So should I just stop doing online banking at work because the computers happen to use the most popular operating system and browser in the world?
Nope, you should just be smart about your office desktop's security settings and perhaps even use the browser-help-object (BHO) listing tool noted in the linked article: http://www.definitivesolutions.com/bhodemon.htm. I just checked my desktop, and it wasn't infected; so I'll still do banking online and continue to be wary of security issues.
Yeah, but it only really manifests itself at high frequencies... perhaps Microsoft's innovation here is that they have gotten it to work for low-bit-rate data;-)
A number of posts in this story have made the comparison between this patent and devices like heart rate monitors and body fat meters. The authors of those posts have missed the fact that the devices they are citing are sensors. They are not "sending data using skin as the phyiscal media," rather they are sensing some physical phenomenon (heart rate or body fat percentage) using some electronic device. These devices are not "prior art" to this patent, nor could this patent be used to challenge the manufacturing of these devices.
At sea level, sound travels through air at approximately 1,116 feet per second. If the keyboard were nominally 10 feet away from the detector (about half of a large room), the latency from the sound delay would be about 8.96 ms.
I don't know what the standard for measuring typing speed is, but in determining morse code speed a 5-letter word is considered standard. A person typing at 100 wpm (incredibly fast) at this standard would type about 500 characters per minute, or 8.33 characters per second. Each keystroke is separated by about 120 ms. Compared to this, the latency of 8.96 ms is minor. For advanced gamers, this kind of latency could be problematic, but I don't imagine that simple word processing would be particularly difficult.
An interesting facet of this technology would be the driver for such a keyboard. Frequency spectrum analysis is relatively computationally intensive, and so the driver for this keyboard would be akin to the driver for a WinModem: some possibly non-trivial amount of the CPU capability would be spent decoding keystrokes. This computational price would be paid for the ability to have an extremely simple and robust keyboard device that required no power.
actually, (61.74/60) is less than (60/58.27), not the other way round, but you are right to say that this makes 1.74 a smaller percentage of 60 than 1.73 is of 58.27.</nitpick>
frequency is a continuous property of a wave... whether you choose to select linearly or logaritmically spaced points is up to you. over large scales (i.e. multiple octaves or decades), it is generally more useful to choose logarithmically spaced points, because you want to treat low octaves with the same number of points as high octaves. over small ranges (here only 3.47 Hz or about 5.78% of the nominal 60 Hz), it makes sense to deal with linearly spaced points, because the imbalance between octaves cannot come into play. in this case, if you played the B-natural against 60 Hz and then played the B-flat against 60 Hz, the resulting beat frequency signals would sound essentially the same, as the difference between them would be only 0.01 Hz.
actually, 60 Hz is closer to B-flat... 60 - 58.27 is 1.73, while 61.74 - 60 is 1.74.
of course, he never said that he tuned the B-flat on his banjo to exactly 60 Hz... he could have known about this discrepancy and tuned from the low end until the beat frequency produced by the combination of his B-flat and the 60 Hz was approximately 1.75 Hz.
I'm currently working on a satellite development project at my university, and we are developing a custom triple modular redundant flight computer system.
Though my project is the communications system, I have come to learn quite a bit about computer systems in high-radiation environments. Basically, high-energy radiation or particles can temporarily short out a transistor and cause memory bits to flip or a wrong result to be calculated inside a processor. The energy required to flip a bit is proportional to the energy stored in the device. Faster devices have smaller feature sizes, and store less energy per memory bit. Thus, they are more prone to these types of "single event upsets" that flip bits and cause unpredictable results. For a given mean level of radiation, there is a feature size above which the probability of an upset is very close to zero, and so processors with feature sizes at least this big (read: typically slower than other processors with smaller feature sizes) can be used without too much worry.
There have been a lot of posts claiming that Microsoft is "dumping" XP on the market at below cost to drive away competition. There is a problem with this: as another poster has mentioned, "dumping" is defined as selling an item below the variable cost (i.e. per-unit cost). A full XP box set costs less than $50 to produce, so this is not "dumping."
Secondly, Microsoft is doing exactly what every company does when presented with competition: they are lowering their prices. They see Lindows as a competing product to their own, so they are lowering the price. Now, their ability to offer that discount only to buyers of Lindows machines is a result of a tool called "price discrimination." Under perfect price discrimination, each consumer of a product would be charged exactly the maximum that he is willing to pay for the product. There is nothing inherently bad about this, it simply creates several prices for a single product, similar to what Amazon was accused of doing in an earlier article here.
Microsoft has simply lowered the price of XP to customers of Lindows only, because they know that other consumers will continue to pay the higher price. This is textbook price discrimination and nothing more.
Re:For how long?
on
Mastering Light
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The article states that shifting red light up in frequency to blue light takes about 10,000 reflections (about 0.1 nanoseconds). I think that you could shift a pulsed light source in this manner:
Generate low-frequency (LF) pulse travelling into crystal.
Apply shock wave to turn crystal into frequency shifter.
Wait until LF pulse is shifted to higher frequency and emitted from crystal.
Allow time for crystal to relax to original properties by allowing the shock wave to dissipate.
Repeat for as long as necessary/desired.
Now, this may or may not create any really usable stream of pulses, but I believe that you would be able to shine a (pulsed) red light in and get a (pulsed) blue light out. Whether the pulsing could be controlled sufficiently to prove useful in optical switching or other applications is yet to be shown.
As for the number of wavecycles being equal, I wonder if this is already observed. It would make sense (if the number of wavecycles is conserved) that the resulting higher frequency pulse would be shorter in duration than the incoming lower frequency pulse, due to the relation among the speed of light/frequency of light/duration of pulse.
Umm, a private vendor of goods (I assume you are not talking about government goods/services) should already have the right to refuse to enter into a contract of sale with anyone for any reason. Just because I decide to sell something to him doesn't mean I should be required to also sell something to you, no matter what my reasoning is. If I believe you to be an unsavory character and feel that your money is likely to be somehow "tainted" as you allude to, then I can certainly refuse to trade you my goods for your money.
I'm not sure about other countries, but here in the U.S. a vendor can refuse to sell to anyone.
Note that even after both of these sales he still owned around 5700 shares of Microsoft stock. The options, exercised at ~$6 and ~$7 per share represented a significant paper profit. Perhaps he wanted to realize that profit. If anything, what he knows that normal investors don't is a rather obvious and oft-ignored piece of investment knowledge: that keeping more than 5% of your total investment holdings in a single security is a bad idea, and he simply wanted to use the proceeds of the sales to diversify his holdings. I don't know, because I'm not him, but please don't go slinging around potential allegations of insider trading.
If the UWB pulse is an approximation of a square pulse (which I think it would be, given that most of the papers I've read on UWB modulate the signal using the timing of the pulses), then the pulse in the frequency domain would be a sinc fuction. For those without an engineering/math background, sinc(x) = sin(x)/x. As such, any true square UWB pulse (and any square pulse of any length) would have infinite bandwidth. Of course, because the amplitude of a sinc decreases as its argument increases, there is a practical limit to the bandwidth of the outgoing signal that is based on what the resolvable power delta would be on the receiving end.
Assuming that the conductive concrete formed a single, closed shell around the cell phone, none.
Basic physics will tell you that a closed conductive surface subject to an external electromagnetic field will exhibit no such field inside it's perimeter. I believe that the derivation is related to Guass's and Maxwell's laws of electromagnetics.
I will hold you personally liable," he said. "I will seek damages for every hour that I'm in custody.
So... he's going to demand that he be charged with breaking into all the computers he COULD have compromised while he was in jail?
Re:Seems like a waste of noise...
on
Optical Cryptography
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is true only if the two waves being added have the same frequency spectra, or if one of the waves is contained in the other in the frequency domain. If you add a 10 nanometer-wide signal centered at 700 nm to a 10 nanometer-wide signal centered at 710 nm, the resultant wave has a bandwidth of 20 nm.
This wave would take up more bandwidth than either of the other two.
Great... now the RIAA/MPAA will be breathing down our necks for bypassing "noise-based-encryption" protection schemes every time we shield an audio or network cable...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but it only really manifests itself at high frequencies... perhaps Microsoft's innovation here is that they have gotten it to work for low-bit-rate data ;-)
A number of posts in this story have made the comparison between this patent and devices like heart rate monitors and body fat meters. The authors of those posts have missed the fact that the devices they are citing are sensors. They are not "sending data using skin as the phyiscal media," rather they are sensing some physical phenomenon (heart rate or body fat percentage) using some electronic device. These devices are not "prior art" to this patent, nor could this patent be used to challenge the manufacturing of these devices.
thank goodness... now these robots can replace the humans who before were exposed to deadly dihydrogen monoxide every time they took a sample!
thank you, robots, for doing such dangerous work!
At sea level, sound travels through air at approximately 1,116 feet per second. If the keyboard were nominally 10 feet away from the detector (about half of a large room), the latency from the sound delay would be about 8.96 ms.
I don't know what the standard for measuring typing speed is, but in determining morse code speed a 5-letter word is considered standard. A person typing at 100 wpm (incredibly fast) at this standard would type about 500 characters per minute, or 8.33 characters per second. Each keystroke is separated by about 120 ms. Compared to this, the latency of 8.96 ms is minor. For advanced gamers, this kind of latency could be problematic, but I don't imagine that simple word processing would be particularly difficult.
An interesting facet of this technology would be the driver for such a keyboard. Frequency spectrum analysis is relatively computationally intensive, and so the driver for this keyboard would be akin to the driver for a WinModem: some possibly non-trivial amount of the CPU capability would be spent decoding keystrokes. This computational price would be paid for the ability to have an extremely simple and robust keyboard device that required no power.
Hmm, the WinKeyboard...
this being /. your normal bedtime reading is probably pr0n... you certainly "know the basics but haven't tried some of these [sex] out."
har har har!
i don't want anyone thinking we're robosexuals...
actually, (61.74/60) is less than (60/58.27), not the other way round, but you are right to say that this makes 1.74 a smaller percentage of 60 than 1.73 is of 58.27.</nitpick>
frequency is a continuous property of a wave... whether you choose to select linearly or logaritmically spaced points is up to you. over large scales (i.e. multiple octaves or decades), it is generally more useful to choose logarithmically spaced points, because you want to treat low octaves with the same number of points as high octaves. over small ranges (here only 3.47 Hz or about 5.78% of the nominal 60 Hz), it makes sense to deal with linearly spaced points, because the imbalance between octaves cannot come into play. in this case, if you played the B-natural against 60 Hz and then played the B-flat against 60 Hz, the resulting beat frequency signals would sound essentially the same, as the difference between them would be only 0.01 Hz.
actually, 60 Hz is closer to B-flat... 60 - 58.27 is 1.73, while 61.74 - 60 is 1.74.
of course, he never said that he tuned the B-flat on his banjo to exactly 60 Hz... he could have known about this discrepancy and tuned from the low end until the beat frequency produced by the combination of his B-flat and the 60 Hz was approximately 1.75 Hz.
I'm currently working on a satellite development project at my university, and we are developing a custom triple modular redundant flight computer system.
Though my project is the communications system, I have come to learn quite a bit about computer systems in high-radiation environments. Basically, high-energy radiation or particles can temporarily short out a transistor and cause memory bits to flip or a wrong result to be calculated inside a processor. The energy required to flip a bit is proportional to the energy stored in the device. Faster devices have smaller feature sizes, and store less energy per memory bit. Thus, they are more prone to these types of "single event upsets" that flip bits and cause unpredictable results. For a given mean level of radiation, there is a feature size above which the probability of an upset is very close to zero, and so processors with feature sizes at least this big (read: typically slower than other processors with smaller feature sizes) can be used without too much worry.
As I earlier today, one metric fuckload is exactly 1/5 of a metric shit-ton.
1/5th of a metric shit-ton ;-)
Bridge trolls should not burn the bridges they are attempting to collect tolls on...
There have been a lot of posts claiming that Microsoft is "dumping" XP on the market at below cost to drive away competition. There is a problem with this: as another poster has mentioned, "dumping" is defined as selling an item below the variable cost (i.e. per-unit cost). A full XP box set costs less than $50 to produce, so this is not "dumping."
Secondly, Microsoft is doing exactly what every company does when presented with competition: they are lowering their prices. They see Lindows as a competing product to their own, so they are lowering the price. Now, their ability to offer that discount only to buyers of Lindows machines is a result of a tool called "price discrimination." Under perfect price discrimination, each consumer of a product would be charged exactly the maximum that he is willing to pay for the product. There is nothing inherently bad about this, it simply creates several prices for a single product, similar to what Amazon was accused of doing in an earlier article here.
Microsoft has simply lowered the price of XP to customers of Lindows only, because they know that other consumers will continue to pay the higher price. This is textbook price discrimination and nothing more.
- Generate low-frequency (LF) pulse travelling into crystal.
- Apply shock wave to turn crystal into frequency shifter.
- Wait until LF pulse is shifted to higher frequency and emitted from crystal.
- Allow time for crystal to relax to original properties by allowing the shock wave to dissipate.
- Repeat for as long as necessary/desired.
Now, this may or may not create any really usable stream of pulses, but I believe that you would be able to shine a (pulsed) red light in and get a (pulsed) blue light out. Whether the pulsing could be controlled sufficiently to prove useful in optical switching or other applications is yet to be shown.As for the number of wavecycles being equal, I wonder if this is already observed. It would make sense (if the number of wavecycles is conserved) that the resulting higher frequency pulse would be shorter in duration than the incoming lower frequency pulse, due to the relation among the speed of light/frequency of light/duration of pulse.
Umm, a private vendor of goods (I assume you are not talking about government goods/services) should already have the right to refuse to enter into a contract of sale with anyone for any reason. Just because I decide to sell something to him doesn't mean I should be required to also sell something to you, no matter what my reasoning is. If I believe you to be an unsavory character and feel that your money is likely to be somehow "tainted" as you allude to, then I can certainly refuse to trade you my goods for your money.
I'm not sure about other countries, but here in the U.S. a vendor can refuse to sell to anyone.
Note that even after both of these sales he still owned around 5700 shares of Microsoft stock. The options, exercised at ~$6 and ~$7 per share represented a significant paper profit. Perhaps he wanted to realize that profit. If anything, what he knows that normal investors don't is a rather obvious and oft-ignored piece of investment knowledge: that keeping more than 5% of your total investment holdings in a single security is a bad idea, and he simply wanted to use the proceeds of the sales to diversify his holdings. I don't know, because I'm not him, but please don't go slinging around potential allegations of insider trading.
If the UWB pulse is an approximation of a square pulse (which I think it would be, given that most of the papers I've read on UWB modulate the signal using the timing of the pulses), then the pulse in the frequency domain would be a sinc fuction. For those without an engineering/math background, sinc(x) = sin(x)/x. As such, any true square UWB pulse (and any square pulse of any length) would have infinite bandwidth. Of course, because the amplitude of a sinc decreases as its argument increases, there is a practical limit to the bandwidth of the outgoing signal that is based on what the resolvable power delta would be on the receiving end.
Assuming that the conductive concrete formed a single, closed shell around the cell phone, none.
Basic physics will tell you that a closed conductive surface subject to an external electromagnetic field will exhibit no such field inside it's perimeter. I believe that the derivation is related to Guass's and Maxwell's laws of electromagnetics.
Comments like this make me want to see a new moderation modifier alongside Insightful and Interesting: the +1 Understands Grammar!
This is true only if the two waves being added have the same frequency spectra, or if one of the waves is contained in the other in the frequency domain. If you add a 10 nanometer-wide signal centered at 700 nm to a 10 nanometer-wide signal centered at 710 nm, the resultant wave has a bandwidth of 20 nm.
This wave would take up more bandwidth than either of the other two.
Great... now the RIAA/MPAA will be breathing down our necks for bypassing "noise-based-encryption" protection schemes every time we shield an audio or network cable...