If we build a plant like this every day for the next 10 years it won't be enough. That is how big the world oil peak problem is. We do not have a workable energy policy in place.
So you claim this is such a big problem that the government needs to step in and force us to move to other fuel sources?
An asteroid a mile wide is a big problem. Poverty is a big problem. Peak oil is not a big problem, especially in a capitalistic economy.
As oil becomes more difficult to source, we'll simply be paying more. As more money goes to oil, other people will be filling in the low-cost fuel void left behind.
"Peak oil" doesn't mean the supply is suddenly going to disappear. We aren't going to wake up next year, next decade, or even next century and suddenly realize the heat isn't working because we have no more oil. At best it means that instead of an increasing worldwide supply of oil we have a decreasing supply of oil. Chances are good that before it decreases it'll plateau for awhile.
This is a proces that will take place over years and decades of time, not days and months. If the world is faced with a sharp decline in oil over a period even as short as one year, other alternatives will quickly fill in the gap. Conversion kits for cars will appear. 5-6 new fuel sources will become widely available. etc.
The sole reason we depend on so many billions of gallons of oil per year is that it's dirt cheap not because it's the only source available, or even the best. In fact, it's pretty poor all things considered. But boy is it ever cheap.
Feel free to continue proselyting your "peak oil" catastrophe, but please don't ask the government to step in and take care of this "problem." Just because you can't envision the market taking care of this problem doesn't mean it won't. If the market starts to fail then the government's role is to lightly touch it through subsidies, taxes, and other economic forces, not by developing a comprehensive plan. No plan is going to be comprehensive enough, and if it were it wouldn't be followed well enough.
I've always thought of rebates as an interest free 30-90 day loan (or longer) to the entity providing the rebate.
If my product is worth, say, $90, and I sell it at $150 then few will purchase it. I then release a rebate for $60, and they sell like hotcakes. For at least 30 days, and sometimes as long at 6-12 months, I've given myself a ($60 * units) loan. Further, it drives demand for my product. Right now people don't mind paying $2 or more per gallon of gas. That's only because we've recently seen it go higher than $3. By setting the price at $150 then giving such a huge rebate I'm making sales to those who might not have purchased it at $90 if I started out there, but will now because it's a good deal.
Long range RFID is very tricky business. You really have to understand how it works to understand the problems.
The reader sets up a strong AC magnetic field. The tag uses this field for power. The tag then shorts out its own coil in a modulated pattern which, due to magnetic field coupling, is detectable by the reader.
This is essentially a big air-core transformer.
These fields have very little coupling at large distances. The coils for both the reader and the tag become larger the further away you want to read them, and it's a geometric relationship. If you can detect the card 4 inches away with a 4" reader, then to double the range to an 8" reader you're likely to need to square the coils and have a 16" reader. Very sensitive readers are being developed which make this easier (ie, can detect smaller tags further away with smaller reading coils) but both the tag and the reader become more expensive and complicated.
You're best bet is to track the movement of tags instead of the location. Place readers around the door frames, for instance, and you can tell how an object is moving. Place large readers on the ceiling or floor and you'll see objects as they pass under/over.
You can get very long distances if the tag has a battery. Make it rechargeable by magnetic field and simply place it on a charging pad once a month overnight so you don't have to change batteries.
It is unlikely that zigbee is going to make inroads into the consumer market at all, nevermind as much as bluetooth has done.
Zigbee will be good for connected sensor networks. I suppose eventually someone will start selling personal area networks using zigbee, but those haven't caught on yet, and I doubt zigbee is going to make any significant inroads.
The only advantage to using a standard is interoperability and cheap existing hardware/software. Since zigbee has few standards about what the devices can do and how they are to interact with each other on the application layer, then there is little or no interoperability. Sure, the lightswitch and thermostat have zigbee, but the thermostat has to understand what a lightswitch is and what it does before it can intelligently set the temperature based on the occupancy of the room (presumably based on whether the lights were just turned on).
Since there are no standards for anything but the lowest layers in zigbee, then it is only marginally better than using a proprietary standard. At best when other products come out you can flash yours to understand how to interact, but that's another step down a path that is likely to lead nowhere.
The only advantage to Zigbee is that it can be cheaper in some cases to implement - where you need a rather significant and robust network, but don't want to spend the time and money developing all the prototcols to manage such a beast. If you're doing very simple point to point communications, then zigbee isn't going to save you anything. Or, in other words, if zigbee is more expensive (chipset, code, memory, etc) to implement than another solution, pick the other solution. In some cases it'll be cheaper - when the other solution will take a year to develop and test, and you have more expensive radio components than the zigbee chipsets due to complexity.
AOL has done this quite successfully, all the while billing themselves as an ISP.
Perhaps not to the extent that bellsouth want to do it. However, I can tell you that this is only a problem when one doesn't have choice in their internet service. Once they start doing this it will be made known, and other ISPs will differentiate themselves by indicating that they don't do this.
As "broadband" internet service becomes more and more a commodity, however, we'll find ISPs trying all sorts of tricks to increase their revenue while decreasing their cost to the customer. This is merely the beginning of such machinations. Expect to see more and worse.
There is undoubtedly a price point at while people will accept this sort of service. Would you be willing to spend $5/mo on a 1500/128 service if they also had you keep adware on the screen? What if they provided 3m/512k service for content that was subsidized, while regular internet usage was throttled to 1500/128? What if that service were free? In other words, you get free 1500/128 service (yeah, upload sucks) if you never visit the subsidized sites. And if you did, you'd merely notice that the ads were more media intensive (full mpg ads, rather than animated or flashed ads, for instance) on certian websites.
Of course, we aren't going to see free broadband anytime soon, but it's getting cheap, and the money has to be made somehow.
Google: christmas light display. The first two links are directly relevant, and nearly all of them relate to exactly this question.
Yeah, sure, I imagine that there's a small percentage of slashdot users that really go all out on christmas displays, but what are you really after here? If you want to see cool ways to do displays, Slashdot isn't the best forum to ask, and if you are interested in the best display, why ask in a less effective forum?
Reminds me of Charlie and the Chocolate factory, "And you - well, you're just lucky [to get your story posted], aren't you?"
Then you need some infrared cameras and wireless headphones. The cameras track the headphones and the eyes of the headphone wearer. Depending on where the user is looking the audio sources are amplified or reduced so they can still hear the noise from other images, but the one they are looking at is clear.
Then get rid of the headphones and use one of those ultrasonic speakers that becomes audible only around their head.
Of course goto leads to faster code. Goto is simply a non-conditional jump - in most processors it is a single instruction that takes few cycles.
But the only case where it should lead to huge improvements in performance is when you replace functions with goto. Then you eliminate a ton of code that fiddles with the stack and saving processor state before going to another function.
The code can be less maintainable, but primarily because functions are easier to deal with than even well written goto code.
And, of course, anything that makes code easier to write is generally better for most applications. Computers are fast enough now that the perfromance hit when the customer is using it is cheaper for the company producing the software than the performance hit the coder takes writing faster code. Only in cases where extreme perfromance is needed is it better to spend more resources writing the code than running it.
what they are worried about most...is playing burned games
Which is why they are pushing the live account so much. It's easer to copy protect software and hardware when they must phone home. Not perfect, but easier.
THe electronics inside is probably like 1cm square.
Not necessarily.
48 pin TSOP chips are often used for Flash memory, and are 1.2 cm x 2 cm. It's easier and cheaper to assemble a flash drive with TSOP chips rather than BGA. TSOP has the pins along two sides of the paackage. BGA has all the connections on the bottom in a grid, but without pins - just solder balls. Other technologies (such as COB) are not a good fit for the product (quantity, price point, manufacturing capacity, turn around, lead time, etc).
Then you've got the microcontroller that's handling all the USB, error detection, correction, and wear leveling. In this particular device I imagine this part has many more pins than usual since it talks to several flash chips simultaneously (that's how they've increased the speed - it's a mini striped RAID). This part is likely to be only a little smaller than the flash chips themselves.
So I can easily see having a device that's nearly 3" long x.75" wide with up to three flash chips, one microcontroller, and the support components.
The USB connector itself adds.75" to the length. It wouldn't be too difficult to make a stick just under 2" long including the connector. If you want really small then use the PCB as the connector (one flash stick does this already) and you'll end up with about 1.5" long. Use BGA or COB and you might be able to get it down to 1" long total.
A cheaper fix for the low resolution problem would be to mount the ccd on a servo stage that can vibrate it. Take 3-5 pictures in a few mS while the stage is vibrating. Since the camera is creating the vibrations it knows where the stage is and post-processing can extract 2-3 times more resolution out of the camera than the sensor's native resolution.
After reading your well thought-out comments, they would lead me to think that you believe Googles promise of "do no evil" is just an empty promise?
First, it is a mission. When they are faced with a decision they can base their solution partly on this drive. However, not all decisions have a clear evil/not-evil solution, and far too many will be choosing between the lesser of two evils.
Second, 'evil' is relative. Right now there are lots of people who feel that Google is doing evil in various ways. Take what's happening in China. Google is self-censoring web searches so they can be a part of the Chinese economy. It's either that, or be blocked entirely. Lots of people feel that is evil and that Google should take a principled - and less profitable - stand.
I don't view it as an empty promise, just a lofty goal that cannot be fully attained due to the nature of business and the subjective nature of it. But it's a goal worth having and striving for.
Even with all this power going into one company, why is there still this cultural "feel good" sensation about google?
It's partly a generation thing. The founders are during our generation, the company was good to us/for us during our good years. If you go back to the beginning of MS, you'll see much the same feel-good vibe from people/industry as you feel for Google now. And you'll see much of the bad feeling people have for MS now was aimed at IBM then. IBM, in its heyday, was also a great company.
As humans we tend to anthropomorphize companies/objects/etc. We "grew up" with Google, and it wasn't a bully to us when we were "kids". Google has been bullying other people, but we turn a blind eye.
But a big company can't help but look out for its own interest. A company cannot become huge and succesfully carry out its complete mission without also, eventually, stepping on toes. This is capitalism.
And so goes the inexorable grind where Google slowly loses public favor, and yet is still too useful to give up for most people. In order to stay more useful than their competitor they have to be a little ruthless... Then a little more. If they don't, someone else will become more useful. They have to push their weight around a little bit to get, for example, the publishers to stop annoying them with lawsuits.
They have to wield patents, trade secrets, copyright, and other IP as weapons since they really don't make a product, just a service.
You see, if a company owns the rights to a copyrighted script/movie/show/etc then by making another one with essentially the same script/plot/etc they can effectively prevent others from doing the same even though the copyright for the originals ran out. Once you change enough so that the big media conglomerates can't go after you for copyright infringment, you've created an essentially different story.
Of course the originals can be distributed after their copyright runs out. This is fixed by releasing a 'newly mastered' or 'digitally enhanced' version. They can copyright the new release of the old work, and one has to find an old copy to get the non-copyright version from - which can be difficult, if not impossible, to do since the studios controlled the masters and any original copies that legally left posession of the owner may be poor quality, damaged, and usually form an incomplete set if it was a series.
My company is porting our C++ Windows app to C in an embedded device and the question of whether to use dynamic memory allocation continues to come up. So far I have resisted malloc/free use but it gets tedious having the same argument with the next set of managers to take an interest in the project. Is there a definitive answer on the subject...?
You're asking if there's a definitive answer on whether your particular application should use dynamic memory allocation?
Apparently not. If you don't have the definitive answer, what makes you think we will?
You won't find a definitive answer on whether dynamic memory allocation is good in general because both approaches are valuable in different situations. Sometimes it's clear - if the OS loses important significant performance using dynamic memory, or the application doesn't need dynamic memory then, in general, it's better to avoid dynamic memory for a host of reasons - performance, ease of debugging, increased determinism in program operation.
If there's no performance penalty, and the application development is significantly sped up by use of dynamic memory allocation (especially in complex programs) then it is an easy win for dynamic allocation.
This is not a situation where one is intrinsically better than the other, and you haven't given us anywhere near enough information to even guess.
However, if you have to keep explaining your reasoning then either
1) You are working with people who don't understand embedded software design (or the application) or
2) You are likely wrong to choose static allocation
In either case you may be making the problem worse by forcing others to work with a set of limitations they don't understand or can effectively work with.
Supercomputers aren't about "Ease of use." They're about speed per dollar. When WCC can beat Linux on price/performance, then people will stand up and take notice. Not before.
Here's a word problem for you:
Suzy takes 12 hours to make the program that runs on the MS cluster in 12 hours
Katy takes 24 hours to make the program that runs on the Linux cluster in 6 hours
Both researchers have burdened costs of $70/hr for the university.
Of course, the numbers are created only to illustrate that it is not a folly to pursue ease of use, even when the immediate goal seems to be performance. Other costs also determine the optimal solution, such as purchase price, maintenance, depreciation, etc.
Even if they couldn't compete in performance (which they probably can) they can still gain the overall advantage by making supercomputing accessable to a wider range of research. IBM didn't think the world needed more than a few computers. In the 70s only engineers had computers - they were too hard for most people. Now a child can sit in front of a computer and use it - it's almost as popular as the TV and phone.
Eventually each university will have a supercomputer. Then each college. Then each department at each university. While computers now are more powerful than supercomputers of yesterday, I still expect them to remain seperate logically - supercomputers will always be ahead of desktops for specialized applications. I doubt we'll have one in each home. But there is a lot of market left for the few supercomputer players, and MS wants some of the low hanging fruit.
I have no doubt they will succeed to some profitable degree.
When did this cease to be "News for Nerds: Stuff that matters" and when did it become "News for MBAs:..."
Did you not get the memo?
Ah.
Let me summarize:
The US is outsourcing everything that can be done more cheaply elsewhere. At this point everyone that is a leaf node in their organization (ie, you don't manage anyone) is at risk of being outsourced.
If you are not working on your project management and leadership skills, you might not have a job in a decade or two.
As an aside, are there any thoughts on why the engineering applications appear to be so overlooked by the open source community?
In general open source programmers scratch an itch.
Programmers don't always make good engineers.
Engineers don't always make good programmers.
If you really love programming, you'll typically want to spend more time programming than, say, engineering. Therefore you may not ever have the desire to write an engineering program unless an engineer challenges you.
If you really love engineering, you'll typically want to spend more time engineering..ing than, say, programming. Therefore you'll likely never write your own tools if there's something available that you can use out of the box. Especially if it's an industry standard and can get your better employment.
Programmers make programs that make them more efficient. You don't see many open source knitting programs. Same for cat breeding and many other areas where programming doesn't naturally flow.
If anything, however, engineering is one of the closest disciplines to programming, and there is a lot of OS engineering software out there.
Is this pandemic something that American college students at small schools should worry about?
It depends on the method of transmission. If it can last outside its host for 24 hours and infect through the respiratory system and the gastric system, then you're looking at the perfect dorm disease. There are many cases of stomach flus spreading through dorms like wildfire.
On the other hand, if it only survives for a few minutes outside its host then it will still spread, but common measures such as washing hands and covering your mouth when you sneeze/cough will limit it severely.
Key problems:
"I don't know how to setup windows XP so it runs reliably"
"The existing/included datalogging sw requires user interaction"
First of all - data logging companies make expensive hardware, and supply software to suit the user's needs. If your current company cannot provide sw that requires no user intervention (ie, has triggers based on time, events, etc) then I suggest you talk to other equipment makers. You will undoubtedly get a response. This solves the second problem.
If you have no experience in setting up windows XP so it runs reliably, then find someone who does, or find a data logging company that has software for your OS of choice. Contrary to popular belief (especially here) XP is very reliable. Do a bare minimum install, enable the firewall, and don't let people use it as a general computer. Just as with linux, don't load anything on it you don't need.
Open source is not a solution to these two problems any better than closed source is. Is there another problem that you haven't explained?
-Adam
I'm a research assistant in a well-known university in the US. As part of the research work my group is doing, we need access to the logs from a production system of an n-tier web-application.
Welcome to capitalism, we hope you enjoy your stay. While here, please note that TANSTAAFL.
Asking for data from a business requires a lot of work on your part. You must somehow convince them that all the effort they are going to spend collecting, sanitizing, and providing you with the information is going to pay off for them in a reasonable way. Since this request involves several months of data, and more employee involvement than a 5 minute survey you'll have to build a strong relationship with a company who has this data.
Opportunites include:
The research will help you identify areas where improvement will save $$$ in [bandwidth|speed|latency|etc]
We can supply one or more interns to do all the internal work as well as work on a few other projects of your choosing
You (manager, CEO, IT lackey) got your degree here and still have fuzzy feelings for the school
Oh benevolent ones! May we sip at the firehose? Verily, this research will help this university provide graduates of the caliber which will dazzle the eyes! Yea, they will be cheap, too.
The key here, as in everything to do with business, is to network, network, network. Don't email - you cannot possibly explain your research in a way that will make them go, "Gee, I think I'd like to devote company resources to these kids tha the university of whatever!" in an email. At best send an email such as, "Dear sir, blah blah blah, we are researching n-tier applications and would like to spend a few moments talking with you about your architecture. When would be a good time to call?" Give it two days - Call them in any case except if they patently refuse to talk to you. Don't engage in email conversations - in order to get good buy-in, you need to talk to them (if only briefly) so they can associate a voice with the email. Then email all you want.
You may have better luck calling at the outset, intriducing yourself and your research, then asking who at the company would be suited to help you out with your research. Then engage that person. Don't get too low on the totem pole or you may end up with someone who is inneffective within the company at getting you what you want. Certian companies (Google, forinstance) are resource rich and may be easier to work with, especially if you can get one or two workers involved and spending their 20% time helping you. If your research isn't exciting on a general level, you're in for a rough ride.
Once you've started a conversation (with several people at different companies - you're still trying to get something they will be reluctant to give) then you can start edging into what you need to complete your research. This whole process will take 2-6 months just to set everything up. I hope you've started early.
There is lots of talk about writing portable programs, but this pursuit has resulted in a lot of processor features going unused.
This is the compiler's job. If your compiler targets a particular processor poorly, get a better compiler.
There is no such thing as portable code:
There is code that is written according to the language specification (Ansi C, Java, etc), which is what one normally considers "portable" only because standards compliant compilers exist for several platforms.
There is code that uses processor/platform/OS/compiler specific extensions, which is normally considered unportable because libraries don't exist for all platforms.
When most developers talk about portability they are talking about OS portability. The portable-to-other-processors debate has long since left the building largely due to incredible speed increases in processors. There's no reason, apart from esoteric algorithm tweaking, to code something in a processor specific manner.
Code porting to another OS is only an issue because operating systems and the hardware they run on are still changing at a dramatic pace. There is no standardized language that covers all the common aspects of a modern operating system, because they are aiming at a moving target. Even the ultra-portable Java has to be extended outside of the official specification to cover serial ports, complex sound, complex graphics, etc.
Portability hasn't been about processor speed for a very long time, and at this point it shouldn't be - a better compiler or a faster processor is a *ton* cheaper (time, money) than writing processor specific code in all but a few extraordinary cases.
It basically means that there is no way to build an embedded software and leave it running disconnected from anything and maintain high time accuracy at the same time.
1 second is 18 months is 21 parts per billion.
If your clock needs to drift less than one second in 18 months, then you're already using an atomic clock or primary or secondary time source. This means that you are also going to go to the trouble of synchronizing your clock with some external standard that is, eventually, a primary clock.
If you can't get the leap second information from your primary time source, then it doesn't matter if you lose 1 second over 18 months - unless you have an atomic clock on board you're going to drift that much in shorter than 18 months. If you have a cheap atomic clock you may still drift that much.
Slashdot Mirror
If we build a plant like this every day for the next 10 years it won't be enough. That is how big the world oil peak problem is. We do not have a workable energy policy in place.
So you claim this is such a big problem that the government needs to step in and force us to move to other fuel sources?
An asteroid a mile wide is a big problem. Poverty is a big problem. Peak oil is not a big problem, especially in a capitalistic economy.
As oil becomes more difficult to source, we'll simply be paying more. As more money goes to oil, other people will be filling in the low-cost fuel void left behind.
"Peak oil" doesn't mean the supply is suddenly going to disappear. We aren't going to wake up next year, next decade, or even next century and suddenly realize the heat isn't working because we have no more oil. At best it means that instead of an increasing worldwide supply of oil we have a decreasing supply of oil. Chances are good that before it decreases it'll plateau for awhile.
This is a proces that will take place over years and decades of time, not days and months. If the world is faced with a sharp decline in oil over a period even as short as one year, other alternatives will quickly fill in the gap. Conversion kits for cars will appear. 5-6 new fuel sources will become widely available. etc.
The sole reason we depend on so many billions of gallons of oil per year is that it's dirt cheap not because it's the only source available, or even the best. In fact, it's pretty poor all things considered. But boy is it ever cheap.
Feel free to continue proselyting your "peak oil" catastrophe, but please don't ask the government to step in and take care of this "problem." Just because you can't envision the market taking care of this problem doesn't mean it won't. If the market starts to fail then the government's role is to lightly touch it through subsidies, taxes, and other economic forces, not by developing a comprehensive plan. No plan is going to be comprehensive enough, and if it were it wouldn't be followed well enough.
-Adam
If more usable energy comes out of that process than went in...
Then you've broken thermodynamics!
-Adam
I've always thought of rebates as an interest free 30-90 day loan (or longer) to the entity providing the rebate.
If my product is worth, say, $90, and I sell it at $150 then few will purchase it. I then release a rebate for $60, and they sell like hotcakes. For at least 30 days, and sometimes as long at 6-12 months, I've given myself a ($60 * units) loan. Further, it drives demand for my product. Right now people don't mind paying $2 or more per gallon of gas. That's only because we've recently seen it go higher than $3. By setting the price at $150 then giving such a huge rebate I'm making sales to those who might not have purchased it at $90 if I started out there, but will now because it's a good deal.
-Adam
Long range RFID is very tricky business. You really have to understand how it works to understand the problems.
The reader sets up a strong AC magnetic field. The tag uses this field for power. The tag then shorts out its own coil in a modulated pattern which, due to magnetic field coupling, is detectable by the reader.
This is essentially a big air-core transformer.
These fields have very little coupling at large distances. The coils for both the reader and the tag become larger the further away you want to read them, and it's a geometric relationship. If you can detect the card 4 inches away with a 4" reader, then to double the range to an 8" reader you're likely to need to square the coils and have a 16" reader. Very sensitive readers are being developed which make this easier (ie, can detect smaller tags further away with smaller reading coils) but both the tag and the reader become more expensive and complicated.
You're best bet is to track the movement of tags instead of the location. Place readers around the door frames, for instance, and you can tell how an object is moving. Place large readers on the ceiling or floor and you'll see objects as they pass under/over.
You can get very long distances if the tag has a battery. Make it rechargeable by magnetic field and simply place it on a charging pad once a month overnight so you don't have to change batteries.
-Adam
It is unlikely that zigbee is going to make inroads into the consumer market at all, nevermind as much as bluetooth has done.
Zigbee will be good for connected sensor networks. I suppose eventually someone will start selling personal area networks using zigbee, but those haven't caught on yet, and I doubt zigbee is going to make any significant inroads.
The only advantage to using a standard is interoperability and cheap existing hardware/software. Since zigbee has few standards about what the devices can do and how they are to interact with each other on the application layer, then there is little or no interoperability. Sure, the lightswitch and thermostat have zigbee, but the thermostat has to understand what a lightswitch is and what it does before it can intelligently set the temperature based on the occupancy of the room (presumably based on whether the lights were just turned on).
Since there are no standards for anything but the lowest layers in zigbee, then it is only marginally better than using a proprietary standard. At best when other products come out you can flash yours to understand how to interact, but that's another step down a path that is likely to lead nowhere.
The only advantage to Zigbee is that it can be cheaper in some cases to implement - where you need a rather significant and robust network, but don't want to spend the time and money developing all the prototcols to manage such a beast. If you're doing very simple point to point communications, then zigbee isn't going to save you anything. Or, in other words, if zigbee is more expensive (chipset, code, memory, etc) to implement than another solution, pick the other solution. In some cases it'll be cheaper - when the other solution will take a year to develop and test, and you have more expensive radio components than the zigbee chipsets due to complexity.
-Adam
AOL has done this quite successfully, all the while billing themselves as an ISP.
Perhaps not to the extent that bellsouth want to do it. However, I can tell you that this is only a problem when one doesn't have choice in their internet service. Once they start doing this it will be made known, and other ISPs will differentiate themselves by indicating that they don't do this.
As "broadband" internet service becomes more and more a commodity, however, we'll find ISPs trying all sorts of tricks to increase their revenue while decreasing their cost to the customer. This is merely the beginning of such machinations. Expect to see more and worse.
There is undoubtedly a price point at while people will accept this sort of service. Would you be willing to spend $5/mo on a 1500/128 service if they also had you keep adware on the screen? What if they provided 3m/512k service for content that was subsidized, while regular internet usage was throttled to 1500/128? What if that service were free? In other words, you get free 1500/128 service (yeah, upload sucks) if you never visit the subsidized sites. And if you did, you'd merely notice that the ads were more media intensive (full mpg ads, rather than animated or flashed ads, for instance) on certian websites.
Of course, we aren't going to see free broadband anytime soon, but it's getting cheap, and the money has to be made somehow.
-Adam
Google: christmas light display. The first two links are directly relevant, and nearly all of them relate to exactly this question.
Yeah, sure, I imagine that there's a small percentage of slashdot users that really go all out on christmas displays, but what are you really after here? If you want to see cool ways to do displays, Slashdot isn't the best forum to ask, and if you are interested in the best display, why ask in a less effective forum?
Reminds me of Charlie and the Chocolate factory, "And you - well, you're just lucky [to get your story posted], aren't you?"
-Adam
Then you need some infrared cameras and wireless headphones. The cameras track the headphones and the eyes of the headphone wearer. Depending on where the user is looking the audio sources are amplified or reduced so they can still hear the noise from other images, but the one they are looking at is clear.
Then get rid of the headphones and use one of those ultrasonic speakers that becomes audible only around their head.
-Adam
Of course goto leads to faster code. Goto is simply a non-conditional jump - in most processors it is a single instruction that takes few cycles.
But the only case where it should lead to huge improvements in performance is when you replace functions with goto. Then you eliminate a ton of code that fiddles with the stack and saving processor state before going to another function.
The code can be less maintainable, but primarily because functions are easier to deal with than even well written goto code.
And, of course, anything that makes code easier to write is generally better for most applications. Computers are fast enough now that the perfromance hit when the customer is using it is cheaper for the company producing the software than the performance hit the coder takes writing faster code. Only in cases where extreme perfromance is needed is it better to spend more resources writing the code than running it.
-Adam
what they are worried about most...is playing burned games
Which is why they are pushing the live account so much. It's easer to copy protect software and hardware when they must phone home. Not perfect, but easier.
-Adam
THe electronics inside is probably like 1cm square.
.75" wide with up to three flash chips, one microcontroller, and the support components.
.75" to the length. It wouldn't be too difficult to make a stick just under 2" long including the connector. If you want really small then use the PCB as the connector (one flash stick does this already) and you'll end up with about 1.5" long. Use BGA or COB and you might be able to get it down to 1" long total.
Not necessarily.
48 pin TSOP chips are often used for Flash memory, and are 1.2 cm x 2 cm. It's easier and cheaper to assemble a flash drive with TSOP chips rather than BGA. TSOP has the pins along two sides of the paackage. BGA has all the connections on the bottom in a grid, but without pins - just solder balls. Other technologies (such as COB) are not a good fit for the product (quantity, price point, manufacturing capacity, turn around, lead time, etc).
Then you've got the microcontroller that's handling all the USB, error detection, correction, and wear leveling. In this particular device I imagine this part has many more pins than usual since it talks to several flash chips simultaneously (that's how they've increased the speed - it's a mini striped RAID). This part is likely to be only a little smaller than the flash chips themselves.
So I can easily see having a device that's nearly 3" long x
The USB connector itself adds
-Adam
A cheaper fix for the low resolution problem would be to mount the ccd on a servo stage that can vibrate it. Take 3-5 pictures in a few mS while the stage is vibrating. Since the camera is creating the vibrations it knows where the stage is and post-processing can extract 2-3 times more resolution out of the camera than the sensor's native resolution.
-Adam
After reading your well thought-out comments, they would lead me to think that you believe Googles promise of "do no evil" is just an empty promise?
First, it is a mission. When they are faced with a decision they can base their solution partly on this drive. However, not all decisions have a clear evil/not-evil solution, and far too many will be choosing between the lesser of two evils.
Second, 'evil' is relative. Right now there are lots of people who feel that Google is doing evil in various ways. Take what's happening in China. Google is self-censoring web searches so they can be a part of the Chinese economy. It's either that, or be blocked entirely. Lots of people feel that is evil and that Google should take a principled - and less profitable - stand.
I don't view it as an empty promise, just a lofty goal that cannot be fully attained due to the nature of business and the subjective nature of it. But it's a goal worth having and striving for.
-Adam
Even with all this power going into one company, why is there still this cultural "feel good" sensation about google?
It's partly a generation thing. The founders are during our generation, the company was good to us/for us during our good years. If you go back to the beginning of MS, you'll see much the same feel-good vibe from people/industry as you feel for Google now. And you'll see much of the bad feeling people have for MS now was aimed at IBM then. IBM, in its heyday, was also a great company.
As humans we tend to anthropomorphize companies/objects/etc. We "grew up" with Google, and it wasn't a bully to us when we were "kids". Google has been bullying other people, but we turn a blind eye.
But a big company can't help but look out for its own interest. A company cannot become huge and succesfully carry out its complete mission without also, eventually, stepping on toes. This is capitalism.
And so goes the inexorable grind where Google slowly loses public favor, and yet is still too useful to give up for most people. In order to stay more useful than their competitor they have to be a little ruthless... Then a little more. If they don't, someone else will become more useful. They have to push their weight around a little bit to get, for example, the publishers to stop annoying them with lawsuits.
They have to wield patents, trade secrets, copyright, and other IP as weapons since they really don't make a product, just a service.
It's just business from here on out.
-Adam
Why do we constantly need a remake of everything?
To renew copyright.
You see, if a company owns the rights to a copyrighted script/movie/show/etc then by making another one with essentially the same script/plot/etc they can effectively prevent others from doing the same even though the copyright for the originals ran out. Once you change enough so that the big media conglomerates can't go after you for copyright infringment, you've created an essentially different story.
Of course the originals can be distributed after their copyright runs out. This is fixed by releasing a 'newly mastered' or 'digitally enhanced' version. They can copyright the new release of the old work, and one has to find an old copy to get the non-copyright version from - which can be difficult, if not impossible, to do since the studios controlled the masters and any original copies that legally left posession of the owner may be poor quality, damaged, and usually form an incomplete set if it was a series.
-Adam
My company is porting our C++ Windows app to C in an embedded device and the question of whether to use dynamic memory allocation continues to come up. So far I have resisted malloc/free use but it gets tedious having the same argument with the next set of managers to take an interest in the project. Is there a definitive answer on the subject...?
You're asking if there's a definitive answer on whether your particular application should use dynamic memory allocation?
Apparently not. If you don't have the definitive answer, what makes you think we will?
You won't find a definitive answer on whether dynamic memory allocation is good in general because both approaches are valuable in different situations. Sometimes it's clear - if the OS loses important significant performance using dynamic memory, or the application doesn't need dynamic memory then, in general, it's better to avoid dynamic memory for a host of reasons - performance, ease of debugging, increased determinism in program operation.
If there's no performance penalty, and the application development is significantly sped up by use of dynamic memory allocation (especially in complex programs) then it is an easy win for dynamic allocation.
This is not a situation where one is intrinsically better than the other, and you haven't given us anywhere near enough information to even guess.
However, if you have to keep explaining your reasoning then either
1) You are working with people who don't understand embedded software design (or the application) or
2) You are likely wrong to choose static allocation
In either case you may be making the problem worse by forcing others to work with a set of limitations they don't understand or can effectively work with.
-Adam
Supercomputers aren't about "Ease of use." They're about speed per dollar. When WCC can beat Linux on price/performance, then people will stand up and take notice. Not before.
Here's a word problem for you:
Suzy takes 12 hours to make the program that runs on the MS cluster in 12 hours
Katy takes 24 hours to make the program that runs on the Linux cluster in 6 hours
Both researchers have burdened costs of $70/hr for the university.
Of course, the numbers are created only to illustrate that it is not a folly to pursue ease of use, even when the immediate goal seems to be performance. Other costs also determine the optimal solution, such as purchase price, maintenance, depreciation, etc.
Even if they couldn't compete in performance (which they probably can) they can still gain the overall advantage by making supercomputing accessable to a wider range of research. IBM didn't think the world needed more than a few computers. In the 70s only engineers had computers - they were too hard for most people. Now a child can sit in front of a computer and use it - it's almost as popular as the TV and phone.
Eventually each university will have a supercomputer. Then each college. Then each department at each university. While computers now are more powerful than supercomputers of yesterday, I still expect them to remain seperate logically - supercomputers will always be ahead of desktops for specialized applications. I doubt we'll have one in each home. But there is a lot of market left for the few supercomputer players, and MS wants some of the low hanging fruit.
I have no doubt they will succeed to some profitable degree.
-Adam
When did this cease to be "News for Nerds: Stuff that matters" and when did it become "News for MBAs: ..."
Did you not get the memo?
Ah.
Let me summarize:
The US is outsourcing everything that can be done more cheaply elsewhere. At this point everyone that is a leaf node in their organization (ie, you don't manage anyone) is at risk of being outsourced.
If you are not working on your project management and leadership skills, you might not have a job in a decade or two.
-Adam
As an aside, are there any thoughts on why the engineering applications appear to be so overlooked by the open source community?
In general open source programmers scratch an itch.
Programmers don't always make good engineers.
Engineers don't always make good programmers.
If you really love programming, you'll typically want to spend more time programming than, say, engineering. Therefore you may not ever have the desire to write an engineering program unless an engineer challenges you.
If you really love engineering, you'll typically want to spend more time engineering..ing than, say, programming. Therefore you'll likely never write your own tools if there's something available that you can use out of the box. Especially if it's an industry standard and can get your better employment.
Programmers make programs that make them more efficient. You don't see many open source knitting programs. Same for cat breeding and many other areas where programming doesn't naturally flow.
If anything, however, engineering is one of the closest disciplines to programming, and there is a lot of OS engineering software out there.
-Adam
Is this pandemic something that American college students at small schools should worry about?
It depends on the method of transmission. If it can last outside its host for 24 hours and infect through the respiratory system and the gastric system, then you're looking at the perfect dorm disease. There are many cases of stomach flus spreading through dorms like wildfire.
On the other hand, if it only survives for a few minutes outside its host then it will still spread, but common measures such as washing hands and covering your mouth when you sneeze/cough will limit it severely.
-Adam
Key problems:
"I don't know how to setup windows XP so it runs reliably"
"The existing/included datalogging sw requires user interaction"
First of all - data logging companies make expensive hardware, and supply software to suit the user's needs. If your current company cannot provide sw that requires no user intervention (ie, has triggers based on time, events, etc) then I suggest you talk to other equipment makers. You will undoubtedly get a response. This solves the second problem.
If you have no experience in setting up windows XP so it runs reliably, then find someone who does, or find a data logging company that has software for your OS of choice. Contrary to popular belief (especially here) XP is very reliable. Do a bare minimum install, enable the firewall, and don't let people use it as a general computer. Just as with linux, don't load anything on it you don't need.
Open source is not a solution to these two problems any better than closed source is. Is there another problem that you haven't explained? -Adam
Welcome to capitalism, we hope you enjoy your stay. While here, please note that TANSTAAFL.
Asking for data from a business requires a lot of work on your part. You must somehow convince them that all the effort they are going to spend collecting, sanitizing, and providing you with the information is going to pay off for them in a reasonable way. Since this request involves several months of data, and more employee involvement than a 5 minute survey you'll have to build a strong relationship with a company who has this data.
Opportunites include:
- The research will help you identify areas where improvement will save $$$ in [bandwidth|speed|latency|etc]
- We can supply one or more interns to do all the internal work as well as work on a few other projects of your choosing
- You (manager, CEO, IT lackey) got your degree here and still have fuzzy feelings for the school
- Oh benevolent ones! May we sip at the firehose? Verily, this research will help this university provide graduates of the caliber which will dazzle the eyes! Yea, they will be cheap, too.
The key here, as in everything to do with business, is to network, network, network. Don't email - you cannot possibly explain your research in a way that will make them go, "Gee, I think I'd like to devote company resources to these kids tha the university of whatever!" in an email. At best send an email such as, "Dear sir, blah blah blah, we are researching n-tier applications and would like to spend a few moments talking with you about your architecture. When would be a good time to call?" Give it two days - Call them in any case except if they patently refuse to talk to you. Don't engage in email conversations - in order to get good buy-in, you need to talk to them (if only briefly) so they can associate a voice with the email. Then email all you want.You may have better luck calling at the outset, intriducing yourself and your research, then asking who at the company would be suited to help you out with your research. Then engage that person. Don't get too low on the totem pole or you may end up with someone who is inneffective within the company at getting you what you want. Certian companies (Google, forinstance) are resource rich and may be easier to work with, especially if you can get one or two workers involved and spending their 20% time helping you. If your research isn't exciting on a general level, you're in for a rough ride.
Once you've started a conversation (with several people at different companies - you're still trying to get something they will be reluctant to give) then you can start edging into what you need to complete your research. This whole process will take 2-6 months just to set everything up. I hope you've started early.
Good luck.
-Adam
This is the compiler's job. If your compiler targets a particular processor poorly, get a better compiler.
There is no such thing as portable code:
When most developers talk about portability they are talking about OS portability. The portable-to-other-processors debate has long since left the building largely due to incredible speed increases in processors. There's no reason, apart from esoteric algorithm tweaking, to code something in a processor specific manner.
Code porting to another OS is only an issue because operating systems and the hardware they run on are still changing at a dramatic pace. There is no standardized language that covers all the common aspects of a modern operating system, because they are aiming at a moving target. Even the ultra-portable Java has to be extended outside of the official specification to cover serial ports, complex sound, complex graphics, etc.
Portability hasn't been about processor speed for a very long time, and at this point it shouldn't be - a better compiler or a faster processor is a *ton* cheaper (time, money) than writing processor specific code in all but a few extraordinary cases.
-Adam
Do you really imagine Linus will start jumping on planes and seeking out kernel contributers to laugh in their faces.
Who wouldn't want to?
-Adam
It basically means that there is no way to build an embedded software and leave it running disconnected from anything and maintain high time accuracy at the same time.
1 second is 18 months is 21 parts per billion.
If your clock needs to drift less than one second in 18 months, then you're already using an atomic clock or primary or secondary time source. This means that you are also going to go to the trouble of synchronizing your clock with some external standard that is, eventually, a primary clock.
If you can't get the leap second information from your primary time source, then it doesn't matter if you lose 1 second over 18 months - unless you have an atomic clock on board you're going to drift that much in shorter than 18 months. If you have a cheap atomic clock you may still drift that much.
-Adam