First of all, they have plenty of other issues to worry about when designing the exterior of a satellite, like reflective material for thermal management, or solar cells for generating power.
It is non-trivial to create what amounts to an invisible satellite.
It has and continues to be done not only by the US, but by other countries as well.
Techniques are continuously developed and refined to see such "invisible" satellites. It's just another arms race.
Secondly, I would imagine that the trajectories of all satellites are available to all agencies that launch stuff into space.
There are certain satellites that are not tracked except by the agencies that use them, and by anyone else who happens to notice it. There are public lists of all known satellites.
From http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /mystery_monday_050103.html: But within weeks after MISTY's shuttle deployment, both U.S. and Soviet sources reported that the satellite malfunctioned. Richelson explained that a spacecraft explosion "may have been a tactic to deceive those monitoring the satellite or may have been the result of the jettisoning of operational debris."
Whatever the case -- and to the chagrin of spysat operators -- a network of civilian space sleuths had been monitoring a set of MISTY maneuvers and the explosion, ostensibly part of a "disappearing act" meant to disguise its true whereabouts.
So check it out yourself. My understanding is that amateur satellite trackers have found and verified numerous unpublished satellites. They feel they are doing a service - "If I can see and track it with my limited resources, you can bet China, etc know about it years ago."
Imaging a soyuz crashing into one of those massive spy satellites with a relative velocity of several kilometers per second...
Check out Big Sky Theory. You'll find that the amount of 3-D space is so large in volume that even satellites meant to hit each other (for various tests) are extraordinarily difficult to target. When satellites start to accidently crash - it is greater then 99.9% certain it was not random or accidental, statistically speaking.
I just can't see how the US could not have spy satellites that are difficult to see and unpublished. The article mentions well-known satellites (keyhole). It will be news (well, actually no one will know publicly) when the chinese test their laser against all our unpublished satellites.
Like others have said, this is likely a story to get greater funding (Congress is going to start dealing with budget soon) for the various agencies. It looks like it may have been done well - a single statement in a long report, and no official statements other than that. Congresspersons, start your engines! China's going to attack Tiawan, and before we find out it'll all be over! Better throw a few more protected satellites up! China's hindering the Iran peace process to keep us occupied in other parts of the world! That might destroy Walmart's business model and we'll lose 1000's of jobs in our state! etc, etc, etc.
Have you ever seen a capacitor explode? Have you ever seen a large capacitor blow up a screwdriver that shorted across its terminals?
It doesn't matter if it's gasoline, Li-Poly, Li-Ion, Hydrogen, etc. We use it because it's easy to extract energy from it. It's easy to extract energy from it because it's very reactive. There are many ways to blow up a fuel tank - but we've had a century of design information and now they rarely go up like they could (except in movies). When we have a few decades of experience behind us with these other technologies then they'll be about as safe as we consider gasoline to be.
Expect to see exploding laptops in movies long after we've solved that problem.
Technically PoE is delivered as -48 volts as well. Also, any Powered Device must be able to accept +48 or -48 VDC, so in the end it doesn't matter since the end units can handle either case.
Since it can only source about 12-13W at the end device it's not enough to run even a large laptop, nevermind a computer. You can't simply increase the current due to the wire losses and heating in cabling. In theory you could deliver 13W over both the spare pair and the data pair, getting about 26W total, but again the cable would be getting quite warm with that much power going through it. They're working on the next revision for higher power PoE, but it's gonna be hard getting much more power out of a 500 foot run of Cat 5 safely.
But a PoE hub or switch could take the data center 48V supply and use it practically straight up. The other nice thing about 48V is that it's considered low voltage, so not as restricted for wiring (UL and building codes) requirements, and it suffers much lower losses over long runs than 12V.
it has flaked out for a total of 1 hour in 4 years
Thank you for bringing this disparity to our attention. We strive to ensure that all our users receive an identical experience with our service, and will work toward making your service just as reliable and useful as everyone else finds it to be.
The whole do no evil thing is a load of horse shit, google is a corporation run by directors who have been selling off their stock as fast as they can. This is never a good sign of about the intentions of the directors.
No, it's a sign of a wise investor. They are limited in the amount of stock they can sell in any given period, so they sell as much as they can when it's high, and hold onto it when it's expected to go high.
Of course it could be that they're losing faith in their company, but enough lies outside of their control now that it would be monumentally stupid to leave a significant portion of their net worth in one company, even if it's theirs.
However, feel free to go ahead and start your billion dollar company, and never sell your stock just so idiots on slashdot can have a warm fuzzy feeling about your intentions.
The CDs have built in spacers - when you stakc them there's a gap built in, preventing adhesion. If your environment is very warm, or they use cheap labels and you store the discs upside down, perhaps there'd be a problem, but you typically don't have to worry about it. The discs are made of polycarbonate, and it's pretty stable.
Otherwise any solution would suffer from the same adhesion problems, not just spindles.
On edge is obviously better, but not by any significant margin.
How do you scan them in now? Do you put them in an automatic machine, do you have humans sitting there doing the work, etc?
However they come out of the scanning process should direct how to store them.
If you've got humans doing the work then put them back in the jewel case, and drop the case into a filing box that you can store on shelving. Mark that box with a large barcoded sticker. Every week scan all the boxes, and have the system beep when you scan a box due for disposal. Dump the contents into the secure shed bin, and put the box on the pile of empties for new projects.
If you do the scanning automatically,a nd simply have a human de-casing the disc and putting them on a spindle or stack, then buy spindle carriers that can pick up the spindle or stack on the output side and drop the entire thing into a suitably sized box, then do the same as above. (I'd probably go this route anyway rather than the storage in jewel case and big box above).
Look for "cake boxes" that are really spindle CD/DVD boxes, such as the following: cake boxes
Are the CDs/DVDs in small batches or big batches? ie, do you have to store 5 of them together, or 500 together? Is there a great variance (do you accept both customers that give 5 and customers that give 500?).
If you want to spend tens of thousands of dollers then a good engineering firm can design a system that you just feed discs into. It'll then scan them for you, store them, and on regular intervals shred those that have been authorized for shredding. Should take up the space of a large closet or small cubicle for a storage capacity of 5,000 or so discs, and scanning capacity of a few hundred per hour.
Don't worry too much. "Dell switching to AMD?" is announced every six months for the last umpteen years. I usually see it as an opportunity for Dell to make a new deal with Intel.
Maybe it'll actually happen this time, but if it does it'll still be 6 months or more before you see them for sale.
But if it doesn't happen, you'll know that Intel (or Dell) caved. Again.
Purely from a business standpoint, it's certainly easier and cheaper to support, stock, and build based on one architecture. Further, most businesses want to purchase Intel products, rather than AMD - it's the safe bet. "you'll never get fired for recommending wintel..."
What does Slashdot see as the future of the M.S. degree versus other available and somewhat non-traditional degrees? What path should engineers pursue for maximum future employability?
On an international scale, in order to stay competitive economically the US has to be the worlds largest consumer. In order to consume individuals must have enough education that their jobs aren't easily outsourced. So the US encourages higher education.
The generic "here's a spec, design it" engineering can be accomplished by a bachelor's degree holder, as well as most outsourcing companies. The research that is done at the master's and PhD levels is important for new technologies, but that has largely been watered down (fewer skunk works, menlo parks, etc)
If you want to stay competitive in today's industry, you'll have to settle for a bachelor's degree or higher, coupled with management experience. Many companies move engineers into a position to act as liasons to outsourced workers, and still keep a smaller engineering group around for fixing designs, quick proof of concept, and developing new technology.
But in the end you'll be fine and happy with a bachelors degree once you have experience. All a masters does for you is move you up the pay bracket 10-15%, and the reality is that after the two years of real world experience rather than going for a masters, most bachelors are at that level by the time you get your masters.
I did a lot of work while in school, developed a passion for my field, and graduated with a bachelors. I may want more schooling down the road. I'm not certain, however, that a masters of engineering will serve me as well as a masters in business, so I decided to work for a few years to get an idea of the industry and find out where the opportunities that look interesting lie.
What you should do to ensure maximum future employability is do what you love, and love what you do. That is what will shine through - too many people do engineering because they want money, but don't want to be doctors. They make OK engineers, but until they find the passion they end up being lukewarm for 1/3 of their life while at work, asleep 1/3, and bored the other 1/3. Don't do that.
Onboard flash caches and larger ram caches are going into the next generation of hard drives. Other than that, nothing much is going to change in the near future.
When the OS is aware of the flash and ram caches on the drive, it will instruct the drive as to what to cache so when the computer is started up next time 50% of the boot code is in the flash and starts running very quickly while it loads the rest of the boot code into ram and feeds it out. Beyond that there isn't much the hard drive can do differently to speed up normal use unless you parallel more platters (which raises heating, noise, energy use, and weight of the servo arm (which slows it down)). In most cases it's better to use several drives in a RAID configuration to obtain the same benefit. You should also consider getting a system that can support 8GB of RAM and loading it up with fast ram so it never has to page to the hard drive. Unless you use photoshop. Then you're out of luck - RAID is as fast as you're going to get.
It's going to be a bumpy start, but flash caches will significantly speed up the hard drive during boot up and a few other times.
The limiting factor is the speed of the mechanical parts, and you can only get very tiny incremental improvements in speed for each large improvement in the mechanical structure. So they are pursuing other methods to raise the apparant speed.
The main way to keep this in the public eye is by muddying the water. I'd have to take a closer look at what the survey says exactly, but it sounds to me like the survey was more like this:
1. Do you believe in evolution?
Rather than this:
2. Do you believe that humans evolved from a different species?
My suspicion is that most americans believe in evolution - species adapt generation by generation to the world around them - since that is usually demonstrated in school. What most americans do not believe is that Humans are naturally occuring descendants of monkeys or another so-called lower life form.
So the term "evolution" has changed from the theory that reproductive organisms change from generation to generation, and nature culls the bad changes to "Humans are big monkeys".
And the politicians on both sides love it, because it means whatever they want it to mean when they talk about it. They can redefine it at each encounter, and then laugh at the other side for misrepresenting the true theory.
Of course they'd rather be talking about it than something worthwhile that they can actually act on and make a positive change for their constituents.
The phone itself is not destined to become a great success, but QTopia sees the various projects people are making in order to make an open source or free phone. They want to provide an attractive alternative to the phone companies should such open source projects gain a critical mass.
If a good platform is developed that is very modular and very compact (ie, add what hardware features you want, leave out what you don't) then one could make a good, marketable phone that has a slighter wider appeal than just geeks. Put that together with a flat rate data plan using VOIP for voice calls, and you'll suddenly expand your user base a magnitude or more.
I just got the Verizon xv6700 (the data evdo rate is significantly faster than tmobile's edge) and am reasonably happy with it - but it is terrible the way they cripple the platform - no java, no data access to a computer, etc. You can get around these things, but people want functionality for a low cost. Only teeny-boppers are willing to rent their ring tones, and as they age they are going to be less willing to do so (Let's see, eat ramen noodels for a month, or get rid of my ring tones). The current and next generations are already getting used to enabling phone features and getting things for free.
Most major cities have flat rate unlimited cell phone plans. We're going to see some drastic changes in the cell phone industry over the next 5 years.
This isn't the phone to get and use, but it is a start, and if priced cheaply ($500 or less including dev kit) then it could make significant inroads into the developer community.
Actually they had a battery recall program(that still hasn't ended) that started in Fall of 2004. This appears to be a new battery recall, but I bet it's the same old issues just becoming worse due to higher battery capacity with poor construction of the cells.
In fact, this may be the same recall that Apple had. Most Li-Ion consumer battery cells in the world are made by two or three companies. In order to cut costs, they make mistakes that affect all downstream manufacturers. It isn't the battery pack that's the problem, it's the cells inside the pack.
Youtube is only as good as its current copyright stance lasts. Once a major lawsuit from a copyright holder happens, Youtube is going to go the way of napster and MP3.com. It'll still be around, but it'll probably have to start erring on the side of too restrictive. Google started out trying to avoid copyright problems, and it will be able to defend itself against copyright lawsuits. That being the case, they won't need to have a period of time where they overreact.
Still, I hate searching in youtube. There's way to much junk in it - not unlike the internet as a whole - and they don't rate videos like google seems to be able to do. Perhaps they need to use the google rank of each video (this video is linked to by x websites using the following keywords) so better videos float to the top of searches.
As the information increases, good searching still seems to be key to a good service. Google seems to know its business. I'm waiting for them to bend their processing power to analyzing video and audio to automatically pull out people and words.
I seriously doubt the military needs Gnutella for their supercomputing needs.
Not only that, but if they wanted it, they'd simply take it. Military and national security needs almost always trump copyright. It's an empty gesture at best.
It would only work when the pressing of a single key causes the generation and transmission of a packet. Telnet is what they talk about, but most terminal programs would be vulnerable. Connecting to a mainframe is obvious, but you'd have the same problem with windows remote desktop, any remote client programs, etc. The SSL telnet program send passwords as a single packet, so that would prevent transmission of information during the password phase, but would not prevent it during interactive use.
Normal websurfing, email, and desktop applications run on the computer itself (instead of remotely) would not pass any usable jitter information.
Ajax web based applications could be vulnerable if they generate packets each time a key is pressed. Not many do this, but more will as time goes on.
The key problems are:
1) It can, at best, transmit 1 bit per keypress
2) All of the intelligence would have to be in the keyboard for deciding *what* to send.
Further, I haven't read the paper, but I don't see how this would work unless the user's typing patterns are very well known to the program, or the jitter introduced is significantly greater than 1/2 the average keypress to keypress time. This would be noticable to most people, though they would get used to it. This could be adaptive though, if you know that a particular keyboard is used by one user, and the keyboard spends a significant amount of its bandwidth on known patterns.
Also, the keyboard cannot query the computer - the only information it could gain is what is typed in it. And since it could only get 1/7 of the possible information that's typed in (or perhaps 1/3 if good compression is used) then it wouldn't be able to get very much at all.
All in all, it seems like a cool trick, but like tempest it requires some fairly specific conditions. For most things there are other ways that are likely easier, less detectable by the end user, and more informative than this one. But under appropiate conditions, it could be just the ticket.
I knew someone was going to dock me for speeding, but that section of prospect is 50. Sorry. You'll have to look harder for my speeding violations.
It's going to be harder since there is no universal electronic database of road speed limits, passing zones, turn lanes, etc. Something I know a few companies would pay good money for.
This is, technically, big brother - it is the technology to make this process cheaper (the process is already possible and available to anyone - just stand on a corner and collect information).
There is no big reason to fear this any more than there is reason to fear the fact that the phone company has a record of every phone call you've ever made. They have, undoubtedly, used that information internally in research projects to form network diagrams and could very well do the 6-degrees game if they felt so inclined.
I can see how it might be profitable to know where I've been, and where and when I might not be at home/work/etc. This will certainly cause me to think more about personal security. But it won't shed light on any activities that I don't want people to know about.
In small towns everyone knew about everyone else, and still kept quiet and were civil - within reason - because they all had to live together. I think this notion of "public privacy" where one should be able to go to the store without anyone knowing is a relatively new desire, and quite frankly many, if not most, fears of losing it are overblown.
But think about the possibilities if this technology - I'll call this "public neutrality" where I, as an endpoint user of the public space am not restricted from what I can and cannot record and analyze.
I've been thinking about this technology for some time. What I'd like to have is a HUD, this license plate reader, and an internet connection. Then we simply need to develop CML - car markup language.
Above every car messages about that car from other drivers are displayed, not unlike photo tags.
Litterer
Doesn't signal
Has gun
Tailgater
Cell phoner stoner
Plain stupid
etc.
Then we can do the same with facial recognition systems.
Use GPS, a 3 axis magnetometer, and a 3 axis accelerometer and you can mark up buildings and other physically stationary objects.
Then - and this is the next cool bit - you build all this into a flashlight. But the flashlight is actually a miniature handheld projecter. You can actually shine it around without wearing a HUD and it'll paint the tags on whatever you're pointing at for everyone else to see. You could print the "loser" on someone's forehead.
Of course, I've just described several patentable ideas. They are now public domain, assuming they have not yet been applied for. So go out and make them already!
In the rare chance that someone needs to use this as prior art in 10-20 years, contact me at http://ubasics.com. If you want me to build them, contact me sooner.
And if someone is curious about where my car is or has been for the last while, no need to spend thousands of dollars on cameras, just check out my tracking system. (please note that it is active only during testing periods. Go back a few thousand points and you'll find my trip to Georgia and Alabama. Let me know if you can determine which of my relatives I visited and how I'm related - that would be interesting detective work.)
Hmm. Then why, depspite years spend working under PMs who'd taken all sorts of courses, have I encountered so few who could deal?
If a few students fail in a class, one would presume it's the student's fault. If the majority of the students fail, then one would presume that the teacher is at fault. (or it's an engineering 'weeder' class:). Project managers who do not have expertise in the project cannot do the time estimate. They can only go to the experts and help them break the tasks up and estimate them. Afterwards they are simply a means of communication and tracking - they never make a decision or estimation - they facilitate decisions, and go to the decision makers when the project goes off track. If they have some expertise in the field then they may be more involved in the estimation and decisions. It could be that you've seen so few good PMs because your company hires poorly, or because they are very rare. Or it could be that you don't understand their function and use them appropiately.
Then the problem is trivial. What about the general case?... And it seems that no one has yet come up with a good answer outside the trivial case.
Every case is trivial when broken down far enough. Have you written a DB before? No? Have you written a random access file module? No? Have you read/written from a file? No? Have you sorted a data list? No? Have you written a module/function/class? No? Have you written a single line of code? Yes! Ok, Let's break this project up into tasks that each emit a single line of code. That seems hard - planning the project will take longer than developing it. Let's get someone who has experience at the higher level. If no one does, or we don't have the resources to get them or the tools that enable us to do it, then we're stuck. Here we go, one line at a time.
In the case where even that's not possible (You are not expert enough to break a given task up any further, or redefine it so that it you are able to break it up), then the correct estimate is, "We do not have the skills to properly estimate this project." There are a few paths you could take - hire someone who can, do a test project, perform a fact-finding study, outsource the work and let someone else do the estimating (write penalty clauses into the contract for poor estimates), etc. Most companies instead guesstimate wildly and then plow ahead. The majority of these projects fail, but they are not necessarily useless - generally a lot is learned during the process. But usually what has been learned could have been learned more efficiently/effectively with a test project.
Does this adequately cover the general case? If not, where does it fail?
Time estimation is part of project managment. A good course in project management will give you the tools to effectively deal with these situations.
Short and sweet, when asked to give an estimate (any estimate) ask them if they want the quick and dirty estimate now (which may be off by 1,000% or more) or if they would like a more accurate estimate. If they want the quick and dirty then use whatever method you use now to give them the estimate. If they want an accurate estimate then tell them you'll research the current state of the project, the development effort required for functions x, y, and z, and the resources required to accomplish the effort.
Then follow a good estimating process - there are many available in many books about this subject. In my case generally new projects are very similar to older projects, and are all built on the same foundations so it's easy to start with a list of tasks to get from point A to B, and list the resources and dependencies for each task. Link them all together, and then go to the boss and say, "Assuming that we have these people and these reources, the project will be completed x weeks from kick-off."
When (not if) the boss says, "Well it needs to be done by this date!" Calmy reply with, "We can meet that goal by either scaling the work back, or increasing manpower. Which is more suitable for this situation?" and so on.
The one thing you don't want to do (that all too many software engineers do on a regular basis) is over estimate or underestimate the work required. In either case the customer (generally your boss) learns not to trust your estimates. This is bad on so many levels, and is the main reason that so many software engineers work more than 40 hours per week on a regular basis - especially those that overestimate the time required trying to combat this (paradoxically).
A more accurate estimation process will include a frank discussion of risk and risk management. "This schedule is good as long as we assume the code base is well documented and follows reasonable coding practises." Then find out what the customer wants you to do if you find this assumption to be false. Give them the whole scenario - the risk may be low, but if the assumption proves wrong then perhaps the project schedule or resources just tripled. That may be too great a risk to take even if it's unlikely - so how do we mitigate that risk?
I could go on, but really this is a basic question that millions of people have asked for thousands of years. There are much better and more thorough resources to answer it. Visit your local library if your company isn't willing to send you to a simple three day project management seminar. They won't teach you much that's new, but they'll tie it all together and give you the tools you need to communicate effectively with others - most of the important stuff is being able to say, "I'll get back to you on that by thursday."
Rabbit Semiconductor makes a nifty Camera Application Kit. But at $500 you may want to try hacking a commercial unit. The nice thing about this one is that it has pan, tilt, and all the software comes with the kit along with a compiler and other tools needed to customize it. Yes, I'm affiliated with them, no I don't make any money from this shameless plug.
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First of all, they have plenty of other issues to worry about when designing the exterior of a satellite, like reflective material for thermal management, or solar cells for generating power.
y /mystery_monday_050103.html :
It is non-trivial to create what amounts to an invisible satellite.
It has and continues to be done not only by the US, but by other countries as well.
Techniques are continuously developed and refined to see such "invisible" satellites. It's just another arms race.
Secondly, I would imagine that the trajectories of all satellites are available to all agencies that launch stuff into space.
There are certain satellites that are not tracked except by the agencies that use them, and by anyone else who happens to notice it. There are public lists of all known satellites.
From http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technolog
But within weeks after MISTY's shuttle deployment, both U.S. and Soviet sources reported that the satellite malfunctioned. Richelson explained that a spacecraft explosion "may have been a tactic to deceive those monitoring the satellite or may have been the result of the jettisoning of operational debris."
Whatever the case -- and to the chagrin of spysat operators -- a network of civilian space sleuths had been monitoring a set of MISTY maneuvers and the explosion, ostensibly part of a "disappearing act" meant to disguise its true whereabouts.
So check it out yourself. My understanding is that amateur satellite trackers have found and verified numerous unpublished satellites. They feel they are doing a service - "If I can see and track it with my limited resources, you can bet China, etc know about it years ago."
Imaging a soyuz crashing into one of those massive spy satellites with a relative velocity of several kilometers per second...
Check out Big Sky Theory. You'll find that the amount of 3-D space is so large in volume that even satellites meant to hit each other (for various tests) are extraordinarily difficult to target. When satellites start to accidently crash - it is greater then 99.9% certain it was not random or accidental, statistically speaking.
I just can't see how the US could not have spy satellites that are difficult to see and unpublished. The article mentions well-known satellites (keyhole). It will be news (well, actually no one will know publicly) when the chinese test their laser against all our unpublished satellites.
Like others have said, this is likely a story to get greater funding (Congress is going to start dealing with budget soon) for the various agencies. It looks like it may have been done well - a single statement in a long report, and no official statements other than that. Congresspersons, start your engines! China's going to attack Tiawan, and before we find out it'll all be over! Better throw a few more protected satellites up! China's hindering the Iran peace process to keep us occupied in other parts of the world! That might destroy Walmart's business model and we'll lose 1000's of jobs in our state! etc, etc, etc.
-Adam
Energy is energy.
Have you ever seen a capacitor explode? Have you ever seen a large capacitor blow up a screwdriver that shorted across its terminals?
It doesn't matter if it's gasoline, Li-Poly, Li-Ion, Hydrogen, etc. We use it because it's easy to extract energy from it. It's easy to extract energy from it because it's very reactive. There are many ways to blow up a fuel tank - but we've had a century of design information and now they rarely go up like they could (except in movies). When we have a few decades of experience behind us with these other technologies then they'll be about as safe as we consider gasoline to be.
Expect to see exploding laptops in movies long after we've solved that problem.
-Adam
Technically PoE is delivered as -48 volts as well. Also, any Powered Device must be able to accept +48 or -48 VDC, so in the end it doesn't matter since the end units can handle either case.
Since it can only source about 12-13W at the end device it's not enough to run even a large laptop, nevermind a computer. You can't simply increase the current due to the wire losses and heating in cabling. In theory you could deliver 13W over both the spare pair and the data pair, getting about 26W total, but again the cable would be getting quite warm with that much power going through it. They're working on the next revision for higher power PoE, but it's gonna be hard getting much more power out of a 500 foot run of Cat 5 safely.
But a PoE hub or switch could take the data center 48V supply and use it practically straight up. The other nice thing about 48V is that it's considered low voltage, so not as restricted for wiring (UL and building codes) requirements, and it suffers much lower losses over long runs than 12V.
-Adam
it has flaked out for a total of 1 hour in 4 years
Thank you for bringing this disparity to our attention. We strive to ensure that all our users receive an identical experience with our service, and will work toward making your service just as reliable and useful as everyone else finds it to be.
Thank you for using Earthlink!
-Adam
That's like kidnapping Dubya in Egypt and asking the Arabs for a ransom.
Pretty smart. I bet the arabs would pay _way_ more than the US for President Bush.
-Adam
The whole do no evil thing is a load of horse shit, google is a corporation run by directors who have been selling off their stock as fast as they can. This is never a good sign of about the intentions of the directors.
No, it's a sign of a wise investor. They are limited in the amount of stock they can sell in any given period, so they sell as much as they can when it's high, and hold onto it when it's expected to go high.
Of course it could be that they're losing faith in their company, but enough lies outside of their control now that it would be monumentally stupid to leave a significant portion of their net worth in one company, even if it's theirs.
However, feel free to go ahead and start your billion dollar company, and never sell your stock just so idiots on slashdot can have a warm fuzzy feeling about your intentions.
-Adam
The CDs have built in spacers - when you stakc them there's a gap built in, preventing adhesion. If your environment is very warm, or they use cheap labels and you store the discs upside down, perhaps there'd be a problem, but you typically don't have to worry about it. The discs are made of polycarbonate, and it's pretty stable.
Otherwise any solution would suffer from the same adhesion problems, not just spindles.
On edge is obviously better, but not by any significant margin.
-Adam
How do you scan them in now? Do you put them in an automatic machine, do you have humans sitting there doing the work, etc?
However they come out of the scanning process should direct how to store them.
If you've got humans doing the work then put them back in the jewel case, and drop the case into a filing box that you can store on shelving. Mark that box with a large barcoded sticker. Every week scan all the boxes, and have the system beep when you scan a box due for disposal. Dump the contents into the secure shed bin, and put the box on the pile of empties for new projects.
If you do the scanning automatically,a nd simply have a human de-casing the disc and putting them on a spindle or stack, then buy spindle carriers that can pick up the spindle or stack on the output side and drop the entire thing into a suitably sized box, then do the same as above. (I'd probably go this route anyway rather than the storage in jewel case and big box above).
Look for "cake boxes" that are really spindle CD/DVD boxes, such as the following: cake boxes
Are the CDs/DVDs in small batches or big batches? ie, do you have to store 5 of them together, or 500 together? Is there a great variance (do you accept both customers that give 5 and customers that give 500?).
If you want to spend tens of thousands of dollers then a good engineering firm can design a system that you just feed discs into. It'll then scan them for you, store them, and on regular intervals shred those that have been authorized for shredding. Should take up the space of a large closet or small cubicle for a storage capacity of 5,000 or so discs, and scanning capacity of a few hundred per hour.
-Adam
Don't worry too much. "Dell switching to AMD?" is announced every six months for the last umpteen years. I usually see it as an opportunity for Dell to make a new deal with Intel.
Maybe it'll actually happen this time, but if it does it'll still be 6 months or more before you see them for sale.
But if it doesn't happen, you'll know that Intel (or Dell) caved. Again.
Purely from a business standpoint, it's certainly easier and cheaper to support, stock, and build based on one architecture. Further, most businesses want to purchase Intel products, rather than AMD - it's the safe bet. "you'll never get fired for recommending wintel..."
-Adam
What does Slashdot see as the future of the M.S. degree versus other available and somewhat non-traditional degrees? What path should engineers pursue for maximum future employability?
On an international scale, in order to stay competitive economically the US has to be the worlds largest consumer. In order to consume individuals must have enough education that their jobs aren't easily outsourced. So the US encourages higher education.
The generic "here's a spec, design it" engineering can be accomplished by a bachelor's degree holder, as well as most outsourcing companies. The research that is done at the master's and PhD levels is important for new technologies, but that has largely been watered down (fewer skunk works, menlo parks, etc)
If you want to stay competitive in today's industry, you'll have to settle for a bachelor's degree or higher, coupled with management experience. Many companies move engineers into a position to act as liasons to outsourced workers, and still keep a smaller engineering group around for fixing designs, quick proof of concept, and developing new technology.
But in the end you'll be fine and happy with a bachelors degree once you have experience. All a masters does for you is move you up the pay bracket 10-15%, and the reality is that after the two years of real world experience rather than going for a masters, most bachelors are at that level by the time you get your masters.
I did a lot of work while in school, developed a passion for my field, and graduated with a bachelors. I may want more schooling down the road. I'm not certain, however, that a masters of engineering will serve me as well as a masters in business, so I decided to work for a few years to get an idea of the industry and find out where the opportunities that look interesting lie.
What you should do to ensure maximum future employability is do what you love, and love what you do. That is what will shine through - too many people do engineering because they want money, but don't want to be doctors. They make OK engineers, but until they find the passion they end up being lukewarm for 1/3 of their life while at work, asleep 1/3, and bored the other 1/3. Don't do that.
-Adam
Onboard flash caches and larger ram caches are going into the next generation of hard drives. Other than that, nothing much is going to change in the near future.
When the OS is aware of the flash and ram caches on the drive, it will instruct the drive as to what to cache so when the computer is started up next time 50% of the boot code is in the flash and starts running very quickly while it loads the rest of the boot code into ram and feeds it out. Beyond that there isn't much the hard drive can do differently to speed up normal use unless you parallel more platters (which raises heating, noise, energy use, and weight of the servo arm (which slows it down)). In most cases it's better to use several drives in a RAID configuration to obtain the same benefit. You should also consider getting a system that can support 8GB of RAM and loading it up with fast ram so it never has to page to the hard drive. Unless you use photoshop. Then you're out of luck - RAID is as fast as you're going to get.
It's going to be a bumpy start, but flash caches will significantly speed up the hard drive during boot up and a few other times.
The limiting factor is the speed of the mechanical parts, and you can only get very tiny incremental improvements in speed for each large improvement in the mechanical structure. So they are pursuing other methods to raise the apparant speed.
-Adam
The main way to keep this in the public eye is by muddying the water. I'd have to take a closer look at what the survey says exactly, but it sounds to me like the survey was more like this:
1. Do you believe in evolution?
Rather than this:
2. Do you believe that humans evolved from a different species?
My suspicion is that most americans believe in evolution - species adapt generation by generation to the world around them - since that is usually demonstrated in school. What most americans do not believe is that Humans are naturally occuring descendants of monkeys or another so-called lower life form.
So the term "evolution" has changed from the theory that reproductive organisms change from generation to generation, and nature culls the bad changes to "Humans are big monkeys".
And the politicians on both sides love it, because it means whatever they want it to mean when they talk about it. They can redefine it at each encounter, and then laugh at the other side for misrepresenting the true theory.
Of course they'd rather be talking about it than something worthwhile that they can actually act on and make a positive change for their constituents.
-Adam
The phone itself is not destined to become a great success, but QTopia sees the various projects people are making in order to make an open source or free phone. They want to provide an attractive alternative to the phone companies should such open source projects gain a critical mass.
If a good platform is developed that is very modular and very compact (ie, add what hardware features you want, leave out what you don't) then one could make a good, marketable phone that has a slighter wider appeal than just geeks. Put that together with a flat rate data plan using VOIP for voice calls, and you'll suddenly expand your user base a magnitude or more.
I just got the Verizon xv6700 (the data evdo rate is significantly faster than tmobile's edge) and am reasonably happy with it - but it is terrible the way they cripple the platform - no java, no data access to a computer, etc. You can get around these things, but people want functionality for a low cost. Only teeny-boppers are willing to rent their ring tones, and as they age they are going to be less willing to do so (Let's see, eat ramen noodels for a month, or get rid of my ring tones). The current and next generations are already getting used to enabling phone features and getting things for free.
Most major cities have flat rate unlimited cell phone plans. We're going to see some drastic changes in the cell phone industry over the next 5 years.
This isn't the phone to get and use, but it is a start, and if priced cheaply ($500 or less including dev kit) then it could make significant inroads into the developer community.
-Adam
Dell can't be behind the times.
Actually they had a battery recall program(that still hasn't ended) that started in Fall of 2004. This appears to be a new battery recall, but I bet it's the same old issues just becoming worse due to higher battery capacity with poor construction of the cells.
In fact, this may be the same recall that Apple had. Most Li-Ion consumer battery cells in the world are made by two or three companies. In order to cut costs, they make mistakes that affect all downstream manufacturers. It isn't the battery pack that's the problem, it's the cells inside the pack.
-Adam
Has a simpler interface and better search
And does a much better job of obeying copyright.
Youtube is only as good as its current copyright stance lasts. Once a major lawsuit from a copyright holder happens, Youtube is going to go the way of napster and MP3.com. It'll still be around, but it'll probably have to start erring on the side of too restrictive. Google started out trying to avoid copyright problems, and it will be able to defend itself against copyright lawsuits. That being the case, they won't need to have a period of time where they overreact.
Still, I hate searching in youtube. There's way to much junk in it - not unlike the internet as a whole - and they don't rate videos like google seems to be able to do. Perhaps they need to use the google rank of each video (this video is linked to by x websites using the following keywords) so better videos float to the top of searches.
As the information increases, good searching still seems to be key to a good service. Google seems to know its business. I'm waiting for them to bend their processing power to analyzing video and audio to automatically pull out people and words.
-Adam
I seriously doubt the military needs Gnutella for their supercomputing needs.
Not only that, but if they wanted it, they'd simply take it. Military and national security needs almost always trump copyright. It's an empty gesture at best.
-Adam
It would only work when the pressing of a single key causes the generation and transmission of a packet. Telnet is what they talk about, but most terminal programs would be vulnerable. Connecting to a mainframe is obvious, but you'd have the same problem with windows remote desktop, any remote client programs, etc. The SSL telnet program send passwords as a single packet, so that would prevent transmission of information during the password phase, but would not prevent it during interactive use.
Normal websurfing, email, and desktop applications run on the computer itself (instead of remotely) would not pass any usable jitter information.
Ajax web based applications could be vulnerable if they generate packets each time a key is pressed. Not many do this, but more will as time goes on.
The key problems are:
1) It can, at best, transmit 1 bit per keypress
2) All of the intelligence would have to be in the keyboard for deciding *what* to send.
Further, I haven't read the paper, but I don't see how this would work unless the user's typing patterns are very well known to the program, or the jitter introduced is significantly greater than 1/2 the average keypress to keypress time. This would be noticable to most people, though they would get used to it. This could be adaptive though, if you know that a particular keyboard is used by one user, and the keyboard spends a significant amount of its bandwidth on known patterns.
Also, the keyboard cannot query the computer - the only information it could gain is what is typed in it. And since it could only get 1/7 of the possible information that's typed in (or perhaps 1/3 if good compression is used) then it wouldn't be able to get very much at all.
All in all, it seems like a cool trick, but like tempest it requires some fairly specific conditions. For most things there are other ways that are likely easier, less detectable by the end user, and more informative than this one. But under appropiate conditions, it could be just the ticket.
-Adam
I'm kinda surprised they don't have this data already.
They do. The difference here is that they intend to sell it to one or more third parties.
-Adam
I knew someone was going to dock me for speeding, but that section of prospect is 50. Sorry. You'll have to look harder for my speeding violations.
It's going to be harder since there is no universal electronic database of road speed limits, passing zones, turn lanes, etc. Something I know a few companies would pay good money for.
-Adam
This is, technically, big brother - it is the technology to make this process cheaper (the process is already possible and available to anyone - just stand on a corner and collect information).
There is no big reason to fear this any more than there is reason to fear the fact that the phone company has a record of every phone call you've ever made. They have, undoubtedly, used that information internally in research projects to form network diagrams and could very well do the 6-degrees game if they felt so inclined.
I can see how it might be profitable to know where I've been, and where and when I might not be at home/work/etc. This will certainly cause me to think more about personal security. But it won't shed light on any activities that I don't want people to know about.
In small towns everyone knew about everyone else, and still kept quiet and were civil - within reason - because they all had to live together. I think this notion of "public privacy" where one should be able to go to the store without anyone knowing is a relatively new desire, and quite frankly many, if not most, fears of losing it are overblown.
But think about the possibilities if this technology - I'll call this "public neutrality" where I, as an endpoint user of the public space am not restricted from what I can and cannot record and analyze.
I've been thinking about this technology for some time. What I'd like to have is a HUD, this license plate reader, and an internet connection. Then we simply need to develop CML - car markup language.
Above every car messages about that car from other drivers are displayed, not unlike photo tags.
Litterer
Doesn't signal
Has gun
Tailgater
Cell phoner stoner
Plain stupid
etc.
Then we can do the same with facial recognition systems.
Use GPS, a 3 axis magnetometer, and a 3 axis accelerometer and you can mark up buildings and other physically stationary objects.
Then - and this is the next cool bit - you build all this into a flashlight. But the flashlight is actually a miniature handheld projecter. You can actually shine it around without wearing a HUD and it'll paint the tags on whatever you're pointing at for everyone else to see. You could print the "loser" on someone's forehead.
Of course, I've just described several patentable ideas. They are now public domain, assuming they have not yet been applied for. So go out and make them already!
In the rare chance that someone needs to use this as prior art in 10-20 years, contact me at http://ubasics.com. If you want me to build them, contact me sooner.
And if someone is curious about where my car is or has been for the last while, no need to spend thousands of dollars on cameras, just check out my tracking system. (please note that it is active only during testing periods. Go back a few thousand points and you'll find my trip to Georgia and Alabama. Let me know if you can determine which of my relatives I visited and how I'm related - that would be interesting detective work.)
-Adam
It depends on what you're developing.
Develop the algorithms in matlab. Develop the UI in C++. Use matlab to create loadable modules that can be called from your C++ program.
Matlab is not ideal for developing the UI. C++ is not ideal for developing math algorithms.
Beyond that, do what makes sense for your program and developers.
-Adam
The thing you need to realize, however, is that they're labeled 'paranormal' for a reason.
It's because it's not normal, and it sounds better than "abnormal".
-Adam
Hmm. Then why, depspite years spend working under PMs who'd taken all sorts of courses, have I encountered so few who could deal?
:). Project managers who do not have expertise in the project cannot do the time estimate. They can only go to the experts and help them break the tasks up and estimate them. Afterwards they are simply a means of communication and tracking - they never make a decision or estimation - they facilitate decisions, and go to the decision makers when the project goes off track. If they have some expertise in the field then they may be more involved in the estimation and decisions. It could be that you've seen so few good PMs because your company hires poorly, or because they are very rare. Or it could be that you don't understand their function and use them appropiately.
... And it seems that no one has yet come up with a good answer outside the trivial case.
If a few students fail in a class, one would presume it's the student's fault. If the majority of the students fail, then one would presume that the teacher is at fault. (or it's an engineering 'weeder' class
Then the problem is trivial. What about the general case?
Every case is trivial when broken down far enough. Have you written a DB before? No? Have you written a random access file module? No? Have you read/written from a file? No? Have you sorted a data list? No? Have you written a module/function/class? No? Have you written a single line of code? Yes! Ok, Let's break this project up into tasks that each emit a single line of code. That seems hard - planning the project will take longer than developing it. Let's get someone who has experience at the higher level. If no one does, or we don't have the resources to get them or the tools that enable us to do it, then we're stuck. Here we go, one line at a time.
In the case where even that's not possible (You are not expert enough to break a given task up any further, or redefine it so that it you are able to break it up), then the correct estimate is, "We do not have the skills to properly estimate this project." There are a few paths you could take - hire someone who can, do a test project, perform a fact-finding study, outsource the work and let someone else do the estimating (write penalty clauses into the contract for poor estimates), etc. Most companies instead guesstimate wildly and then plow ahead. The majority of these projects fail, but they are not necessarily useless - generally a lot is learned during the process. But usually what has been learned could have been learned more efficiently/effectively with a test project.
Does this adequately cover the general case? If not, where does it fail?
-Adam
Time estimation is part of project managment. A good course in project management will give you the tools to effectively deal with these situations.
Short and sweet, when asked to give an estimate (any estimate) ask them if they want the quick and dirty estimate now (which may be off by 1,000% or more) or if they would like a more accurate estimate. If they want the quick and dirty then use whatever method you use now to give them the estimate. If they want an accurate estimate then tell them you'll research the current state of the project, the development effort required for functions x, y, and z, and the resources required to accomplish the effort.
Then follow a good estimating process - there are many available in many books about this subject. In my case generally new projects are very similar to older projects, and are all built on the same foundations so it's easy to start with a list of tasks to get from point A to B, and list the resources and dependencies for each task. Link them all together, and then go to the boss and say, "Assuming that we have these people and these reources, the project will be completed x weeks from kick-off."
When (not if) the boss says, "Well it needs to be done by this date!" Calmy reply with, "We can meet that goal by either scaling the work back, or increasing manpower. Which is more suitable for this situation?" and so on.
The one thing you don't want to do (that all too many software engineers do on a regular basis) is over estimate or underestimate the work required. In either case the customer (generally your boss) learns not to trust your estimates. This is bad on so many levels, and is the main reason that so many software engineers work more than 40 hours per week on a regular basis - especially those that overestimate the time required trying to combat this (paradoxically).
A more accurate estimation process will include a frank discussion of risk and risk management. "This schedule is good as long as we assume the code base is well documented and follows reasonable coding practises." Then find out what the customer wants you to do if you find this assumption to be false. Give them the whole scenario - the risk may be low, but if the assumption proves wrong then perhaps the project schedule or resources just tripled. That may be too great a risk to take even if it's unlikely - so how do we mitigate that risk?
I could go on, but really this is a basic question that millions of people have asked for thousands of years. There are much better and more thorough resources to answer it. Visit your local library if your company isn't willing to send you to a simple three day project management seminar. They won't teach you much that's new, but they'll tie it all together and give you the tools you need to communicate effectively with others - most of the important stuff is being able to say, "I'll get back to you on that by thursday."
-Adam
Rabbit Semiconductor makes a nifty Camera Application Kit. But at $500 you may want to try hacking a commercial unit. The nice thing about this one is that it has pan, tilt, and all the software comes with the kit along with a compiler and other tools needed to customize it. Yes, I'm affiliated with them, no I don't make any money from this shameless plug.
-Adam