In the law class I took in college (a few years back) we were told that abandoned property is just that. abandoned. However, we're talking about real property; cars, tables, computers, etc. An example of how property could be considered abandoned is when it gets dragged to the curb on trash day. If it is clear that you no longer want the item, it is up for grabs.
However, ROMs are something quite different. What we're dealing with here is not physical real property, but intelectual property. That, I believe, falls under patent and copyright law which has its own interesting issues. Until the copyright falls into the public domain what you can legally do with the copyrighted work, in this case a game ROM, without the permission of the copyright holder is limited.
Why is it so hard to believe that developing on Windows could possibly be cheaper than developing on a Linux box? For you, as a developer of an open-souce, I code because I enjoy it, project, you are right. Developing under Linux (or FreeBSD) will always be cheaper than developing under Windows... for you.
However, the corporate world is quite often very different. When you have preasures of deadlines and QA, quite often you don't have the time to work with a somewhat less feature-rich, but free, tool. Some tools just make developing certain kinds of applications more efficient, take VisualBasic for example. There's not much else that can compare to the RAD capabilities of VB. Sure, you might argue that there is no long-term viability for a VB app, but long-term viability isn't always needed. Neither is peak performance. Greater development efficiency directly translates into greater profits. Greater profits may quickly overcome any savings that you may have gained from developing your solution on an open source free OS with free tools.
Take for instance a relatively simple GUI application. Say that it takes two weeks to develop the application under a free toolkit like GTK. Now say that it takes only one week to develop that same application under VB. If we use a $60k developer salary (which is only about half of what it actually costs to employ a developer), then we see that one week of time is worth ~$1154. After one month, the license for VB and Windows has quickly paid for itself.
So, for certain kinds of development, yes, you certainly can beat free.
While the backhaul network may be packet switched (I'll take your word that Verizon has made that leap forward as most carriers are still doing circuit switched), the radio interface in CDMA is essentially circuit switched. When I connect to the cell tower, that tower is going to assign me some of its finite amount of resources (traffic elements, walsch codes, etc) to me. Once the tower runs out of traffic elements (or other resources), it can no longer accept any new calls.
If, on the other hand, the connection is only established for a short period of time, say 2 to 10 seconds, then while there is a lag in the conversation some of those resources are freed up.
Another advantage of push-to-talk is that when I'm listening, the cell system knows that I can't be talking. I'm then able to move to a lower power transmit mode (say 1/4 rate in IS95) where I transmit at a lower power level. This saves on battery life. The tower also only has to process data frames (error control) and no voice frames.
Now, admitedly, I'm not familiar with how this has actually been implemented for Verizon, but that is the general idea. It's likely that there will be a time-out window where the system will hold on to my connection resources just in case a response has been made so things don't get better right away, and there are still problems to deal with such as the overhead associated with initiating a connection (something that is actually non-trivial from the cellular point of view).
The problem is that when you send pages off to your printer they will often require them to be in a particular format. For instance, when I was in school I worked on the yearbook. Our printer was Jostens. When it came time to send pages for the yearbook to them, we had to send them in PageMaker format along with a printed proof copy. While I agree that export filters that mostly work just won't cut it, spending time working on the export filters is not a wastefull effort.
We had this back in the 80s. It was called 'Laser Tag' or, the lesser known and less popular version, 'Photon'. Hell, prior to that there were these things called 'squirt guns' and 'rubber-band guns'.
Technical superiority is only one small part of the puzzle these days.
Unless, of course, you are using an Iden system, which is what Nextel uses. Iden is contrary to everything that most of the Slashdot crowd cries for: it's a closed proprietary standard owned and developed by Motorola. However, because it's a closed standard Motorola is more free to do crazy and wild things with it than they (or Ericson, Nokia, Qualcomm, etc...) are with, say, 3GPP or 3GPP2. It's free from the political squables of which handoff algorithm should be included in the standard.
Of course, these are all of the plus points and none of the detractors, but you get the idea. Because there is no politics (or relatively so) involved in Iden technological inovation is arguably simpler than when dealing with the standards body. Its hard enough getting everyone within a company to agree on how to do something, let alone trying to convince other companies of the merits of your pattened process from which you stand to gain financially every time your competitor makes a phone.
Yes, but I was addressing the comments of the form "nVidia is going to go out of business because of this!" and other such knee-jerk reactions. I'm simply stating that nVidia has other markets than just the gaming/3D accelerator market. ATI has many of the same safeguards in place, thus helping to ensure, though not guarantee, that we will continue to have at least two major graphics players in the market for some time to come.
It is a bit worrying, though, that both of our major players have mostly the same portfolio. What happens when there is simultaneoulsy a dip in both the graphics and chipset markets?
One feather that nVidia has added to their hat in the last two years is their beginnings of diversification. No longer are the completely reliant on the consumer graphics market, what with their entry into the motherboard market. They have produced graphics chips for the XBox and have made a healthy entry into the mobile graphics chip realm. A couple (few?) years back they received a contract from the US Gov to produce graphics chips for displays in military jets (if memory serves).
They have much more going for them then being purely a gaming chip company. Given time I suspect that we'll see nVidia and ATi oscilate the leadership position. nVidia, while in the valey, has other businesses to fall back on.
While not always the case, companies with a backup plan tend to be more willing to take risks simply because if the risk doesn't pan out it doesn't spell disaster for the company. I think that we'll see more inovation coming from nVidia yet.
...being able to offer passengers internet access...
Offering passengers internet access sounds like a great idea, but can what form of 802.11 can handle that level of doppler shift? I really don't think that any current form of 802.11 was designed with high speed mobile users in mind.
The whole idea of RF ID tags is to replace bar codes. While in principle they could track how many people were wearing their clothing in the mall, they couldn't link those tags to an individual. There just isn't a unique identifier in each RF ID tag (at least not the ones that I've read about).
I suppose that some ingenious person could put together a signature for someone based on the various RF ID tags that they have on them (Hey, its the guy wearing Fruit of the Looms, Levi jeans, an Eddie Bauer shirt, and a Wilsons Leather wallet), but that signature would still not be able to be matched to an individuals identity. There just isn't enough information there.
I have that, though I'm not a fighter pilot. Every time that I go out into bright sunlight (or even stare at a bright light) I sneeze at least twice, and usually three times. I've read that there is a genetic component to this, which seems likely as both my mother and brother suffer in the same way. My Father, on the other hand, is not prone to light induced sneezes.
I remember reading about this some while back. As I recall, Doctors aren't sure why it affects some people. There is a theory that your optic nerves are somehow interfering with the nerves of your sinus system. When you optic nerve becomes excited, it causes the affected people to sneeze.
Event more interesting is the statistics:
Affects about 1 in 4
Prodominantly affects caucasians
You have about a 50% chance of inheriting it from your a parent
The gym at my work has had this for a few years now. They have two types of devices: incumbant (sp?) bikes and stair climbers. There are about five different games that you can play. The most entertaining one is called something like Aztec.
Aztec is a pseudo implementation of the Aztec American Indian's version of soccer (or football, for those outside the US). You pilot a little pod and try to catch a little ball in an arena. Take the ball to your goal and see if you can fire it through the hoop.
The interesting thing about the games is that others can join in. In Aztec, you can play cooperatively or against other players.
Other games, such as the mountain climbing and aerial fire fighting games require you to work harder to climb, while easing the pressure when descending. Really pretty neat.
Overall, the graphics on the games are dated offering graphical quallity, in terms of resolution and texels, about the same as that of Quake I. The games are somewhat uninspired, but playing against someone else in the gym can add much needed interest to your workout.
Part of the problem, from my limited knowledge on the subject, was the speed at which the receivers could operate. Interestingly, one of the things that made CDMA work was the rake receiver.
Take three paths from your radio signal and combine them together. Your combined signal is stronger than any of the individual components and thus allows you to work in higher interference situations. If some of the bits from one path were blasted out by interference then hopefully they were received without problem in one of your other two fingers. Combining the three together helps eliminate some of these signal interference problems. Of course you need relatively fast ICs to get this trick to work without the users noticing lag in their conversations.
Re:Chips, Dips, ^^ HOW LOW CAN we go today?
on
Slashdot Turns 5
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· Score: 1
UID 5 appears to be the lowest non-admin UID issued. Even then, samzenpus hasn't posted anything, at least not within the last few years. UID 7, CLorox is the lowest UID that actively posts. I thought that I had a low UID, but these guys put me to shame!
Its good for, as another poster put it, simulations. Specifically simulations with lots of tightly coupled entities. If you are simulating, say 100 different entities, and the action of each of those entities has an affect on all of the other 99 entities, you gain greatly from a massively parallel shared memory environment. Sending state changes through a cluster can kill these kinds of applications.
20-60 minutes? Man, I envy you. I do wireless systems simulations. While I haven't yet had the pleasure of experiencing this, some simulations take 'days' to run on a 32 processor SGI. Granted, I don't know what these translate into on x86 hardware, but it's not going to take that down to less than a day any time soon.
I just took part in a committee (don't you just love corporations?) to decide what workstation computers we should be moving towards in the future. This is what a collection of a small number of users (~70) should switch to. When we did a survey of what types of computers we owned and how much they cost to purchase and then support, my jaw hit the floor!
A Sun workstation by itself, screw software updates and anything other than the OS and hardware, can cost ~$20,000. Take into account the support contracts with Sun ranging from ~$20/month to ~$200/month, depending on the age of the machine, software licenses, etc. and you can quickly see where their cost saving fall.
Looking at a difference of the two knight images in Gimp show very few differences. You can reproduce this proof through the following steps:
1) save the two knight images. The first from nvidia, the second from Exluna.
2) Open both images in the Gimp.
3) Scale the image from Exluna to be 400x270, almost exactly the same dimensions of the nvidia image which is 400x271
4) Copy the Exluna image and paste it as a layer on top of the nvidia image.
5) Change the layer properties in the Layers/Channels/Paths dialog to difference. You will notice that there is almost zero difference between the two images. What subtle difference is there can easily be explained by jpeg compression.
While this isn't definitive proof that these images aren't from an nvidia board, it sure makes it seem likely!
Carries have no money/people don't want it
on
Bad MEN Of Wireless
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· Score: 1
And at a time when so many economies are struggling around the world, the need has never been greater for wireless carriers to have access to next-generation technologies that increase efficiency and that might get businesses and consumers spending on telecommunications again.
Has he seen how the carriers are doing lately? MEN couldn't sell the new technology to the carriers no matter how badly they wanted to. The carriers have no money to buy the infrastructure or even pay someone to go out and set it up! It is really expensive to buy the equipment considering that its only your early adopters that will actually use it to begin with. That's a pretty small niche market.
Couple that with the fact that there is no killer app for 3G networks. People don't know what to do with all of that bandwidth that you'll be getting with 3G. Hell, MEN don't know what to do with it. Even if you are just talking about coverage increases, you'll have to buy a multi-mode phone to work in your new 3G systems (we'll say IS-2000 CDMA) then be able to switch down to IS-95 CDMA, our current CDMA systems, and also be able to work in AMPS, lovely analog mode that for some reason, I believe (though I could be dead wrong here), is required of phones by some government regulatory body; most likely the FCC.
Early adopter phones are expensive, getting all of those modes into one phone can be a challenge which leads to higher phone prices. I'd love to see it, but I don't think that its going to happen all that soon.
I did the same thing recently but at a greater cost. Two things to be aware of when taking math classes (the second of which is more likely at a community college than a university):
Calculator 101: Some math classes are taught as "How to do math with your calculator". I ran into this when taking some basic math class refreshers at a community college (college algebra, geometry). We spent about 15 minutes discussing a problem type, and then the next hour 15 learning how to solve the problems using our fancy TI calculators. My Analytic Trig class was completely different. We spent most of our time learning the good ol' fashion pen-and-paper methods, and then about 15 minutes looking at calculator alternatives. Find out what kind of class you are signing up for and check those drop pollicies!
Welcome back to high-school: This seems common with community colleges, though I'm sure there are exceptions. The math classes that I took at my community college made me feel like I was back in high-school. Pollicies such as mandatory attendance or graded home work assignments put a bit of a damper on my attitude towards the classes. Granted, the homework policy motivated me more to actually do my homework, it was sometimes difficult when balancing work, home and school.
The problem with real-time video isn't figuring out how to get a camera into the phone, its a question of bandwidth. Second generation (2G) phones only have about 14.4 Kbps available to them to share between voice and data using a single traffic channel. Newer systems, such as some 2.5G and 3G systems, have substantially more bandwidth available. 1X systems, a 3G extension, has quite a lot of bandwidth available and I have seen a demo of real-time streaming video on these phones. Very impressive stuff. The only problem is that for the most part, the high-bandwidth standards generally expect that you won't be moving, or moving very slowly, when you are using high-bandwidth applications.
One method of achieving the high-throughput is to allocate your call multiple traffic channels. One of the problems lies in handing off from cell to cell as you are moving down the highway. Getting the handoff scheduled, and perhaps even rerouting the data to the new cell, isn't really the problem. Its what to do if there just aren't enough traffic channels available to accomodate your usage on the next cell, or any cell that could service you.
Couple that with the fact that I think that most people are more interested in having higher cell-phone reliability than ooh-ah features, add in financially troubled providers, and I think that it will be quite a while before we actually see this in the US. Europe may be differnt as they seem to be lower on the curve of early adopters.
I think part of the problem is that writing software is a rather new handwork in comparison to e.g. metalworking. Programmers don't have a union, often they work under poorer confitions than workers at conveyor belts if you consider the higher responsibility they have.
Having done both, I'd have to disagree with you whole-heartedly. Even though I worked 18 hours, staying until 2 AM, Monday, there is no way that I would agree that that was worse then when I worked at the sheet metal factory.
*looks around* I don't see any 5 ton presses around me. I don't have to wear ear-plugs and safety glasses while writing code. I've never heard about anyone losing their fingers or arms because they set the phone down on them. Being a code monkey might have its downsides but it involves no where near the perils that you encounter working in a factory.
Ok, here is probably the simplest example of where object oriented programming can come in handy. Say that you are working with vectors. Now, vector math isn't all that complicated. You can do it rather easily through function calls, such as (in C)
vec3 = addVectors(vec1, vec2);
But, it can be a little nicer to have your code reflect a formula that you've developed or are utilizing. Programming the same problem in C++ (you can probably do this in other languages too, I'm just familliar with C++) allows you to change your problem to
vec3 = vec1 + vec2;
The way you do this is you overload the + operator (the function named operator+()) in your vector class. Your vector class holds all of the information about the vector and has operations that know how to work on that data. You could further extend your class so that you could do subtraction (vec2 - vec1), division (vec2 / 5), multiplication (vec2 * 5), translation (vec2.translate(5,5,1) ), intersection detection (vec1.intersects(vec2)) and so on.
Example 2:Matrix Math
The same sorts of things can be done with matrix classes. Create a matrix class that you populate with data and has operations for performing mathematical operations on that data.
matrix3 = matrix1 + matrix2
matrix3 = matrix1 * matrix2
matrix1.rref();
etc.
Could you do the same operations using structures and functions? Sure, but it wouldn't look nearly as clean. The added benefit here is that the interface for performing these operations on your new data types (matrix and vector) are consistent. You didn't have to learn that matrix operations are carried out by matrix_add style functions where vector operations are carried out by vector_add style functions.
Slashdot Mirror
In the law class I took in college (a few years back) we were told that abandoned property is just that. abandoned. However, we're talking about real property; cars, tables, computers, etc. An example of how property could be considered abandoned is when it gets dragged to the curb on trash day. If it is clear that you no longer want the item, it is up for grabs.
However, ROMs are something quite different. What we're dealing with here is not physical real property, but intelectual property. That, I believe, falls under patent and copyright law which has its own interesting issues. Until the copyright falls into the public domain what you can legally do with the copyrighted work, in this case a game ROM, without the permission of the copyright holder is limited.
Why is it so hard to believe that developing on Windows could possibly be cheaper than developing on a Linux box? For you, as a developer of an open-souce, I code because I enjoy it, project, you are right. Developing under Linux (or FreeBSD) will always be cheaper than developing under Windows... for you.
However, the corporate world is quite often very different. When you have preasures of deadlines and QA, quite often you don't have the time to work with a somewhat less feature-rich, but free, tool. Some tools just make developing certain kinds of applications more efficient, take VisualBasic for example. There's not much else that can compare to the RAD capabilities of VB. Sure, you might argue that there is no long-term viability for a VB app, but long-term viability isn't always needed. Neither is peak performance. Greater development efficiency directly translates into greater profits. Greater profits may quickly overcome any savings that you may have gained from developing your solution on an open source free OS with free tools.
Take for instance a relatively simple GUI application. Say that it takes two weeks to develop the application under a free toolkit like GTK. Now say that it takes only one week to develop that same application under VB. If we use a $60k developer salary (which is only about half of what it actually costs to employ a developer), then we see that one week of time is worth ~$1154. After one month, the license for VB and Windows has quickly paid for itself.
So, for certain kinds of development, yes, you certainly can beat free.
I hate to tell you, but GSM is a TDMA system. UMTS, the 3G system which is supposed to replace GSM, is CDMA.
While the backhaul network may be packet switched (I'll take your word that Verizon has made that leap forward as most carriers are still doing circuit switched), the radio interface in CDMA is essentially circuit switched. When I connect to the cell tower, that tower is going to assign me some of its finite amount of resources (traffic elements, walsch codes, etc) to me. Once the tower runs out of traffic elements (or other resources), it can no longer accept any new calls.
If, on the other hand, the connection is only established for a short period of time, say 2 to 10 seconds, then while there is a lag in the conversation some of those resources are freed up.
Another advantage of push-to-talk is that when I'm listening, the cell system knows that I can't be talking. I'm then able to move to a lower power transmit mode (say 1/4 rate in IS95) where I transmit at a lower power level. This saves on battery life. The tower also only has to process data frames (error control) and no voice frames.
Now, admitedly, I'm not familiar with how this has actually been implemented for Verizon, but that is the general idea. It's likely that there will be a time-out window where the system will hold on to my connection resources just in case a response has been made so things don't get better right away, and there are still problems to deal with such as the overhead associated with initiating a connection (something that is actually non-trivial from the cellular point of view).
The problem is that when you send pages off to your printer they will often require them to be in a particular format. For instance, when I was in school I worked on the yearbook. Our printer was Jostens. When it came time to send pages for the yearbook to them, we had to send them in PageMaker format along with a printed proof copy. While I agree that export filters that mostly work just won't cut it, spending time working on the export filters is not a wastefull effort.
We had this back in the 80s. It was called 'Laser Tag' or, the lesser known and less popular version, 'Photon'. Hell, prior to that there were these things called 'squirt guns' and 'rubber-band guns'.
Technical superiority is only one small part of the puzzle these days.
Unless, of course, you are using an Iden system, which is what Nextel uses. Iden is contrary to everything that most of the Slashdot crowd cries for: it's a closed proprietary standard owned and developed by Motorola. However, because it's a closed standard Motorola is more free to do crazy and wild things with it than they (or Ericson, Nokia, Qualcomm, etc...) are with, say, 3GPP or 3GPP2. It's free from the political squables of which handoff algorithm should be included in the standard.
Of course, these are all of the plus points and none of the detractors, but you get the idea. Because there is no politics (or relatively so) involved in Iden technological inovation is arguably simpler than when dealing with the standards body. Its hard enough getting everyone within a company to agree on how to do something, let alone trying to convince other companies of the merits of your pattened process from which you stand to gain financially every time your competitor makes a phone.
Yes, but I was addressing the comments of the form "nVidia is going to go out of business because of this!" and other such knee-jerk reactions. I'm simply stating that nVidia has other markets than just the gaming/3D accelerator market. ATI has many of the same safeguards in place, thus helping to ensure, though not guarantee, that we will continue to have at least two major graphics players in the market for some time to come.
It is a bit worrying, though, that both of our major players have mostly the same portfolio. What happens when there is simultaneoulsy a dip in both the graphics and chipset markets?
One feather that nVidia has added to their hat in the last two years is their beginnings of diversification. No longer are the completely reliant on the consumer graphics market, what with their entry into the motherboard market. They have produced graphics chips for the XBox and have made a healthy entry into the mobile graphics chip realm. A couple (few?) years back they received a contract from the US Gov to produce graphics chips for displays in military jets (if memory serves).
They have much more going for them then being purely a gaming chip company. Given time I suspect that we'll see nVidia and ATi oscilate the leadership position. nVidia, while in the valey, has other businesses to fall back on.
While not always the case, companies with a backup plan tend to be more willing to take risks simply because if the risk doesn't pan out it doesn't spell disaster for the company. I think that we'll see more inovation coming from nVidia yet.
...being able to offer passengers internet access...
Offering passengers internet access sounds like a great idea, but can what form of 802.11 can handle that level of doppler shift? I really don't think that any current form of 802.11 was designed with high speed mobile users in mind.
The whole idea of RF ID tags is to replace bar codes. While in principle they could track how many people were wearing their clothing in the mall, they couldn't link those tags to an individual. There just isn't a unique identifier in each RF ID tag (at least not the ones that I've read about).
I suppose that some ingenious person could put together a signature for someone based on the various RF ID tags that they have on them (Hey, its the guy wearing Fruit of the Looms, Levi jeans, an Eddie Bauer shirt, and a Wilsons Leather wallet), but that signature would still not be able to be matched to an individuals identity. There just isn't enough information there.
I have that, though I'm not a fighter pilot. Every time that I go out into bright sunlight (or even stare at a bright light) I sneeze at least twice, and usually three times. I've read that there is a genetic component to this, which seems likely as both my mother and brother suffer in the same way. My Father, on the other hand, is not prone to light induced sneezes.
I remember reading about this some while back. As I recall, Doctors aren't sure why it affects some people. There is a theory that your optic nerves are somehow interfering with the nerves of your sinus system. When you optic nerve becomes excited, it causes the affected people to sneeze.
Event more interesting is the statistics:
See here for a bit more on it
The gym at my work has had this for a few years now. They have two types of devices: incumbant (sp?) bikes and stair climbers. There are about five different games that you can play. The most entertaining one is called something like Aztec.
Aztec is a pseudo implementation of the Aztec American Indian's version of soccer (or football, for those outside the US). You pilot a little pod and try to catch a little ball in an arena. Take the ball to your goal and see if you can fire it through the hoop.
The interesting thing about the games is that others can join in. In Aztec, you can play cooperatively or against other players.
Other games, such as the mountain climbing and aerial fire fighting games require you to work harder to climb, while easing the pressure when descending. Really pretty neat.
Overall, the graphics on the games are dated offering graphical quallity, in terms of resolution and texels, about the same as that of Quake I. The games are somewhat uninspired, but playing against someone else in the gym can add much needed interest to your workout.
Part of the problem, from my limited knowledge on the subject, was the speed at which the receivers could operate. Interestingly, one of the things that made CDMA work was the rake receiver.
Take three paths from your radio signal and combine them together. Your combined signal is stronger than any of the individual components and thus allows you to work in higher interference situations. If some of the bits from one path were blasted out by interference then hopefully they were received without problem in one of your other two fingers. Combining the three together helps eliminate some of these signal interference problems. Of course you need relatively fast ICs to get this trick to work without the users noticing lag in their conversations.
UID 5 appears to be the lowest non-admin UID issued. Even then, samzenpus hasn't posted anything, at least not within the last few years. UID 7, CLorox is the lowest UID that actively posts. I thought that I had a low UID, but these guys put me to shame!
Its good for, as another poster put it, simulations. Specifically simulations with lots of tightly coupled entities. If you are simulating, say 100 different entities, and the action of each of those entities has an affect on all of the other 99 entities, you gain greatly from a massively parallel shared memory environment. Sending state changes through a cluster can kill these kinds of applications.
20-60 minutes? Man, I envy you. I do wireless systems simulations. While I haven't yet had the pleasure of experiencing this, some simulations take 'days' to run on a 32 processor SGI. Granted, I don't know what these translate into on x86 hardware, but it's not going to take that down to less than a day any time soon.
Easily $22k
I just took part in a committee (don't you just love corporations?) to decide what workstation computers we should be moving towards in the future. This is what a collection of a small number of users (~70) should switch to. When we did a survey of what types of computers we owned and how much they cost to purchase and then support, my jaw hit the floor!
A Sun workstation by itself, screw software updates and anything other than the OS and hardware, can cost ~$20,000. Take into account the support contracts with Sun ranging from ~$20/month to ~$200/month, depending on the age of the machine, software licenses, etc. and you can quickly see where their cost saving fall.
Looking at a difference of the two knight images in Gimp show very few differences. You can reproduce this proof through the following steps:
1) save the two knight images. The first from nvidia, the second from Exluna.
2) Open both images in the Gimp.
3) Scale the image from Exluna to be 400x270, almost exactly the same dimensions of the nvidia image which is 400x271
4) Copy the Exluna image and paste it as a layer on top of the nvidia image.
5) Change the layer properties in the Layers/Channels/Paths dialog to difference. You will notice that there is almost zero difference between the two images. What subtle difference is there can easily be explained by jpeg compression.
While this isn't definitive proof that these images aren't from an nvidia board, it sure makes it seem likely!
And at a time when so many economies are struggling around the world, the need has never been greater for wireless carriers to have access to next-generation technologies that increase efficiency and that might get businesses and consumers spending on telecommunications again.
Has he seen how the carriers are doing lately? MEN couldn't sell the new technology to the carriers no matter how badly they wanted to. The carriers have no money to buy the infrastructure or even pay someone to go out and set it up! It is really expensive to buy the equipment considering that its only your early adopters that will actually use it to begin with. That's a pretty small niche market.
Couple that with the fact that there is no killer app for 3G networks. People don't know what to do with all of that bandwidth that you'll be getting with 3G. Hell, MEN don't know what to do with it. Even if you are just talking about coverage increases, you'll have to buy a multi-mode phone to work in your new 3G systems (we'll say IS-2000 CDMA) then be able to switch down to IS-95 CDMA, our current CDMA systems, and also be able to work in AMPS, lovely analog mode that for some reason, I believe (though I could be dead wrong here), is required of phones by some government regulatory body; most likely the FCC.
Early adopter phones are expensive, getting all of those modes into one phone can be a challenge which leads to higher phone prices. I'd love to see it, but I don't think that its going to happen all that soon.
The problem with real-time video isn't figuring out how to get a camera into the phone, its a question of bandwidth. Second generation (2G) phones only have about 14.4 Kbps available to them to share between voice and data using a single traffic channel. Newer systems, such as some 2.5G and 3G systems, have substantially more bandwidth available. 1X systems, a 3G extension, has quite a lot of bandwidth available and I have seen a demo of real-time streaming video on these phones. Very impressive stuff. The only problem is that for the most part, the high-bandwidth standards generally expect that you won't be moving, or moving very slowly, when you are using high-bandwidth applications.
One method of achieving the high-throughput is to allocate your call multiple traffic channels. One of the problems lies in handing off from cell to cell as you are moving down the highway. Getting the handoff scheduled, and perhaps even rerouting the data to the new cell, isn't really the problem. Its what to do if there just aren't enough traffic channels available to accomodate your usage on the next cell, or any cell that could service you.
Couple that with the fact that I think that most people are more interested in having higher cell-phone reliability than ooh-ah features, add in financially troubled providers, and I think that it will be quite a while before we actually see this in the US. Europe may be differnt as they seem to be lower on the curve of early adopters.
I think part of the problem is that writing software is a rather new handwork in comparison to e.g. metalworking. Programmers don't have a union, often they work under poorer confitions than workers at conveyor belts if you consider the higher responsibility they have.
Having done both, I'd have to disagree with you whole-heartedly. Even though I worked 18 hours, staying until 2 AM, Monday, there is no way that I would agree that that was worse then when I worked at the sheet metal factory.
*looks around* I don't see any 5 ton presses around me. I don't have to wear ear-plugs and safety glasses while writing code. I've never heard about anyone losing their fingers or arms because they set the phone down on them. Being a code monkey might have its downsides but it involves no where near the perils that you encounter working in a factory.
Example 1:Vector Math
Ok, here is probably the simplest example of where object oriented programming can come in handy. Say that you are working with vectors. Now, vector math isn't all that complicated. You can do it rather easily through function calls, such as (in C)
vec3 = addVectors(vec1, vec2);
But, it can be a little nicer to have your code reflect a formula that you've developed or are utilizing. Programming the same problem in C++ (you can probably do this in other languages too, I'm just familliar with C++) allows you to change your problem to
vec3 = vec1 + vec2;
The way you do this is you overload the + operator (the function named operator+()) in your vector class. Your vector class holds all of the information about the vector and has operations that know how to work on that data. You could further extend your class so that you could do subtraction (vec2 - vec1), division (vec2 / 5), multiplication (vec2 * 5), translation (vec2.translate(5,5,1) ), intersection detection (vec1.intersects(vec2)) and so on.
Example 2:Matrix Math
The same sorts of things can be done with matrix classes. Create a matrix class that you populate with data and has operations for performing mathematical operations on that data.
matrix3 = matrix1 + matrix2
matrix3 = matrix1 * matrix2
matrix1.rref();
etc.
Could you do the same operations using structures and functions? Sure, but it wouldn't look nearly as clean. The added benefit here is that the interface for performing these operations on your new data types (matrix and vector) are consistent. You didn't have to learn that matrix operations are carried out by matrix_add style functions where vector operations are carried out by vector_add style functions.
I can't wait to see this stuff lithographed on the Silicon-on-arsenide (sp?) technology.