Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying In the yellow haze of the sun There were children crying and colors flying All around the chosen ones All in a dream, all in a dream The loading had begun Flyin' mother nature's silver seed To a new home in the sun
Oh fuck I just broke the DMCA. Sorry, Neil.
Seriously, this theme has been around in modern media. The genesis project from Star Trek, that crappy Don Bluth film, etc. In a lot of sci-fi's the earth is a dump and most people live elsewhere, like in Cowboy Bebop. Sci-fi's are often uncannily accurate at predicting the future.
Call me a crazy hippy, but in a lot of ways the Earth is a life form and we are like it's organs. If the meaning of life is to reproduce, then wouldn't terraforming and colonizing a new planet be the ultimate form of reproduction?
At a company I used to work for we stored our DAT data backups inside firesafe boxes inside firesafe safes. There was about 6 inches of material between the DATs and the air outside the safe. Supposedly they would protect the tapes for up to an hour in a 3000 degree fire or something like that.
This is pretty cool, but nothing really new. I'm actively involved with radio location systems. I'm currently working on a project to build cheap automatic radio location devices. The innovative thing here is that it's designed for the mass market.
My primary experience has been with APRS, the Automatic Position Reporting System. It's in many ways similar to this system. It's used quite extensively by ham radio operators to coordinate public service activities, track storms out in tornado ally, etc.
The neat thing about APRS is that it isn't just a position tracking system, but it's a distributed network of repeating stations linked via radio and landlines.
Here are some neat links you might find interesting:
www.findu.com allows you to locate any ham radio operator's last known position transmitted via aprs from location in the world that has coverage to an APRS internet gateway.
Hell any modern 56k modem (and even my old Sportster 14.4) does 4:1 lossless on the fly compression. Granted this is a little slower than what the GF FX is doing, but then again the GF FX does EVERYTHING super fast. It's not too tough to speed up that compression. Low-ratio lossless compression is pretty easy to do on the fly in hardware, just turn up the clock rate and bam. VHDL anyone?
So is Windows' GDI32.exe. So is OS X's Quartz. If you want to believe either is a memory featherweight, I got a few investment ideas for you...
I never said they were, but at least they're big fast ram hogs that are easy to configure and present a consistant interface. I realize that X has nothing to do with the actual graphic interface, but most people aren't informed well enough to make the differentiation between X and all the other parts like the window manager.
X is a big dumb slow ram hog that's impossible to configure without a lot of help and with no consistant look and feel thanks to the proliferation of widget libraries. Something smaller faster and more elegant with a more consistant interface would go a long way towards making me switch from using Windows as my GUI of choice.
On the other hand, there are a crapload of apps for X and everyone COULD standardize on a widget library and a window manager. Also as computers get faster and storage gets bigger and everything gets cheaper a lot of X's performance problems are sort of going away, kind of like what's happening to Java. The remaining issue (configuration) has come a long way too, so maybe there is no need for an X replacement.
I guess I'm always willing to give something new a try, but the real deciding factor is always software availability. For years MacOS was technically superior to MS-DOS and later Windows, but whenever I asked someone why they didn't switch the first thing they said was "there's no good software." Eventually I came to agree and switched to Windows myself (and also Linux). People will only use PicoGUI if there is good software for it, and nobody will develop for PicoGUI unless there are users. It's a chicken or the egg issue. Of course Linux and KDE and others have been in that situation and now are quite popular. So what it would really take to get many people to use PicoGUI would be a concerted effort on the part of a commited group of developers.
IMHO small businesses can be just as shady, if not MORE shady than large businesses. There are fewer chefs in the kitchen, so to speak.
IMHO this is a good law. Businesses have a responsibility to keep confidential information confidential and failing to do so may be considered negligence. Obviously, "negligence" is subjective.
Your point about the law not requireing specific details about the type of breach is well taken.
Sure it would put a GREAT signal in, running a 2.5khz wide SSB signal!!! This is a VERY high speed and therefor wide bandwidth (talking megahertz here) spread spectrum signal. You should study up on your Shannon equations (although Shannon was wrong anyway).
Yeah us hams do some crazy stuff:) But yeah tropospheric ducting is not a reliable propagation path.
Considering the power, the relatively small size of the antennas, and especially the excessive bandwidth that 802.11 consumes, this is a pretty impressive achievement.
Dish's are dirt cheap. Most people will PAY YOU to take their old 8 foot satelite TV dish away, and this dish is perfectly useable at 2.4GHz.
The feedhorn, on the other hand, would be rather expensive. Unless you build your own, which isn't all too difficult. Basicly, stick your pringles can antenna on there and you're done. Well there's a little more to it if you want to have an LNA.
Of course for most businesses it's cheaper to buy that stuff off the shelf. It's not the cost of a wireless link, it's the cost of not having a wireless link.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Is it possible that MS is starting to lose control of it's own software? Maybe we are seeing the boundaries of what can be accomplished in a restrictive, closed source development environment.
That filter may be 80% transmissive and certainly a difference of 20% wouldn't account for a 100 times increase in transmissability.
The article claims that their new sensor is so selective that it can select a SINGLE wavelength of light. Communications theory dictates that if you select a SINGLE wavelength you have zero bandwidth and therefor can transfer information at zero speed. So clearly this new sensor must not be THAT selective.
The narrower of the two filters you posted has a passband of 140 nanometers. That is pretty frikkin wide.
(300 * 10^6) / (140 * 10^-9) = 2.14 * 10^15 Hertz.
Thats a passband of 2.15 PETA hertz!
For 11MBPs ethernet you need a bandwidth of 11MHz if you don't use any advanced modulation techniques. I don't think a filter with and 11MHz passband at light frequencies is realistic, so IF they have developed some new filter, it's passband is probably narrower than the one you posted, but wider tha what would be ideal.
Again, this is all conjecture because the article is vague. Uunless they are lying, we can assume the device is about 100 times more sensitive than current devices at the very narrow bandwidth they describe. Since you pointed out that there is very little theoretical room for improvement in phototransistors, then the only logical conclusion is that they've developed some new type of filter.
Of course perhaps they really HAVE developed a new type of optical sensor and the filtering is in some way inherant to the device's fundamental characteristics.
This article is very vague about what exactly has been developed. I'm curious to know more, perhaps when it's unveiled at comdex.
They refer to it as an optical antenna. That is probably a misnomer. It sounds like what they have actually developed is a new type of optical sensor, perhaps with some special lensing. Lenses are much like antennas for light.
Current technology uses phototransistors which are pretty good at what they do. But they have a fairly wide bandwidth, that is they respond to a wide range of wavelengths. The article claims that their new sensor has a very narrow bandwidth. To limit the wavelength response of a phototransistor, filters must be used which reduces the signal strength.
They also claim that the device is 100 times more sensitive than current technology. A new type of filter which was very low loss could increase the effective sensitivity of a filtered phototransistor, so I wonder if this is what they have really developed.
Either way light travels in straight lines and I doubt if they're counting on cloud reflection or something, so this device would require a line of sight. That said, try aiming your remote control at a window sometime and see how the light bounces off and then to your TV. A device 100 times more sensitive may be able to take advantage of reflected paths that are currently unuseable.
Current outdoor point to point IR links using laser technology can be reliable up to several miles, even in rain. The units I've seen are over speced, so that without weather they are actually capable of working over much longer distances, but they aren't market as such.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the Neil Young song?
Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying
In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home in the sun
Oh fuck I just broke the DMCA. Sorry, Neil.
Seriously, this theme has been around in modern media. The genesis project from Star Trek, that crappy Don Bluth film, etc. In a lot of sci-fi's the earth is a dump and most people live elsewhere, like in Cowboy Bebop. Sci-fi's are often uncannily accurate at predicting the future.
Call me a crazy hippy, but in a lot of ways the Earth is a life form and we are like it's organs. If the meaning of life is to reproduce, then wouldn't terraforming and colonizing a new planet be the ultimate form of reproduction?
Once a week we sent a backup home with the CEO.
My primary experience has been with APRS, the Automatic Position Reporting System. It's in many ways similar to this system. It's used quite extensively by ham radio operators to coordinate public service activities, track storms out in tornado ally, etc.
The neat thing about APRS is that it isn't just a position tracking system, but it's a distributed network of repeating stations linked via radio and landlines. Here are some neat links you might find interesting:
Hell any modern 56k modem (and even my old Sportster 14.4) does 4:1 lossless on the fly compression. Granted this is a little slower than what the GF FX is doing, but then again the GF FX does EVERYTHING super fast. It's not too tough to speed up that compression. Low-ratio lossless compression is pretty easy to do on the fly in hardware, just turn up the clock rate and bam. VHDL anyone?
Touche
X is a big dumb slow ram hog
So is Windows' GDI32.exe. So is OS X's Quartz. If you want to believe either is a memory featherweight, I got a few investment ideas for you...
I never said they were, but at least they're big fast ram hogs that are easy to configure and present a consistant interface. I realize that X has nothing to do with the actual graphic interface, but most people aren't informed well enough to make the differentiation between X and all the other parts like the window manager.
Yes! And get rid of this stupid web based message board crap and go back to the good old BBS days.
X is a big dumb slow ram hog that's impossible to configure without a lot of help and with no consistant look and feel thanks to the proliferation of widget libraries. Something smaller faster and more elegant with a more consistant interface would go a long way towards making me switch from using Windows as my GUI of choice.
On the other hand, there are a crapload of apps for X and everyone COULD standardize on a widget library and a window manager. Also as computers get faster and storage gets bigger and everything gets cheaper a lot of X's performance problems are sort of going away, kind of like what's happening to Java. The remaining issue (configuration) has come a long way too, so maybe there is no need for an X replacement.
I guess I'm always willing to give something new a try, but the real deciding factor is always software availability. For years MacOS was technically superior to MS-DOS and later Windows, but whenever I asked someone why they didn't switch the first thing they said was "there's no good software." Eventually I came to agree and switched to Windows myself (and also Linux). People will only use PicoGUI if there is good software for it, and nobody will develop for PicoGUI unless there are users. It's a chicken or the egg issue. Of course Linux and KDE and others have been in that situation and now are quite popular. So what it would really take to get many people to use PicoGUI would be a concerted effort on the part of a commited group of developers.
That's my $.02
No, Intel is also releasing new ARMs and they're not the fastest chips ever. Neither is the Transmeta Crusoe.
All good points.
IMHO this is a good law. Businesses have a responsibility to keep confidential information confidential and failing to do so may be considered negligence. Obviously, "negligence" is subjective.
Your point about the law not requireing specific details about the type of breach is well taken.
Sure it would put a GREAT signal in, running a 2.5khz wide SSB signal!!! This is a VERY high speed and therefor wide bandwidth (talking megahertz here) spread spectrum signal. You should study up on your Shannon equations (although Shannon was wrong anyway).
Considering the power, the relatively small size of the antennas, and especially the excessive bandwidth that 802.11 consumes, this is a pretty impressive achievement.
The feedhorn, on the other hand, would be rather expensive. Unless you build your own, which isn't all too difficult. Basicly, stick your pringles can antenna on there and you're done. Well there's a little more to it if you want to have an LNA.
Of course for most businesses it's cheaper to buy that stuff off the shelf. It's not the cost of a wireless link, it's the cost of not having a wireless link.
Lets see, things Linux has that they didn't copy from MS:
The list goes on.
BAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAH Name me one innovation that MS has ever had that ISN'T a copy of someone else's innovation.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Is it possible that MS is starting to lose control of it's own software? Maybe we are seeing the boundaries of what can be accomplished in a restrictive, closed source development environment.
That filter may be 80% transmissive and certainly a difference of 20% wouldn't account for a 100 times increase in transmissability. The article claims that their new sensor is so selective that it can select a SINGLE wavelength of light. Communications theory dictates that if you select a SINGLE wavelength you have zero bandwidth and therefor can transfer information at zero speed. So clearly this new sensor must not be THAT selective. The narrower of the two filters you posted has a passband of 140 nanometers. That is pretty frikkin wide. (300 * 10^6) / (140 * 10^-9) = 2.14 * 10^15 Hertz. Thats a passband of 2.15 PETA hertz! For 11MBPs ethernet you need a bandwidth of 11MHz if you don't use any advanced modulation techniques. I don't think a filter with and 11MHz passband at light frequencies is realistic, so IF they have developed some new filter, it's passband is probably narrower than the one you posted, but wider tha what would be ideal. Again, this is all conjecture because the article is vague. Uunless they are lying, we can assume the device is about 100 times more sensitive than current devices at the very narrow bandwidth they describe. Since you pointed out that there is very little theoretical room for improvement in phototransistors, then the only logical conclusion is that they've developed some new type of filter. Of course perhaps they really HAVE developed a new type of optical sensor and the filtering is in some way inherant to the device's fundamental characteristics.
This article is very vague about what exactly has been developed. I'm curious to know more, perhaps when it's unveiled at comdex.
They refer to it as an optical antenna. That is probably a misnomer. It sounds like what they have actually developed is a new type of optical sensor, perhaps with some special lensing. Lenses are much like antennas for light.
Current technology uses phototransistors which are pretty good at what they do. But they have a fairly wide bandwidth, that is they respond to a wide range of wavelengths. The article claims that their new sensor has a very narrow bandwidth. To limit the wavelength response of a phototransistor, filters must be used which reduces the signal strength.
They also claim that the device is 100 times more sensitive than current technology. A new type of filter which was very low loss could increase the effective sensitivity of a filtered phototransistor, so I wonder if this is what they have really developed.
Either way light travels in straight lines and I doubt if they're counting on cloud reflection or something, so this device would require a line of sight. That said, try aiming your remote control at a window sometime and see how the light bounces off and then to your TV. A device 100 times more sensitive may be able to take advantage of reflected paths that are currently unuseable.
Current outdoor point to point IR links using laser technology can be reliable up to several miles, even in rain. The units I've seen are over speced, so that without weather they are actually capable of working over much longer distances, but they aren't market as such.