It looks like the strategy is to leave the leading edge to others and concentrate on doing what can be done now cheaper. Which is not a totally stupid idea. It's all very well to have the fastest/biggest/coolest looking aircraft, but business is interested in the bottom line. When you fly, do you choose the coolest aircraft or the cheapest ticket?
What thay are saying is that the jet airliner industry is now "mature". Until the next major technological innovation, aircraft will continue to look and perform as they do now. So capitalise on the large-scale market and leave the edges to someone else. Be Ford, not Ferrari.
What surprises me is replacing the 767 rather than the much older 737. The technology must be dated despite the many facelifts, and there must be a lot of planes up for replacement. Are thay abandoning that market to Airbusses 319/320/321?
I remember reading an article about a system like this years ago - running somewhere like ARM's labs in Cambridge. They were using it for desktops rather than laptops, but that is a detail. More importantly, they had hooked a load of other systems up to the ID. It provided the security access to the building - no more fiddling for cards, the door unlocks as you approach. Rather than just blanking off the screen as you waked away from one workstation, as you moved towards another workstation, it moved your "desktop" to that station, so that your work could "follow" you round the building. And, by detecting which room you were in, the phone system could route calls to you wherever you were.
There are a lot of questions (privacy etc) about those other uses, but a system which gives you multiple returns from the single cost of wearing some kind of ID is much more likely to be adopted than a single dongle for a single job.
MySQL seems to work as a "virtual company". They are scattered all over the world - though with heavy bias to Europe, which keeps the timezones together.
Re:Listen up, this is the last time I'll say this
on
Decentralization
·
· Score: 2
But I think the point was right about no "either this way ot that". I think you can plot a scatter graph with two axes - geekiness one way and suitness the other if you want. People with neither are out of the business. People with both probably choose suit because it pays better (and gets you laid more?). But there is no reason, in my experience, to believe there is any clustering at any given point in the graph. Just as there are tall people and short people, but a lot more ordinary-sized people, there are total geeks and total (pointy haired) managers, but most people are somewhere in the middle. So that the "overlap between the two types" is actually the majority. Picking ends of the spectrum as archetypes is like the picture of the sumo wrestler with the geisha - interesting as an example of extremes bu not informative about the generality.
The logic benind the articel is very, very weak. The basis of the article is that misquotes in citations (wrong volume, page number etc.) propagate from one paper to another. Whech shows that the authors cut-and-pasted citations from earlier papers. Sure. But the researchers quoted claim that this means that the researchers didn't read the papers concerned. Rubbish.
During the reserch shage of a project, you read the papers. Error in th citation - no sweat; you know authers and title, and a search engine will give it to you in nothing flat.
Weeks or months later, it is writeup time. Open the first paper to cite it. And there are all the other references you followed (a little trouble in the lookup is long forgotten) and dutifully read. And - get this - it is easier to cut-and-past the citation than to go back to the paper and assemble - separately - the publication, title, authors and page numbers.
Then only thing the research quoted proves is that papers are overwhelmingly circulated electronically ans the dead tree format is, for scientific papers, obsolete.
More fool them. If they have over-tight firewall rules, more and more people will do what you are doing - tunnel through the firewall using HTTP. OK, for NTP, that doean't matter, because it is safe. But suppose some over-clver idion builds a Telnet-over-HTTP client? Your entire security system has just gone out the window.
There is such a thing as too much security. Imagina a physical security system where you could only withdraw documents after having a full body search, fingerprint, retina print, and lie-detector test. What would happen? People wouldn't put things into the repositiry because of the problems of getting them out - so net security would fall.
If everybody started using HTTP tunnelling, firewalls would have no value at all. Of course, you have to install a tunnel-friendly client on the safe side - but if they become routine, people will do it without thinking.
If it was a heat pipe, it was probably not solid copper, though it looked like it. It would be a copper tube filled with a volatile liquid. Liquid evaporates at the hot end, diffuses to cool end where it condenses, transferring heat as it does so. But most of them looked solid.
This invention just looks (from the uninformative article) as if they hae some improvements on the mechanical structire and on helping the methanol get thr right idea about where to flow (cappillaries with "one way" structires, I would guess).
As said elsewhere, only incremental. But then, the latest Pentium is "only incremental" on the original 386 - but thos increments have taken us a long way.
He didn't own patents - he hadn't though ot it at the tiem. He later claimed to regret this, saying he would have got righ if he had. Actually, I think any patents he took out would have expired by the time they became useful - he was that far ahead of his time.
He had plenty of both. He certainly had the science to explain geosynchronous orbits. And, while he didn't designe a complete satellite, and he certainly didn't have a launch system, he put a lut of engineering thought and inventiveness into his 1945 paper on geosynchronous communications satellites. My company quoted this paper as prior art toi show thwt he had invented (in terms of describing the need for and mode of operation of) the video synchroniser - a gadget which was only built thirty years later.
All the developments in tools described by the questioner have bought improvements in both speed and quality of programming. But they are small increments - 10% here, 50% there. Structured programming was an advance on spaghetti coding, and OOP an advance again. But while software productivity has, maybe, doubled or trebled, the size of the problem has tracked hardware with Moore's law. The result is that software developers are *always* on the back foor. And I agree with Brooks - there is no silver bullet. We will always be on the back foot. But new tools will help a little.
Actuall, for all the spiel about different languages, styles and tools, I think the biggest advances have been the intrioduction of portable, well tested, well documented libraries. The best tools in the world don't beat pulling 90% of the solution out off a hat.
Absolutely. 12 pennies to the shilling, old bean. One of the early British computers (?Leo?) used BCD arithmetic, but had a hardware switch so that the ls digit could be used in base 12 instead of base 10 for making the pennies into shillings.
If you are using Ascii, the 8-bit bytes are a good size. Of course, you really only need 7 bits, but no programmer is going to like that. Then you add the concept of byte addressable word space, so you use the byte address to address doublebytes (short) and quadbytes(longs).
As to why 12 bits is good: simply 8 bits is a bit small for an awful lot of cases, so if you use an 8-bit fundamental word length, you are often into doubleword operations. Practically, a 12 bit word length, values +/2048 or 0-4095, seems to work out useful in a lot oc control applications. When the extra bits were expensive, the saving between 12 and 16 is relevant.
First machine I worked on was 18 bits - all 8K words of it. Enough to run a very simple Fortran compiler. From paper tape, naturally.
Who says the sensor has to be in the billboard? Actually, it would be better about a mile back down the freeway, so the billboard can be switched to an appropriate ad in time for you to see it. Possibly a row of snsores, one per lane, on some kind of gantry.
And sure, switching to spanish ads when a group of Spanish-speakers come past, or at the time of day that Spanish-speakers tend to travel, is *exactly* what the advertisers want.
The neat thing about this from the advertisers point of view is they don't have to pigeonhole you by age, gender, race, language etc. to make a guess of an appropriate ad for your group, which will be statistically right but may well be individually wrong. They are selecting ads on the basis of a choice you have made, so if you are atypical of your socio-economic group (defined by them, of course) you get an atypical ad displayed to you.
Which doesn't change the fact that billboards, electronic or paper, are appallingly ugly, and I am very glad that we don't have a fraction as many in this country (UK) as you have in the US.
I wouldn't read Slashdot on my phone, but I do use the Net exclusively for looking up train times, directory enquiries, checking if a plane I have to meet is delayed. I would like to do these from a mobile. The people I do them with already have classic web interfaces. It is extra work for them to do WAP, imode etc. Some will do the extra work, some won't. But I can access them all if I have standard HTML on my phone.
By the way, Opera7.0 beta (Windows only) can be put into small creen mode. It is worth downloading if you have got reasonable bandwidth. The browser works very well for plain-vanilla HTML that I have tried. Screws up a bit on javascript pop-up menus. This migh well be welcone pressure back to clean, simple web pages designed to give you information instead of high-energy jazzy pages intended to impress you with the provider and his web designer without telling you anything.
Unfortunately the patent will probably limit design improvements by anyone other than the original inventor for the next twenty years or so, but there will be some innovative uses and improvements despite that, and in twenty years, once the patent expires, there will doubtless by quite a hayday of new designs.
Since the patentee is an individual not a megacorp, I would have thought he would be willing to license it to any manufacturer, who could then improve it. If the idea is good, he would be foolish to sign an exclusive licence - both for the reason you give, and because if the idea is good, the field of applications will be greater than any one manufacturer would be likely to cover.
I am no pilot, but I can give a view of autorotation. Basically, the rotor can work both ways - rotor turns and drives air, or air running through rotor turns it. So if the engine fails, you declutch the engine and keep the rotor turning as yo descend - fast but not too fast. You use the enerdy of your descent to keep the rotors turning, keeping the rotors on shallow pitch - which also slows your descent. As *just* the right moment, you put the rotors into steep pitch, which rapidly converts the kinetic energy of the rotors into lift - which kills your vertical speed just befor you hit the ground - you hope.
Autorotaion is *much* hairier than gliding a plane, because you have to time things much more precisely, killing your descent at the right moment. But it is *much* better than the alternative (plummetting).
Re:Lacks any ability to glide
on
Fanwing Planes?
·
· Score: 2
Not only have they been manufacturing their planes for about two years, but the first use of the aircraft parachute for real happened about a month ago. Engine failed, parachite worked. Pilot and passenger walked away - the definition of a good landing.
I doubt there is cellphone service in the areas this is target at. For the telcos to put in a cell, they probably want several hundred potential users per cell - more if those are poor, low use customers. A cell can cover several villages - but not that many, and at one phone per village, it probably won't pay. More likely there is a single landline into the village already - the Indian govenment has pushed to ensure that as many villages as possible have minimal telephone communications.
It is a matter of horses for courses. The world has roughly 6 billion people. This tool is not for the one billion poorest, who needs basics like water, and do not have access to the telephone line to connect this thing to the Internet. But it is an appropriate tool for the next billion up from them, hopefully helping them to move from the poverty line to comfort in a small fraction of the time it took us in the West.
While we, the well-off billion at the top, should certainly carre about the poorest billion, we should also think about the other four billion between us and them.
In the short term, they will, as other people have said, be attached to palettes and be used for warehouse and back-of-store inventory control. But the proponents hope that soon *everything* in your supermarket trolley will have one of these babies (good term, in view of its size) attached to it. At that point, you don't have to unpack your trolley at the checkout and have it scanned by some bored hosewife. You just wheel it past a checkout point which scans the whole trolley, works out the total and prints your bill. Swipe your credit card, maybe input a PIN or some form of biometric ID, and walk out. Saving for you - the checkout queue and the whole nauseating checkout routine. Saving for the store - all the checkout operators; one problem solver can supervise three or four checkout queues, each of which can probably handle two to three shoppers a minute. Its a *big* store that needs more than one such. Cost - perhaps 3-5% on the gross bill, but you have already saved some money in the warehouse, now more at the checkout. Better security - the goods you shoved in your pocket or under your hat get billed as if they were in the trolley.
The bad news is that I'm finding that gigabit ethernet doesn't deliver the performance you might expect using traditional network protocols
I think you answered your own question here. My experience is that Jumbo frames are absolutely necessary to get the full performance out of Gig Ethernet (we get 600 Mbit/sec user data between two pons on GbE). Ordinary packets are just too damned small to be able to fill the pipe.
The problem with parallel buszse is not so much crosstalk which, as you say, can be handled by shielding, as skew. The tiny displacements cause by one conductor passing closer to, say, a large conductive mass such as a mounting screw, or having slightly less capacitance to the ground plane because of nearby vias cause tiny changes in the transit time of the signals. As data rates get higher, these tiny skews begin to approach the length of a bit. And this problem gets worse as the bus gets longer, whereas serial lines you can just bung up an optical transceiver and they run (nearly) for ever.
If you look at all the high-speed "busses" being developed now, they are all going serial. Sometimes thay may be multi-serial. I thing 10GHz Etherenet is actually 4x2.5GHz, and Infiniband gangs up to 12 x2.0GHz channels. But each of these channels is actually a stand-along serial channel with its own self-clocking data, not a classic parallel port.
True. Several recent articles on space telescopes have commented on the dofficulty of getting rid of waste heat. Viewers generally want to be as cold as possible - obviously infra-red, but is seems tha other sensors benefit from being very cold. But the sun heats it, power supplies, actuators an electronics all generate heat. With no convection or conduction to the environment, there is only radiation left to get rid of the heat - and that isn't very efficient at low temps.
Aircraft get hit by lightning strikes seversal times a year. As the man said, they ar built to take it. I heard quite a few years ago of an aircraft losing power on one engine after a lighting strike, but this is the exception, not the rule.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like the strategy is to leave the leading edge to others and concentrate on doing what can be done now cheaper. Which is not a totally stupid idea. It's all very well to have the fastest/biggest/coolest looking aircraft, but business is interested in the bottom line. When you fly, do you choose the coolest aircraft or the cheapest ticket?
What thay are saying is that the jet airliner industry is now "mature". Until the next major technological innovation, aircraft will continue to look and perform as they do now. So capitalise on the large-scale market and leave the edges to someone else. Be Ford, not Ferrari.
What surprises me is replacing the 767 rather than the much older 737. The technology must be dated despite the many facelifts, and there must be a lot of planes up for replacement. Are thay abandoning that market to Airbusses 319/320/321?
I remember reading an article about a system like this years ago - running somewhere like ARM's labs in Cambridge. They were using it for desktops rather than laptops, but that is a detail. More importantly, they had hooked a load of other systems up to the ID. It provided the security access to the building - no more fiddling for cards, the door unlocks as you approach. Rather than just blanking off the screen as you waked away from one workstation, as you moved towards another workstation, it moved your "desktop" to that station, so that your work could "follow" you round the building. And, by detecting which room you were in, the phone system could route calls to you wherever you were.
There are a lot of questions (privacy etc) about those other uses, but a system which gives you multiple returns from the single cost of wearing some kind of ID is much more likely to be adopted than a single dongle for a single job.
MySQL seems to work as a "virtual company". They are scattered all over the world - though with heavy bias to Europe, which keeps the timezones together.
But I think the point was right about no "either this way ot that". I think you can plot a scatter graph with two axes - geekiness one way and suitness the other if you want. People with neither are out of the business. People with both probably choose suit because it pays better (and gets you laid more?). But there is no reason, in my experience, to believe there is any clustering at any given point in the graph. Just as there are tall people and short people, but a lot more ordinary-sized people, there are total geeks and total (pointy haired) managers, but most people are somewhere in the middle. So that the "overlap between the two types" is actually the majority. Picking ends of the spectrum as archetypes is like the picture of the sumo wrestler with the geisha - interesting as an example of extremes bu not informative about the generality.
The logic benind the articel is very, very weak. The basis of the article is that misquotes in citations (wrong volume, page number etc.) propagate from one paper to another. Whech shows that the authors cut-and-pasted citations from earlier papers. Sure. But the researchers quoted claim that this means that the researchers didn't read the papers concerned. Rubbish.
During the reserch shage of a project, you read the papers. Error in th citation - no sweat; you know authers and title, and a search engine will give it to you in nothing flat.
Weeks or months later, it is writeup time. Open the first paper to cite it. And there are all the other references you followed (a little trouble in the lookup is long forgotten) and dutifully read. And - get this - it is easier to cut-and-past the citation than to go back to the paper and assemble - separately - the publication, title, authors and page numbers.
Then only thing the research quoted proves is that papers are overwhelmingly circulated electronically ans the dead tree format is, for scientific papers, obsolete.
More fool them. If they have over-tight firewall rules, more and more people will do what you are doing - tunnel through the firewall using HTTP. OK, for NTP, that doean't matter, because it is safe. But suppose some over-clver idion builds a Telnet-over-HTTP client? Your entire security system has just gone out the window.
There is such a thing as too much security. Imagina a physical security system where you could only withdraw documents after having a full body search, fingerprint, retina print, and lie-detector test. What would happen? People wouldn't put things into the repositiry because of the problems of getting them out - so net security would fall.
If everybody started using HTTP tunnelling, firewalls would have no value at all. Of course, you have to install a tunnel-friendly client on the safe side - but if they become routine, people will do it without thinking.
If it was a heat pipe, it was probably not solid copper, though it looked like it. It would be a copper tube filled with a volatile liquid. Liquid evaporates at the hot end, diffuses to cool end where it condenses, transferring heat as it does so. But most of them looked solid.
This invention just looks (from the uninformative article) as if they hae some improvements on the mechanical structire and on helping the methanol get thr right idea about where to flow (cappillaries with "one way" structires, I would guess).
As said elsewhere, only incremental. But then, the latest Pentium is "only incremental" on the original 386 - but thos increments have taken us a long way.
He didn't own patents - he hadn't though ot it at the tiem. He later claimed to regret this, saying he would have got righ if he had. Actually, I think any patents he took out would have expired by the time they became useful - he was that far ahead of his time.
He had plenty of both. He certainly had the science to explain geosynchronous orbits. And, while he didn't designe a complete satellite, and he certainly didn't have a launch system, he put a lut of engineering thought and inventiveness into his 1945 paper on geosynchronous communications satellites. My company quoted this paper as prior art toi show thwt he had invented (in terms of describing the need for and mode of operation of) the video synchroniser - a gadget which was only built thirty years later.
All the developments in tools described by the questioner have bought improvements in both speed and quality of programming. But they are small increments - 10% here, 50% there. Structured programming was an advance on spaghetti coding, and OOP an advance again. But while software productivity has, maybe, doubled or trebled, the size of the problem has tracked hardware with Moore's law. The result is that software developers are *always* on the back foor. And I agree with Brooks - there is no silver bullet. We will always be on the back foot. But new tools will help a little.
Actuall, for all the spiel about different languages, styles and tools, I think the biggest advances have been the intrioduction of portable, well tested, well documented libraries. The best tools in the world don't beat pulling 90% of the solution out off a hat.
Absolutely. 12 pennies to the shilling, old bean. One of the early British computers (?Leo?) used BCD arithmetic, but had a hardware switch so that the ls digit could be used in base 12 instead of base 10 for making the pennies into shillings.
As to why 12 bits is good: simply 8 bits is a bit small for an awful lot of cases, so if you use an 8-bit fundamental word length, you are often into doubleword operations. Practically, a 12 bit word length, values +/2048 or 0-4095, seems to work out useful in a lot oc control applications. When the extra bits were expensive, the saving between 12 and 16 is relevant.
First machine I worked on was 18 bits - all 8K words of it. Enough to run a very simple Fortran compiler. From paper tape, naturally.
Who says the sensor has to be in the billboard? Actually, it would be better about a mile back down the freeway, so the billboard can be switched to an appropriate ad in time for you to see it. Possibly a row of snsores, one per lane, on some kind of gantry.
And sure, switching to spanish ads when a group of Spanish-speakers come past, or at the time of day that Spanish-speakers tend to travel, is *exactly* what the advertisers want.
The neat thing about this from the advertisers point of view is they don't have to pigeonhole you by age, gender, race, language etc. to make a guess of an appropriate ad for your group, which will be statistically right but may well be individually wrong. They are selecting ads on the basis of a choice you have made, so if you are atypical of your socio-economic group (defined by them, of course) you get an atypical ad displayed to you.
Which doesn't change the fact that billboards, electronic or paper, are appallingly ugly, and I am very glad that we don't have a fraction as many in this country (UK) as you have in the US.
I wouldn't read Slashdot on my phone, but I do use the Net exclusively for looking up train times, directory enquiries, checking if a plane I have to meet is delayed. I would like to do these from a mobile. The people I do them with already have classic web interfaces. It is extra work for them to do WAP, imode etc. Some will do the extra work, some won't. But I can access them all if I have standard HTML on my phone.
By the way, Opera7.0 beta (Windows only) can be put into small creen mode. It is worth downloading if you have got reasonable bandwidth. The browser works very well for plain-vanilla HTML that I have tried. Screws up a bit on javascript pop-up menus. This migh well be welcone pressure back to clean, simple web pages designed to give you information instead of high-energy jazzy pages intended to impress you with the provider and his web designer without telling you anything.
Unfortunately the patent will probably limit design improvements by anyone other than the original inventor for the next twenty years or so, but there will be some innovative uses and improvements despite that, and in twenty years, once the patent expires, there will doubtless by quite a hayday of new designs.
Since the patentee is an individual not a megacorp, I would have thought he would be willing to license it to any manufacturer, who could then improve it. If the idea is good, he would be foolish to sign an exclusive licence - both for the reason you give, and because if the idea is good, the field of applications will be greater than any one manufacturer would be likely to cover.
I am no pilot, but I can give a view of autorotation. Basically, the rotor can work both ways - rotor turns and drives air, or air running through rotor turns it. So if the engine fails, you declutch the engine and keep the rotor turning as yo descend - fast but not too fast. You use the enerdy of your descent to keep the rotors turning, keeping the rotors on shallow pitch - which also slows your descent. As *just* the right moment, you put the rotors into steep pitch, which rapidly converts the kinetic energy of the rotors into lift - which kills your vertical speed just befor you hit the ground - you hope.
Autorotaion is *much* hairier than gliding a plane, because you have to time things much more precisely, killing your descent at the right moment. But it is *much* better than the alternative (plummetting).
Not only have they been manufacturing their planes for about two years, but the first use of the aircraft parachute for real happened about a month ago. Engine failed, parachite worked. Pilot and passenger walked away - the definition of a good landing.
I doubt there is cellphone service in the areas this is target at. For the telcos to put in a cell, they probably want several hundred potential users per cell - more if those are poor, low use customers. A cell can cover several villages - but not that many, and at one phone per village, it probably won't pay. More likely there is a single landline into the village already - the Indian govenment has pushed to ensure that as many villages as possible have minimal telephone communications.
It is a matter of horses for courses. The world has roughly 6 billion people. This tool is not for the one billion poorest, who needs basics like water, and do not have access to the telephone line to connect this thing to the Internet. But it is an appropriate tool for the next billion up from them, hopefully helping them to move from the poverty line to comfort in a small fraction of the time it took us in the West.
While we, the well-off billion at the top, should certainly carre about the poorest billion, we should also think about the other four billion between us and them.
In the short term, they will, as other people have said, be attached to palettes and be used for warehouse and back-of-store inventory control. But the proponents hope that soon *everything* in your supermarket trolley will have one of these babies (good term, in view of its size) attached to it. At that point, you don't have to unpack your trolley at the checkout and have it scanned by some bored hosewife. You just wheel it past a checkout point which scans the whole trolley, works out the total and prints your bill. Swipe your credit card, maybe input a PIN or some form of biometric ID, and walk out. Saving for you - the checkout queue and the whole nauseating checkout routine. Saving for the store - all the checkout operators; one problem solver can supervise three or four checkout queues, each of which can probably handle two to three shoppers a minute. Its a *big* store that needs more than one such. Cost - perhaps 3-5% on the gross bill, but you have already saved some money in the warehouse, now more at the checkout. Better security - the goods you shoved in your pocket or under your hat get billed as if they were in the trolley.
The bad news is that I'm finding that gigabit ethernet doesn't deliver the performance you might expect using traditional network protocols
I think you answered your own question here. My experience is that Jumbo frames are absolutely necessary to get the full performance out of Gig Ethernet (we get 600 Mbit/sec user data between two pons on GbE). Ordinary packets are just too damned small to be able to fill the pipe.
The problem with parallel buszse is not so much crosstalk which, as you say, can be handled by shielding, as skew. The tiny displacements cause by one conductor passing closer to, say, a large conductive mass such as a mounting screw, or having slightly less capacitance to the ground plane because of nearby vias cause tiny changes in the transit time of the signals. As data rates get higher, these tiny skews begin to approach the length of a bit. And this problem gets worse as the bus gets longer, whereas serial lines you can just bung up an optical transceiver and they run (nearly) for ever.
If you look at all the high-speed "busses" being developed now, they are all going serial. Sometimes thay may be multi-serial. I thing 10GHz Etherenet is actually 4x2.5GHz, and Infiniband gangs up to 12 x2.0GHz channels. But each of these channels is actually a stand-along serial channel with its own self-clocking data, not a classic parallel port.
Fibre channel->2Gbit/sec, though that degrades to 200Mbyte/sec when you remember the 8/10 encoding.
Mind you, it isn't cheap yet.
True. Several recent articles on space telescopes have commented on the dofficulty of getting rid of waste heat. Viewers generally want to be as cold as possible - obviously infra-red, but is seems tha other sensors benefit from being very cold. But the sun heats it, power supplies, actuators an electronics all generate heat. With no convection or conduction to the environment, there is only radiation left to get rid of the heat - and that isn't very efficient at low temps.
Aircraft get hit by lightning strikes seversal times a year. As the man said, they ar built to take it. I heard quite a few years ago of an aircraft losing power on one engine after a lighting strike, but this is the exception, not the rule.