if you had an emp that could do that, that would probably be the least destructive thing to do with it
I suspect something on the order of 10's of watts (very low power) would easily do it. Even if it was on a harmonic of the original frequency, in which case you might get away with consumer hardware. Or, even something as simple as a strong magnetic field - you can make one of those if you have a coil and current.
From what I know of RFID chips, they use a tuned tank circuit to power the return pulse. A relatively strong signal close to the device should easily be able to reduce this circuit to a ruin without hurting anything. I think this is similar to how the tags get disabled that they put on clothes to prevent shoplifting.
If these are in my next $1600cdn set of Michelin Pilot Sports, I'll have a circuit to disable them on the net in the summer. I didn't buy those tires 'cause I like driving 55mph.
Oange Juliuii in Canada.. Smoothie Compound?
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Phantom Game Console
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Mmmm.. smoothies.. we still have them here.
Anyone know what the mysterious smoothie powder or julius compound actually is?
You can get the entire, world class QNX operating system for free. www.qnx.com - it is a true RTOS, and while linux is coming along, I'm not quite willing to bet my car on it yet. The thought I am willing to bet my safety on my software skills might be a case of hubris, though. hahaha. Anyhow, I play around with engine controls and the like, and it's a good OS.
I live in Canada.. I'm not very affected by trends in software development per se. That's one of the reasons I did EE instead of CS.. programming just isn't that complicated at the application level. That worked out reasonably well. The biggest point I want to make is is the low dollar relative to the US, and the fact that most Canadians are more or less culturally the same as their US counterparts. So companies don't get shocked too bad.
The biggest trend though here is companies like EDS setting up HUGE new callcenter facilities. These places pay $10-12 or more an hour (Canadian), or about $6/hr US. That's a lot of money around here. You can buy a nice house for $50-60k cdn if you shop around. There's huge savings in Salary right there. EDS gets well educated people for that - often university educated. That's not heard of in the USA right now.
So.. here's to outsourcing. If the US wants to maintain it's very high standard of living and powerful economy, then they have to get production and productivity up. That's the flip side of global trade. Cheap goods in the short term, but you have to maintain your advantage in the long.
I am a licensed ham - have been since I was 9 years old, yet feel sad when I read the article. It used to be hams were on the forefront of developing new radio technologies (indeed, that's one of the tenets of the amateur radio charter - furtherance of the radio art) but here I see them (us) glomming onto technology mostly developed in the commercial sector, and threatening to push unlicensed users out. Hams still have a boatload of frequencies available, especially in the microwave regions. However, most of us don't want to take the time to design new radios. You get the picture.
Bingo! I've been a ham radio op since I was 13, and this year will be my 14th with a ticket. 73 de VE1SFM. Back in the day, you used to see all sorts of problems with digital modes and packet radio mixed with the internet. People freaked, because the internet was seen as a threat. I was into that for a long time. How many of shops even have homebuilt gear in them? I have some stuff, but mainly accessories, power supplies and antennas. Everything else is commercial. It seems more and more people rely on commercial stuff from companies like Kenwood, because it's reliable and inexpensive realative to developing your own. That's not why ham radio developed as a hobby, though.
Along comes 802.11. Hams should be embracing spread spectrum technology and pushing the envelope. The design of this technology is hard, and it's already available to anyone. The genie is out of the bottle with 802.11 though - the fact I can go in and buy this hardware for $100 is absolutely mind boggling. People should be looking for ways to extend and modify this gear, looking at ways to get into making custom digital chips to change the modulation schemes, etc etc etc.
If you told me I could go buy a SS radio w/10mbit bandwidth (let alone 54mbit) with a computer interface for $120cdn 10 years ago, I would have laughed in your face. That was science fiction, the stuff of star wars satellites.
But, no, instead what I see here is the ham radio organizations trying (hopelessly, I might add) to kill or restrict one of the best things to happen to public communications since Marconi flew a kite. Or tesla made a coil:). Anyone who doesn't like seeing city-wide lan's spring up based on this technology.. well, THEY should go fly a kite.
The really gifted kids will be drawn to science no matter the financial rewards.
Ha! My dad is a Phd. Geneticist (Yale). I wanted to study astrophysics until sometime in high school, when I came to the crushing realization taxi drivers would likely make more than I would. My dad didn't make very much money until very late in his career. He regretted not taking another path, like medicine, when he had the chance. I didn't want to make the same mistake. I did a EE degree and play around with my hobby (neural networks) in my own time, and have my own lab. I can do whatever I want. Maybe I'll try and publish some of my projects and ideas, maybe I won't.
Maybe one day I can retire and do nothing but experiment and dream up new theories. I don't kid myself though - I don't have any intention of "suffering" for science. It's just sad it has to be this way. Some of my friends really studied hard to maintain high GPAs through school. I worked part time and made about three times the average value of their scholarships while maintaining acceptable grades. Is that right? I would have loved to devote every ounce of effort to the base science, but it wasn't worth it.
Sadder still is there are very few fields where base researchers can accomplish anything earthshattering. Advancing science requires big bucks. Access to the software tools and semiconductor processes used for MEMS work, the real-world research area that will lead to nanotech, for example, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You need to have university affliations, and you need to dedicate your life to be in a position where you can advance that one little piece. That's just the way it is. If something is not done, then there WILL be a very large problem with this level of advanced research - there are very few native PhD's to fill these holes, because you have to be very dedicated to make the sacrifices needed to get that level of expertise. Think 40 years of poverty-level wages and BS politics.
The life of most professional scientists - the real science people, base science, not applied theory - sucks. It really sucks until you can get tenure someplace, and that's assuming you can even get tenure. The impression I get, maybe it is incorrect, is that base science is not particularly valued at this point in time. There is much more emphasis placed on applying base science, or engineering and applications work. This will come back and bite the west in general if the next "big thing" isn't discovered here. It will, of course, be commercialized for consumption in the USA.
This is a very interesting project I wasn't aware of - too bad it can't get posted to the front page. Some people should submit it! Perhaps I'll eventually contribute.. it looks promising.
I can't see this flying.. centrally controlled
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Metaverse Launched?
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I see no real reason to spend my spare time building things for their APIs, if my work can only be run on their system - and their system is subject to their rate increases. I would think that a far better design would attempt to use a more peer to peer oriented system, or an open server that you can take and download. Of course, then you can't make money with it.. but at least it can't be arbitrarily censored, shut down, or rates hiked. Your expense is your machine and your connection, and the software packs. It would be really nice to see this under a opensource liscence though!
It might take off, it might not, but it's not a MMPOG like Everquest. In order to really want to spend a lot of time developing something, I'd think you'd want control over the system. Neverwinter Nights allows you to host your own games, on your own machine, and I think that kind of system is far better. I paid once for the game, and now I can use it until that I feel it's obsolete or I'm sick of it. Same thing with Quake, pay once, then you can decide when you'd had enough. Lots of incentive to mod things.
It's only a matter of time before somthing like that appears - a open source, or at least, one-time-fee based software product that you can run on your own network, then connect to other people via your own connections. If you want to use their database to have more people connected, fine, but making it a prerequisite limits the usefulness of the product. In a university community, or a wireless LAN, high bandwidth is a much more feasible option. Most DSL providers here have internal networks that run much faster than the connections through the gateways. All of those are arenas where games like these can take off. You'd be downloading avatars all night to keep up to pace on a crummy 56k modem.
I'm positive the open source community will do something here. The promise is too high.
On the other hand, I don't know.. it seems the older I get, the less interested I am. I'd rather work on my (real) cars and go (real) racing with (real) people.
Heck, just get it to start from a bare bones baseline. I think you'll very quickly find out just what "hard to tune" is indeed! Just wait, you'll see.
Well, I'm starting with a $1500 CDN car. Not big bucks. I fully expect to melt and rebuild the engine. No big loss there. Getting the car to idle is complicated off a map, but I plan on using a PID closed-loop control based on a wideband O2. So not too big a deal there, either. The whole point of a sophisticated RTOS is to be able to determine where, when, and why you are having problems.
I want the source code to my car's computer. I don't know what that AEM system is doing. Do you have the source code?
Yes, tuning your own system is very diffuclt. I have a year budgeted and a couple thousand dollars to give it a crack. The satisfaction of getting people like you to shut up makes it all worthwhile. I remember once upon a time, a unix kernel on x86 got laughed at, too. $1300 USD is more than the civic I'm using cost me, and that actually covers the cost of the PCB to do the injector and ignition triggers, too. We'll leave the datalogger to determine the stock maps as a $200 extra (my design).
The AEM is limited by what AEM wants to research. An open source project could quickly surpass it.
The AEM is also illegal to use on the street, but hey, you knew that too, right. For what it's worth, I have a EE degree, and I program RTOS systems for a living.
The AEM works fine for some people. For other people, AEM has had to fly out engineers to get it working. Great customer support, but far from plug and play.
The AEM system isn't all it's cracked up to be. It can be very difficult to tune. I'm a hobbyist who does a lot of work on these kinds of things, and have made some small EMS systems. I'm working on running a civic off of a PC running QNX. Also difficult to do. You should be very scared about these developments in ECUs, and it is also illegal to remove your ECU - it's a pollution control. That isn't much of a deterrant, but I've pretty much given up on newer vehicles as they're underpowered and soon to be hobbled by things like OBD-III.
If you know what you're doing, there isn't really anything to worry about. One little hole in your car's cooling system could cause thousands of dollars damage too. I have run a watercooled system nonstop, 24/7, without incident for almost 18 months now. The hoses are still in great shape, and the pump works fine. The reduction in noise is signifigant, although the case still requires some ventilation.
My original installation is here: http://www.nyx.net/~smanley/watercool
I've since moved to a lian-li case to get some more room and haven't had a chance to post the pictures. The installation is similar, even easier with all the extra space. The watercooling setup allows me to run a AMD XP2100 at 2Ghz, a mild overclock of a few hundred mhz, but I can do so at a idle temperature of 42C in a 30C room.
This gets posted everytime one of these articles comes up here. Don't spread FUD, no, it isn't for newbies, but no, it isn't inherantly dangerous either. If you don't know what you are doing, don't go near the kit. The biggest additions I made were fuel injection hose clamps, pinch-free, and a GFCI outlet so that if the pump shorts, my gear shuts down in a nanosecond.
I'm currently working on another setup for home to help deal with the noise problem on the box here. It is very expensive to do properly, though.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. You could teach a CS course with any functionally complete language that allows real pointers. You can even use Java, I guess, but you need to teach students about the machine that the code runs on then - the JVM. The concepts are all the same, or very framiliar. The problem is that the universities have sold out to people wanting to learn technology to make a quick buck, and not interested in the theory and operating principles of a computer. Things like interprocess communications, memory management, network theory..
If you have a solid grounding in your fundamentals, learning a new language is easy. Mastering a language takes years, but once you've mastered one, moving between them is not a problem. Unless, of course, you don't have a solid grounding in the basics. When I was in school, we used Modula-2 for all of the intro programming courses. You could use C or modula for the software engineering courses (2nd/3rd year). Most of the higher level courses let you use what you wanted. I didn't expect the school to teach me to be a Java programmer. Now, the school uses Java in those intro courses. This is very confusing to newbies, and has resulted in a pile of engineers (who take the CS courses in 1st/2nd year) that need to be taught what pointers are in another course.
Universities should be ashamed for selling out like this, because the focus on theory and fundamentals is what differentiates University from a technical school. There is nothing wrong with a technical/hands on approach, but the two are designed to accomplish different things.
The above nonsense with Microsoft is why I took engineering in University and not computer science. The hordes of people looking to make a quick buck and the adminstration catering to them was a turnoff. Nobody survives dynamics, analog design, digital systems and electromagnetic fields & waves and the like without understanding the fundamentals at some level.
Nothing against microsoft, but there's something to be said about teaching age-old information and not what corporation XYZ thinks is best for you, this month.
The title of this message is referring to a College, but most of the comments are directed at Universities, so I hope I have the distinction correct.
I had some minor problems with wrists and my thumb that were really annoying. I used microsoft ergo keyboards, but they're not popular anymore and I needed a replacement. I got a good quality normal one. I've used the really nice IBM monsters in the past, still have one in fact.. but my girlfriend can hear it across the house, so that's not a long term option. *click click click*
The solution for me was when I started lifting weights.. the problems just went away. Get some free weights and a curl bar, cut back on the typing for a little while and then give it 6 months of 20 minutes three times a week. You'll look better, be stronger, and I bet your RSI will be better, too.
Rational is pretty bad. It's interface is horrible. We evaluated it a few years ago; the experience was so poor, I don't ever care to look at it again. The first poster was not so far off when he said it was crap, and to berate him because he is an "Undergraduate" says to me you don't have anything factual to refute his opinion with - other than an ad hominem attack. It's not like the man is alone in his opinion that it's pretty bad software. In fact, I'd argue that amoung the slashdot crowd, you'd be more hard pressed to find positive experiences.
Togethersoft offers a much nicer package that you can actually apply to an existing codebase.
In my experience, neither package is a subsitute for good design documentation and talented developers. They are mearly a tool. Selling either package as a "process" might sound fine-and-dandy, in my experience, you can certainly produce very good, very solid code encompasing hundreds of classes with nothing more than visio and some solid software engineers. You can produce horrible, horrible messes with and without Rational's products. Rose just lets you do it faster.
There's a reason that Rational's products and sales are going down the tubes after the dot.com freakshow - I found people pushing these models weren't the ones on the front lines having to deal with their decisions, integrate them into existing codebases, etc.
I believe that same law states your device can not cause interference to other devices also. Not that a law could actually prevent interference.
Your interference is my modulation scheme. Notice I'm not arguing the ethics of that point.
Well, the right to listen to cellular conversations wasn't taken away in my country. Of course, I can copy music legally here, too. Nor was the equipment to recieve 800mhz made illegal. It is illegal to tell people about what you hear though, only fair, I guess. YMMV. Fix your legal system, or elect people who listen. Or something.
802.11 is unique in that it is the first time consumers have had access to a fast, flexible, inexpensive and high bandwith wireless communications medium. That just hasn't ever happened before. I've been a ham radio operator since I was 13 - the concept of being able to walk into Staples and buy a 10mbit/s spread spectrum transciever in a PCMCIA form factor for $100 would have seemed impossible 10 years ago. No wonder people are doing crazy stuff with it.
I would venture to say that if this ever did catch on, the rules would be changed to protect the business that is profiting from it.
Normally I jump right on the conspiracy bandwagon, but not in this case. People are making a LOT of money selling 802.11 gear. Those people will protect that right - and just like the RIAA and CD players, once a "good enough" technology hits critical mass, it takes on a life of it's own. Tell Joe Sixpack that he can't watch football's greatest compound fractures on DVD anymore and he needs a new player, he'll be e^unhappy. Same thing applies to 802.11 - it's not the best technology, but it's hit, or very near to hitting critical mass.
802.11 is a potentially disruptive technology that has a lot of people in the wireless telecom industry very worried. I'm not sure they can do very much about it though - 2.4Ghz is the wild west of radio, world wide. It isn't good for much besides 802.11 like schemes because of interference and noise, or so goes the theory. It's a completely different issue than with the cellular monitoring - that got through because politicians were sick of getting caught talking to their interns over cell. hehe.
The band isn't regulated, so you can do what you want. They have to accept interference from your 2.4Ghz devices.. soo.. read between the lines if you're spiteful.
If widespread 802.11 is what it takes to get reliable, IP-based wireless everywhere, then so be it. The power is in the hands of consumers now to do it themselves.. and yes, I've been to some wireless presentations where industry experts have said 802.11 based cell phones are not out of the realm of possibility,expected and planned for. The only reason they don't exist now is the manufacturers don't want to piss off the people who got hosed by the joke that is 3G.
Which just opens up an opportunity for someone else.
What would give you a better background? Who would you hire? We're obviously not talking about the John Carmacks of the world here, but the supporting cogs making up the majority.
- 4-5 years of an EE/ME program + 2 years working as a game developer / software engineer.
- 4 years from DigiPen + 2 years working as a game developer / software engineer.
For what it's worth, you don't "learn to be an engineer" in an engineering program. That takes -another- 4 or more years after you graduate, at least in Canada. School just gives you the grounding and fundamentals.
*shrug* DigiPen just seems like the easy way out. All that math I didn't think would be important turns out to be really useful, your mileage may vary.
Some of the best game developers I know aren't CS people, they have EE / ME degrees. (Hey Jess, you out there? Still at EA?) This is something I'd consider if I wanted to get into game development and was looking for a career path. Engineering is very focused on how to model the real world and real world physics and stresses, something pretty much what games do today. You're not going to learn much about automatic control systems in a CS program, and that is very relevant to advanced simulator design. American engineering schools aren't quite as rigorous (Canadian perspective here), but it's pretty much the same thing. I have an EE degree, so obviously I am biased.
Another benefit to having an engineering degree is it gives you great distinction from the packs of CS people. For better or for worse, this has been something that has benefited me in job searches, especially in this economy.
If you are an engineer in Canada, you are required to do much more complicated math than most CS undergraduates get into. At the core of all games is some very complicated mathematical modelling - I'd even argue someone with a pure math degree would be a better bet than someone from a more specific program in game development.
Let's face it, going to a school that's going to just teach you game development would be very nearsighted IMHO. I would much rather have a solid grounding in the fundamentals that I can apply to whatever comes along. Anyone who is destined to be a great game developer is smart enough to implement their own gaming engines and games, learn about game physics and AI, etc, on their own. I would give a harder look to someone with a degree and their own open source project in one of the above areas than someone who graduated from Video Game U. Unless of course, I was looking to save money.. and of course, there are exceptions to every rule.
Most of the time those who have a natural talent and interest stand out light years ahead of those who trudge through a CS degree for the money. Perhaps this is what you mean by an "applications developer".
My $0.02.
Oil industry predicts production in decline then..
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5 Predictions for 2012
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If current consumption trends continue, the world will be having a serious energy problem. The world isn't going to end - we'll just start burning coal for electricity. So much for the environment, though. This is a direct effect of the current price of gasoline - high consumption. Much more effort should be put into higher efficiency alternatives and new means to generate large quantities of mobile energy.
I have no problem with people driving SUVs, but you should have to PAY for that luxury. I pay about $0.90/l (~$4/gallon) for premium in Canada. We are an net oil exporting nation, unlike the US. I would be much more confortable with a price about twice that - but how many americans are going to handle a $8/gallon price tag at the pump? That'd be no big deal with a 80mpg hybrid.
What does ANY of this have to do with the topic? I'd put big bets on technologies that allow for teleconferncing, remote work, etc. Telecommunications are likely going to become very valuable as they allow for productive work without much worker mobility. Likewise, technologies related to the more efficient combustion of energy are going to take off. The current model of north american society, commuting, etc - is going to end. It is just not sustainable.
Bonus to living here though - the US military machine will make sure the effects are felt everywhere else first. Another observation is Russia holds some of the largest untapped reserves of petroleum.
This is the whole problem with 3G, why I don't own any stock for companies having anything to DO with 3G, and I why I think 3G is a big sick joke. Here in Canada, I have a digital phone, filled with lame ass options that cost a fortune to use (so I never use them). I don't really need to check a stock quote from my phone, and certainly not at $0.50/minute (or worse). They might as well not be there - this is an important observation.
The phone companies want to bend you over for the service, then bend you over AGAIN for the content. It makes too much sense just to give you an IP - then they can't profit at every turn. I really don't understand why they don't get this. In Japan, i-Mode services MADE the digital network there. People can add their own little stupid things, and whatever is trendy, gets used. This is "revolutionary" and "radical" thinking. I hope the telcos get burnt even worse than they are now - they've effectively STOPPED (wireless) infrastructure development here. I can't complain too much about broadband, but it will never exist where I live in the woods.
There's a gotcha that the telcos don't know about though. It has to do with those "Features" my phone has I never use, and don't even consider because they cost so much to use. It's about to bite them in the ass, hard. What's that? It's the social use and acceptance of technology. In North America, most people associate the cellular phone with voice calls. Period. Different in europe and asia, but not here. Cell == Voice. No association with data.
If 802.11 takes off in a big way - all indicators are it will, it's great stuff - then the social acceptance of that technology will happen. People will associate "mobile wireless" with a 802.11 enabled PDA or notebook. They won't think about using mobile wireless services the way they use a cell phone - they'll just expect it as a feature of where they happen to be, offered by a mall, coffee place, school, office. It won't be the cell phone providing that connectivity.
Once that gets entrenched, it's all over for 3G wireless. I think it's already stillborn.
I hope the WiFi people take these people to the cleaners. Bend THEM over. Own your own infrastructure. WiFi gives people what they want, and you know what, $300 for an access point - or even $1000 for a few - isn't really that much compared to what equivilant service would cost me, if it ever happens. When infrastructure is cheaper than service, ya gotta start asking questions.
Maybe I'm wrong. 3G is a non-issue in my life, though.
"One statement is the "only living material can produce living matter"
Biologists say crap like that. It makes life simple. You know the old joke about the alien biologist and the alien engineer? The alien biologist sees a TV for the first time, and promptly goes about dissecting it, drawing and photographing every diode, transistor and capacitor in excruciating detail. Doesn't really explain much about how the system works though.
What does the engineer do?
The engineer presses the power button.
Until recently - VERY LITTLE work has been done on how you would go about creating life from bare chemicals in any kind of serious sense, because until recently, the tools just weren't there. Now the tools are there, and people who think about problems like engineers are getting at those tools. I have no doubt we'll be able to create organisms from scratch, something I think is much more near-term than assembler-based nanotech - in a way, it is nanotech, though.
Artificial intelligence is a much more complicated problem. For example, dispite overwhelming evidence, mention a psi effect in mainstream journals - or even slashdot - and you get mocked. Obviously, there are things going on in our brains we're not aware of, but as one famous hypothesis you mentioned indicates, that just might be quantum nonlocal effects - something that we can engineer.
The arguement that humans have 100-1000+ billion neurons is only part of the problem (although a large one). Simpler creatures exhibit obvious concious reasoning dispite having far fewer neurons. That doesn't mean there's inexplicable magic going on. It just means -we don't know-. So we go about finding out. That's why life is interesting, ya know?
ObShotAtCreationists: 55 years isn't bad compared to how long it took evolution, by all measures, several hundred thousand if not millions and millions of years.
When was the last time someone didn't starve because someone else wrote a new text editor and gave it away with the proviso that if anyone else does anything with it, they have to give away their work for free too?
http://iccf-holland.org/click5.html
Vim, arguably the worlds best text editor, does exactly that. Bill Gates is worthy of some respect for giving money away, but when compared to his net worth and rate of capital growth (never mind it's a tax deduction), you would be suprised what it's comparable to.
Slashdot Mirror
if you had an emp that could do that, that would probably be the least destructive thing to do with it
I suspect something on the order of 10's of watts (very low power) would easily do it. Even if it was on a harmonic of the original frequency, in which case you might get away with consumer hardware. Or, even something as simple as a strong magnetic field - you can make one of those if you have a coil and current.
From what I know of RFID chips, they use a tuned tank circuit to power the return pulse. A relatively strong signal close to the device should easily be able to reduce this circuit to a ruin without hurting anything. I think this is similar to how the tags get disabled that they put on clothes to prevent shoplifting.
If these are in my next $1600cdn set of Michelin Pilot Sports, I'll have a circuit to disable them on the net in the summer. I didn't buy those tires 'cause I like driving 55mph.
Mmmm.. smoothies.. we still have them here.
Anyone know what the mysterious smoothie powder or julius compound actually is?
You can get the entire, world class QNX operating system for free. www.qnx.com - it is a true RTOS, and while linux is coming along, I'm not quite willing to bet my car on it yet. The thought I am willing to bet my safety on my software skills might be a case of hubris, though. hahaha. Anyhow, I play around with engine controls and the like, and it's a good OS.
I live in Canada.. I'm not very affected by trends in software development per se. That's one of the reasons I did EE instead of CS.. programming just isn't that complicated at the application level. That worked out reasonably well. The biggest point I want to make is is the low dollar relative to the US, and the fact that most Canadians are more or less culturally the same as their US counterparts. So companies don't get shocked too bad.
The biggest trend though here is companies like EDS setting up HUGE new callcenter facilities. These places pay $10-12 or more an hour (Canadian), or about $6/hr US. That's a lot of money around here. You can buy a nice house for $50-60k cdn if you shop around. There's huge savings in Salary right there. EDS gets well educated people for that - often university educated. That's not heard of in the USA right now.
So.. here's to outsourcing. If the US wants to maintain it's very high standard of living and powerful economy, then they have to get production and productivity up. That's the flip side of global trade. Cheap goods in the short term, but you have to maintain your advantage in the long.
"They" will cut the power to your house or apartment before a raid to make sure you can't make use of any such niftiness. Get a UPS.
I am a licensed ham - have been since I was 9 years old, yet feel sad when I read the article. It used to be hams were on the forefront of developing new radio technologies (indeed, that's one of the tenets of the amateur radio charter - furtherance of the radio art) but here I see them (us) glomming onto technology mostly developed in the commercial sector, and threatening to push unlicensed users out. Hams still have a boatload of frequencies available, especially in the microwave regions. However, most of us don't want to take the time to design new radios. You get the picture.
Bingo! I've been a ham radio op since I was 13, and this year will be my 14th with a ticket. 73 de VE1SFM. Back in the day, you used to see all sorts of problems with digital modes and packet radio mixed with the internet. People freaked, because the internet was seen as a threat. I was into that for a long time. How many of shops even have homebuilt gear in them? I have some stuff, but mainly accessories, power supplies and antennas. Everything else is commercial. It seems more and more people rely on commercial stuff from companies like Kenwood, because it's reliable and inexpensive realative to developing your own. That's not why ham radio developed as a hobby, though.
Along comes 802.11. Hams should be embracing spread spectrum technology and pushing the envelope. The design of this technology is hard, and it's already available to anyone. The genie is out of the bottle with 802.11 though - the fact I can go in and buy this hardware for $100 is absolutely mind boggling. People should be looking for ways to extend and modify this gear, looking at ways to get into making custom digital chips to change the modulation schemes, etc etc etc.
If you told me I could go buy a SS radio w/10mbit bandwidth (let alone 54mbit) with a computer interface for $120cdn 10 years ago, I would have laughed in your face. That was science fiction, the stuff of star wars satellites.
But, no, instead what I see here is the ham radio organizations trying (hopelessly, I might add) to kill or restrict one of the best things to happen to public communications since Marconi flew a kite. Or tesla made a coil :). Anyone who doesn't like seeing city-wide lan's spring up based on this technology.. well, THEY should go fly a kite.
Bah, humbug.
The really gifted kids will be drawn to science no matter the financial rewards.
Ha! My dad is a Phd. Geneticist (Yale). I wanted to study astrophysics until sometime in high school, when I came to the crushing realization taxi drivers would likely make more than I would. My dad didn't make very much money until very late in his career. He regretted not taking another path, like medicine, when he had the chance. I didn't want to make the same mistake. I did a EE degree and play around with my hobby (neural networks) in my own time, and have my own lab. I can do whatever I want. Maybe I'll try and publish some of my projects and ideas, maybe I won't.
Maybe one day I can retire and do nothing but experiment and dream up new theories. I don't kid myself though - I don't have any intention of "suffering" for science. It's just sad it has to be this way. Some of my friends really studied hard to maintain high GPAs through school. I worked part time and made about three times the average value of their scholarships while maintaining acceptable grades. Is that right? I would have loved to devote every ounce of effort to the base science, but it wasn't worth it.
Sadder still is there are very few fields where base researchers can accomplish anything earthshattering. Advancing science requires big bucks. Access to the software tools and semiconductor processes used for MEMS work, the real-world research area that will lead to nanotech, for example, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You need to have university affliations, and you need to dedicate your life to be in a position where you can advance that one little piece. That's just the way it is. If something is not done, then there WILL be a very large problem with this level of advanced research - there are very few native PhD's to fill these holes, because you have to be very dedicated to make the sacrifices needed to get that level of expertise. Think 40 years of poverty-level wages and BS politics.
The life of most professional scientists - the real science people, base science, not applied theory - sucks. It really sucks until you can get tenure someplace, and that's assuming you can even get tenure. The impression I get, maybe it is incorrect, is that base science is not particularly valued at this point in time. There is much more emphasis placed on applying base science, or engineering and applications work. This will come back and bite the west in general if the next "big thing" isn't discovered here. It will, of course, be commercialized for consumption in the USA.
My $0.02 (cdn, even)
This is a very interesting project I wasn't aware of - too bad it can't get posted to the front page. Some people should submit it! Perhaps I'll eventually contribute.. it looks promising.
I see no real reason to spend my spare time building things for their APIs, if my work can only be run on their system - and their system is subject to their rate increases. I would think that a far better design would attempt to use a more peer to peer oriented system, or an open server that you can take and download. Of course, then you can't make money with it.. but at least it can't be arbitrarily censored, shut down, or rates hiked. Your expense is your machine and your connection, and the software packs. It would be really nice to see this under a opensource liscence though!
It might take off, it might not, but it's not a MMPOG like Everquest. In order to really want to spend a lot of time developing something, I'd think you'd want control over the system. Neverwinter Nights allows you to host your own games, on your own machine, and I think that kind of system is far better. I paid once for the game, and now I can use it until that I feel it's obsolete or I'm sick of it. Same thing with Quake, pay once, then you can decide when you'd had enough. Lots of incentive to mod things.
It's only a matter of time before somthing like that appears - a open source, or at least, one-time-fee based software product that you can run on your own network, then connect to other people via your own connections. If you want to use their database to have more people connected, fine, but making it a prerequisite limits the usefulness of the product. In a university community, or a wireless LAN, high bandwidth is a much more feasible option. Most DSL providers here have internal networks that run much faster than the connections through the gateways. All of those are arenas where games like these can take off. You'd be downloading avatars all night to keep up to pace on a crummy 56k modem.
I'm positive the open source community will do something here. The promise is too high.
On the other hand, I don't know.. it seems the older I get, the less interested I am. I'd rather work on my (real) cars and go (real) racing with (real) people.
*shrug* I'm not sure I have a point, oh well.
Heck, just get it to start from a bare bones baseline. I think you'll very quickly find out just what "hard to tune" is indeed! Just wait, you'll see.
Well, I'm starting with a $1500 CDN car. Not big bucks. I fully expect to melt and rebuild the engine. No big loss there. Getting the car to idle is complicated off a map, but I plan on using a PID closed-loop control based on a wideband O2. So not too big a deal there, either. The whole point of a sophisticated RTOS is to be able to determine where, when, and why you are having problems.
I want the source code to my car's computer. I don't know what that AEM system is doing. Do you have the source code?
Yes, tuning your own system is very diffuclt. I have a year budgeted and a couple thousand dollars to give it a crack. The satisfaction of getting people like you to shut up makes it all worthwhile. I remember once upon a time, a unix kernel on x86 got laughed at, too. $1300 USD is more than the civic I'm using cost me, and that actually covers the cost of the PCB to do the injector and ignition triggers, too. We'll leave the datalogger to determine the stock maps as a $200 extra (my design).
The AEM is limited by what AEM wants to research. An open source project could quickly surpass it.
The AEM is also illegal to use on the street, but hey, you knew that too, right. For what it's worth, I have a EE degree, and I program RTOS systems for a living.
The AEM works fine for some people. For other people, AEM has had to fly out engineers to get it working. Great customer support, but far from plug and play.
The AEM system isn't all it's cracked up to be. It can be very difficult to tune. I'm a hobbyist who does a lot of work on these kinds of things, and have made some small EMS systems. I'm working on running a civic off of a PC running QNX. Also difficult to do. You should be very scared about these developments in ECUs, and it is also illegal to remove your ECU - it's a pollution control. That isn't much of a deterrant, but I've pretty much given up on newer vehicles as they're underpowered and soon to be hobbled by things like OBD-III.
/ www.diy-efi.org/
A better can be found here, or the diy-efi site:
http://www.bgsoflex.com/megasquirt.html
http:/
It wouldn't be too too hard to have a car "simulator" that fed a OBD device junk data to make it look like it was working, either.
If you know what you're doing, there isn't really anything to worry about. One little hole in your car's cooling system could cause thousands of dollars damage too. I have run a watercooled system nonstop, 24/7, without incident for almost 18 months now. The hoses are still in great shape, and the pump works fine. The reduction in noise is signifigant, although the case still requires some ventilation.
My original installation is here: http://www.nyx.net/~smanley/watercool
I've since moved to a lian-li case to get some more room and haven't had a chance to post the pictures. The installation is similar, even easier with all the extra space. The watercooling setup allows me to run a AMD XP2100 at 2Ghz, a mild overclock of a few hundred mhz, but I can do so at a idle temperature of 42C in a 30C room.
This gets posted everytime one of these articles comes up here. Don't spread FUD, no, it isn't for newbies, but no, it isn't inherantly dangerous either. If you don't know what you are doing, don't go near the kit. The biggest additions I made were fuel injection hose clamps, pinch-free, and a GFCI outlet so that if the pump shorts, my gear shuts down in a nanosecond.
I'm currently working on another setup for home to help deal with the noise problem on the box here. It is very expensive to do properly, though.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. You could teach a CS course with any functionally complete language that allows real pointers. You can even use Java, I guess, but you need to teach students about the machine that the code runs on then - the JVM. The concepts are all the same, or very framiliar. The problem is that the universities have sold out to people wanting to learn technology to make a quick buck, and not interested in the theory and operating principles of a computer. Things like interprocess communications, memory management, network theory..
If you have a solid grounding in your fundamentals, learning a new language is easy. Mastering a language takes years, but once you've mastered one, moving between them is not a problem. Unless, of course, you don't have a solid grounding in the basics. When I was in school, we used Modula-2 for all of the intro programming courses. You could use C or modula for the software engineering courses (2nd/3rd year). Most of the higher level courses let you use what you wanted. I didn't expect the school to teach me to be a Java programmer. Now, the school uses Java in those intro courses. This is very confusing to newbies, and has resulted in a pile of engineers (who take the CS courses in 1st/2nd year) that need to be taught what pointers are in another course.
Universities should be ashamed for selling out like this, because the focus on theory and fundamentals is what differentiates University from a technical school. There is nothing wrong with a technical/hands on approach, but the two are designed to accomplish different things.
The above nonsense with Microsoft is why I took engineering in University and not computer science. The hordes of people looking to make a quick buck and the adminstration catering to them was a turnoff. Nobody survives dynamics, analog design, digital systems and electromagnetic fields & waves and the like without understanding the fundamentals at some level.
Nothing against microsoft, but there's something to be said about teaching age-old information and not what corporation XYZ thinks is best for you, this month.
The title of this message is referring to a College, but most of the comments are directed at Universities, so I hope I have the distinction correct.
I had some minor problems with wrists and my thumb that were really annoying. I used microsoft ergo keyboards, but they're not popular anymore and I needed a replacement. I got a good quality normal one. I've used the really nice IBM monsters in the past, still have one in fact.. but my girlfriend can hear it across the house, so that's not a long term option. *click click click*
The solution for me was when I started lifting weights.. the problems just went away. Get some free weights and a curl bar, cut back on the typing for a little while and then give it 6 months of 20 minutes three times a week. You'll look better, be stronger, and I bet your RSI will be better, too.
And stop typing when it hurts!
Rational is pretty bad. It's interface is horrible. We evaluated it a few years ago; the experience was so poor, I don't ever care to look at it again. The first poster was not so far off when he said it was crap, and to berate him because he is an "Undergraduate" says to me you don't have anything factual to refute his opinion with - other than an ad hominem attack. It's not like the man is alone in his opinion that it's pretty bad software. In fact, I'd argue that amoung the slashdot crowd, you'd be more hard pressed to find positive experiences.
:P
Togethersoft offers a much nicer package that you can actually apply to an existing codebase.
In my experience, neither package is a subsitute for good design documentation and talented developers. They are mearly a tool. Selling either package as a "process" might sound fine-and-dandy, in my experience, you can certainly produce very good, very solid code encompasing hundreds of classes with nothing more than visio and some solid software engineers. You can produce horrible, horrible messes with and without Rational's products. Rose just lets you do it faster.
There's a reason that Rational's products and sales are going down the tubes after the dot.com freakshow - I found people pushing these models weren't the ones on the front lines having to deal with their decisions, integrate them into existing codebases, etc.
And hey, I'm a graduate.
I believe that same law states your device can not cause interference to other devices also. Not that a law could actually prevent interference.
Your interference is my modulation scheme. Notice I'm not arguing the ethics of that point.
Well, the right to listen to cellular conversations wasn't taken away in my country. Of course, I can copy music legally here, too. Nor was the equipment to recieve 800mhz made illegal. It is illegal to tell people about what you hear though, only fair, I guess. YMMV. Fix your legal system, or elect people who listen. Or something.
802.11 is unique in that it is the first time consumers have had access to a fast, flexible, inexpensive and high bandwith wireless communications medium. That just hasn't ever happened before. I've been a ham radio operator since I was 13 - the concept of being able to walk into Staples and buy a 10mbit/s spread spectrum transciever in a PCMCIA form factor for $100 would have seemed impossible 10 years ago. No wonder people are doing crazy stuff with it.
I would venture to say that if this ever did catch on, the rules would be changed to protect the business that is profiting from it.
Normally I jump right on the conspiracy bandwagon, but not in this case. People are making a LOT of money selling 802.11 gear. Those people will protect that right - and just like the RIAA and CD players, once a "good enough" technology hits critical mass, it takes on a life of it's own. Tell Joe Sixpack that he can't watch football's greatest compound fractures on DVD anymore and he needs a new player, he'll be e^unhappy. Same thing applies to 802.11 - it's not the best technology, but it's hit, or very near to hitting critical mass.
802.11 is a potentially disruptive technology that has a lot of people in the wireless telecom industry very worried. I'm not sure they can do very much about it though - 2.4Ghz is the wild west of radio, world wide. It isn't good for much besides 802.11 like schemes because of interference and noise, or so goes the theory. It's a completely different issue than with the cellular monitoring - that got through because politicians were sick of getting caught talking to their interns over cell. hehe.
My $0.02 (cdn).
The band isn't regulated, so you can do what you want. They have to accept interference from your 2.4Ghz devices.. soo.. read between the lines if you're spiteful.
If widespread 802.11 is what it takes to get reliable, IP-based wireless everywhere, then so be it. The power is in the hands of consumers now to do it themselves.. and yes, I've been to some wireless presentations where industry experts have said 802.11 based cell phones are not out of the realm of possibility,expected and planned for. The only reason they don't exist now is the manufacturers don't want to piss off the people who got hosed by the joke that is 3G.
Which just opens up an opportunity for someone else.
What would give you a better background? Who would you hire? We're obviously not talking about the John Carmacks of the world here, but the supporting cogs making up the majority.
- 4-5 years of an EE/ME program + 2 years working as a game developer / software engineer.
- 4 years from DigiPen + 2 years working as a game developer / software engineer.
For what it's worth, you don't "learn to be an engineer" in an engineering program. That takes -another- 4 or more years after you graduate, at least in Canada. School just gives you the grounding and fundamentals.
*shrug* DigiPen just seems like the easy way out. All that math I didn't think would be important turns out to be really useful, your mileage may vary.
Some of the best game developers I know aren't CS people, they have EE / ME degrees. (Hey Jess, you out there? Still at EA?) This is something I'd consider if I wanted to get into game development and was looking for a career path. Engineering is very focused on how to model the real world and real world physics and stresses, something pretty much what games do today. You're not going to learn much about automatic control systems in a CS program, and that is very relevant to advanced simulator design. American engineering schools aren't quite as rigorous (Canadian perspective here), but it's pretty much the same thing. I have an EE degree, so obviously I am biased.
Another benefit to having an engineering degree is it gives you great distinction from the packs of CS people. For better or for worse, this has been something that has benefited me in job searches, especially in this economy.
If you are an engineer in Canada, you are required to do much more complicated math than most CS undergraduates get into. At the core of all games is some very complicated mathematical modelling - I'd even argue someone with a pure math degree would be a better bet than someone from a more specific program in game development.
Let's face it, going to a school that's going to just teach you game development would be very nearsighted IMHO. I would much rather have a solid grounding in the fundamentals that I can apply to whatever comes along. Anyone who is destined to be a great game developer is smart enough to implement their own gaming engines and games, learn about game physics and AI, etc, on their own. I would give a harder look to someone with a degree and their own open source project in one of the above areas than someone who graduated from Video Game U. Unless of course, I was looking to save money.. and of course, there are exceptions to every rule.
Most of the time those who have a natural talent and interest stand out light years ahead of those who trudge through a CS degree for the money. Perhaps this is what you mean by an "applications developer".
My $0.02.
Rapid decline of oil production will start around 2012. The growth of an economy only works because we have lots of easy energy around.
If current consumption trends continue, the world will be having a serious energy problem. The world isn't going to end - we'll just start burning coal for electricity. So much for the environment, though. This is a direct effect of the current price of gasoline - high consumption. Much more effort should be put into higher efficiency alternatives and new means to generate large quantities of mobile energy.
I have no problem with people driving SUVs, but you should have to PAY for that luxury. I pay about $0.90/l (~$4/gallon) for premium in Canada. We are an net oil exporting nation, unlike the US. I would be much more confortable with a price about twice that - but how many americans are going to handle a $8/gallon price tag at the pump? That'd be no big deal with a 80mpg hybrid.
What does ANY of this have to do with the topic? I'd put big bets on technologies that allow for teleconferncing, remote work, etc. Telecommunications are likely going to become very valuable as they allow for productive work without much worker mobility. Likewise, technologies related to the more efficient combustion of energy are going to take off. The current model of north american society, commuting, etc - is going to end. It is just not sustainable.
Bonus to living here though - the US military machine will make sure the effects are felt everywhere else first. Another observation is Russia holds some of the largest untapped reserves of petroleum.
But hey, don't panic.
This is the whole problem with 3G, why I don't own any stock for companies having anything to DO with 3G, and I why I think 3G is a big sick joke. Here in Canada, I have a digital phone, filled with lame ass options that cost a fortune to use (so I never use them). I don't really need to check a stock quote from my phone, and certainly not at $0.50/minute (or worse). They might as well not be there - this is an important observation.
The phone companies want to bend you over for the service, then bend you over AGAIN for the content. It makes too much sense just to give you an IP - then they can't profit at every turn. I really don't understand why they don't get this. In Japan, i-Mode services MADE the digital network there. People can add their own little stupid things, and whatever is trendy, gets used. This is "revolutionary" and "radical" thinking. I hope the telcos get burnt even worse than they are now - they've effectively STOPPED (wireless) infrastructure development here. I can't complain too much about broadband, but it will never exist where I live in the woods.
There's a gotcha that the telcos don't know about though. It has to do with those "Features" my phone has I never use, and don't even consider because they cost so much to use. It's about to bite them in the ass, hard. What's that? It's the social use and acceptance of technology. In North America, most people associate the cellular phone with voice calls. Period. Different in europe and asia, but not here. Cell == Voice. No association with data.
If 802.11 takes off in a big way - all indicators are it will, it's great stuff - then the social acceptance of that technology will happen. People will associate "mobile wireless" with a 802.11 enabled PDA or notebook. They won't think about using mobile wireless services the way they use a cell phone - they'll just expect it as a feature of where they happen to be, offered by a mall, coffee place, school, office. It won't be the cell phone providing that connectivity.
Once that gets entrenched, it's all over for 3G wireless. I think it's already stillborn.
I hope the WiFi people take these people to the cleaners. Bend THEM over. Own your own infrastructure. WiFi gives people what they want, and you know what, $300 for an access point - or even $1000 for a few - isn't really that much compared to what equivilant service would cost me, if it ever happens. When infrastructure is cheaper than service, ya gotta start asking questions.
Maybe I'm wrong. 3G is a non-issue in my life, though.
My $0.02 (cdn)
"One statement is the "only living material can produce living matter"
Biologists say crap like that. It makes life simple. You know the old joke about the alien biologist and the alien engineer? The alien biologist sees a TV for the first time, and promptly goes about dissecting it, drawing and photographing every diode, transistor and capacitor in excruciating detail. Doesn't really explain much about how the system works though.
What does the engineer do?
The engineer presses the power button.
Until recently - VERY LITTLE work has been done on how you would go about creating life from bare chemicals in any kind of serious sense, because until recently, the tools just weren't there. Now the tools are there, and people who think about problems like engineers are getting at those tools. I have no doubt we'll be able to create organisms from scratch, something I think is much more near-term than assembler-based nanotech - in a way, it is nanotech, though.
Artificial intelligence is a much more complicated problem. For example, dispite overwhelming evidence, mention a psi effect in mainstream journals - or even slashdot - and you get mocked. Obviously, there are things going on in our brains we're not aware of, but as one famous hypothesis you mentioned indicates, that just might be quantum nonlocal effects - something that we can engineer.
The arguement that humans have 100-1000+ billion neurons is only part of the problem (although a large one). Simpler creatures exhibit obvious concious reasoning dispite having far fewer neurons. That doesn't mean there's inexplicable magic going on. It just means -we don't know-. So we go about finding out. That's why life is interesting, ya know?
ObShotAtCreationists: 55 years isn't bad compared to how long it took evolution, by all measures, several hundred thousand if not millions and millions of years.
When was the last time someone didn't starve because someone else wrote a new text editor and gave it away with the proviso that if anyone else does anything with it, they have to give away their work for free too?
http://iccf-holland.org/click5.html
Vim, arguably the worlds best text editor, does exactly that. Bill Gates is worthy of some respect for giving money away, but when compared to his net worth and rate of capital growth (never mind it's a tax deduction), you would be suprised what it's comparable to.