I'm getting what sounds like similar behavior, but my Mozilla/Firebird/FireFox plug-in loads a copy of Acrobat 5.05, full version. Acrobat 6 loads only when I click on the Acrobat icon.
Something to add to my comment: The fact that Windows XP becomes unstable is a far, far bigger issue than a memory leak in FireFox. There must be many people who do not want this problem in Windows XP exposed. My tests show that the instability happens every time, without fail.
In Windows 98, a failure in a word processor can cause an error in a spreadsheet. I thought we got away from that flaw in Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
"Sabrina Fay" reported that Windows was fine, but Linux crashed. I ran the test numerous times, and saw the opposite behavior: Linux certainly never became unstable. Something is fishy.
Also, there was apparently no attempt by that person to reproduce actual use, in which the crashes occur much sooner.
The relevance is not just the number of tabs, but that it seems obvious that the test is showing a memory leak. All memory leaks should be fixed, so that they cannot cause other, more subtle problems. Maybe the memory leak is causing the problems with the Acrobat plug-in, for example.
It is to be hoped that FireFox will support varied usage patterns.
That's interesting. I've often thought that some bad Acrobat and FireFox interaction is causing problems.
FireFox 0.8 has memory leaks. Load enough instances and tabs, and it will always crash. (This has been verified under Linux and Windows XP.)
When FireFox crashes, it also crashes Windows XP SP1! Windows XP SP1 doesn't show an error message, but the OS becomes unstable, and it is necessary to reboot.
This is shocking to me. The explanation seems to be that the features of Windows XP that most users see run well, but a little below the surface, Windows XP is not a finished operating system. I think a fundamental definition of an operating system is that a real operating system can handle bad behavior of a program without self-destructing. So, after all these years of development, Windows is more a sociological phenomenon than an operating system. It amazes me that Microsoft managers are unable or unwilling to take care of business.
When FireFox crashes under Linux, Linux remains completely stable. (I suppose you could have guessed that.)
I have copies of all the browsers, and in my opinion FireFox is by far the best. Browsers are windows on the world for an increasing number of people, so it is important that the world has an excellent one.
I think FireFox's memory management issues should be fixed before any other work is done. Of course, that is for the FireFox/Mozilla team to decide.
Governments need to decide whether they want to be trusted. If they want
trust, then they should avoid any hint of sneakiness.
The U.S. government secretly overthrew a democratically elected president of
Iran, President Mossadegh. That started a chain of
events that eventually continued with retaliation: The destruction of the
World Trade Center.
Osama bin Laden cannot be effective in being violent if he does not have
support. He is far less likely to have support for his violent schemes if
people generally trust the U.S. government.
The U.S. government has bombed 24 countries since the Second World War. That
has lowered the level of trust. Those who live in countries that have been
bombed do not always think that the violence was "justified".
Old idea: "You shall not kill." New clauses: a) Unless you need to create a
distraction to further your political purposes, b) Unless you think it would
help you be reelected. c) Except if you fear something that someone might do
in the future. d) Except if you want the oil profits. e) Except if some of the
people in the other country think that killing some of them and destroying
some of their property is an excellent goal.
The main executable file of WordStar 6 was 187,000 bytes (not megabytes). That was up from maybe 130,000 bytes in WordStar 3.3. Reviewers talked about bloat.
Don't forget the earlier examples of footshooting involving WordPerfect.
Novell paid $1 billion (or was it $850 million?) for WordPerfect Corporation
and sold it
to Corel for $186 million about 18 months later. That's a pity, because
for $50 I could have told them that WordPerfect Corporation was not a
good fit for Novell.
Little-discussed facts about WordPerfect for DOS: There were plenty of menus
that were 7 levels deep. It was like a video game. There may have been a pot
of gold in there somewhere that no one ever discovered.
It always seemed to me that the old WP Corp. was like a Ponzi scheme. They had
excellent free technical support to tell you how to find things in the forest
of menus. But that could only work if they had steadily increasing sales.
That was not the end of footshooting. Corel President Michael Cowpland (I
once talked to him on the phone, briefly.) was married to a woman who had a
habit of dressing seductively... some described it as going about in public
half-naked. Here's a quote, one of many: (Sorry, I couldn't find any of the really seductive photos.)
Marlen Cowpland: The wife of former Corel Corp. CEO Michael Cowpland and the
Marie Antoinette of the Canadian rich, she appeared at the computer software
company's 1999 Ottawa gala draped in a million-dollar dress following a
quarter when Corel stock had lost more than half its value and the firm had
bled almost $15 million. She later hosted Talk TV's Celebrity Pets. A release
for Cowpland's show gives no year of birth, but did say she was born in
"Quebec, Canada." The release added, "Cowpland believes that to fully
experience life, you must create your own party."
Linus Torvalds has 20 million dollars, at least. Red Hat gave him some of its
stock, before it was valuable. Sure he gave away a lot of his work for free,
but that only primed the pump, didn't it?
Be honest: Who would you really like to be? Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates?
Would you like to be like Linus, a rich man who is loved and admired by
hundreds of thousands of people? Or would you like to be like Mr. Gates, a
"rich" man who cannot buy the things that really matter?
Would you like to be like Linus, a man who makes jokes that are widely
repeated? Or would you like to be like Mr. Gates, a man whose voice is so
scratchy that it is annoying to hear him say more than one sentence, and who is boring because he never seems to say anything unless there might be money in it?
If you have a few quirky habits, do you want to be like Alan Cox, or do you want to
be like Steve Ballmer, who is widely called Monkey Boy?
If you really believe that everything you do must be for money, you have two
heroes!! You can be like Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer!
Suppose Linus decides he's bored with what he's doing and wants another job?
Will he need to read Monster.com? Somehow the theory in the letter is not
fitting some of the facts.
It is necessary to be a scientist 100% of the time. You know someone is NOT a
scientist when that person ignores data. The letter puts forth a theory of the
world that does not even begin to explain information that is immediately
available.
Whoever wrote the letter did not bother to examine the implications of what
facts he did accept. If every programmer in the world spent the next 5 years
writing free software, what would be the state of computing at the end of that
period? Would all necessary software have been completely written? Would there
be no more work for programmers? No, at the end of the 5 years there would be
a great clamor for new programs that became possible because of the new
software infrastructure.
Love creates connections between the lover and the world. The connections
create opportunities. We know love works, we just don't yet completely
understand how.
I recognize that most people who write free software would not think of
themselves as lovers, but that's what they are.
If you are a man who has written free software, and you meet an interesting
woman, and you tell a little about yourself, and you talk about what you have
done to benefit the world, don't forget to ask her what she has done to
benefit the world. If the answer is nothing, she's a lot less interesting than
you thought at the beginning. You have created a world for yourself in which
you can ask for something better.
However, there is a kernel of truth about which the letter hints. While you
are loving the world, don't forget to love yourself. There must be a balance.
I hope that fewer people will add to the disfunctionality of the world by making their view of life as narrow
as that of the letter.
Aexia, thanks for the link to the story about Marcus Dixon. But the story does show corruption: "The prosecutor, in what can only be perceived as an act of complete disregard for the law, facts and justice in general,...
and, "In the jurors own words, the look of horror across their faces when the judge sentenced Marcus to ten years minimum could be seen by everyone. They never knew the consequences. They could not fathom that a boy could go to jail for consensual sex, and certainly not for 10 years with no possibility of parole."
When the government does something completely screwy because of deliberately pursuing some purpose other than good government, that is corruption.
The "Patriot" Act was passed without some Congressmen and women even reading
it. It was named that to intimidate members of Congress. Vote against this
bill and you will be against patriotism!
The "Patriot" Act was supposed to protect us against people who want
to destroy our entire society. Now its being used to harass citizens who do
something stupid, and have no political motive. If they get away with this,
you will see more and more extensions of government police power. History has
shown that, even if they don't get away with it, they will try again.
More and more we are seeing examples of prosecutors who don't want sensible
justice, but who just want other people to hurt, because of their own personal
mental issues. Last week the Oprah Winfrey show provided another example: An
18-year-old man had sex with a 16-year-old woman at his school. (Big surprise,
there.) Later she accused him of rape, and he was found NOT guilty. But he was
put into prison for 10 years anyway. The prosecutor said that was entirely
justified, and that he had no problems with the punishment.
The U.S. government is rapidly becoming more corrupt. Here are just a few examples:
Killing people and destroying their property: N.Y.
Times editorial "... Americans paid Ahmad Chalabi to gull them into a war that is costing
them a billion a week and a precious human cost."
The present terrorism against the U.S. people is partly the result of the
U.S. government's secret violence: About a year ago, I hastily put
together a short, incomplete history that shows what has happened: History
surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories.
Just guessing: The radar signal is generated by a microwave oscillator formed
by some kind of folded structure on the silicon. The structure must be folded
because it must be at least one wavelength of the generated frequency. The
wavelength of a 24 GigaHertz signal is:
(300,000,000 meters/second [the speed of light, approx.]) / (24,000,000,000
cycles/second [24 GHz]) = 0.0125 meters, or a wavelength of 1.25 centimeters.
In photos, the radar chips are shown to be less than 1.25 centimeters in width
and length. That makes me guess that there is some folded resonant structure.
Does anyone know if that assumption is correct? Is it possible to generate a
signal from a structure smaller than one wavelength?
One of the articles says that the maximum transmission speed is 1 GHz, so that
is the maximum speed of any digital or analog circuitry. The governmentally
designated band is 22 to 29 GigaHertz, so the theoretical maximum speed of
data transmission is 7 Gigahertz, the width of the frequency band.
This is a major breakthrough. A large number of these chips can be combined
with digital signal processing to make a radar that has an effective antenna
size much larger than each chip. Large effective antenna sizes are also great for reliable directed data transmission.
There is no data set presented. It's just a Slashdot comment.
"My god, I don't even know where to start with your recommendations on how to treat women."
My recommendation: "... treat women right even if they treat you badly." That applies to everyone, of course. Treat everyone right. As I mentioned, I got this idea from someone else. I think it's a good idea.
Yes, theoretically, a rise time of 1/5 that of the fastest signal. However, usually at the upper bandwidth limit, there is phase distortion and amplitude reduction. So, it seems to me that the rule of thumb might hold true. I seem to remember that some fast rise times are achieved by providing resonance near the upper bandwidth limit, or some other synthetic method, so that there is overshoot. I don't remember much about this. It that possibly an explanation for the different estimates?
Modern circuits are not so well controlled as someone might guess. To have 20
kHz output with little phase distortion, it is necessary to pass more than 200
kHz.
But that's not the issue. ICs allow the design of circuits with bandwidths
that are literally physically impossible with discrete components. The
fundamental bandwidth limitations of the transistors used in the IC may be 200
MHz or more, or even 1.5 gigahertz. Any small problem can cause a circuit to oscillate at 50 MHz,
even if the IC is supposedly limited to far less than this.
All you need for oscillation is gain and some positive feedback. In
the real world, circuits try all possible combinations almost instantaneously,
and begin oscillating for reasons the designer never foresaw. For example,
maybe there is capacitive coupling through the IC packaging, and the output
circuit alone is oscillating.
This is only a slight exaggeration: There are 4 steps toward making a new electronic device: 1) Build the circuit.
2) Supply power for the first time. 3) Apply an oscilloscope probe and begin
discovering all the reasons the circuit is oscillating when it shouldn't. 4)
Then discover all the other reasons the circuit isn't working correctly, if
any.
I was never a person who thought that killing people and destroying their
property was a good way to resolve social problems, but at one time it was my
job to repair the automatic flight control systems of fighter-interceptors in the
U.S. Air Force's Air Defense Command.
These aircraft required 250 hours of maintenance per hour of flight. (Aircraft
meant to be sold to other nations, also, required 15 hours of maintenance per hour of
flight. I've followed the development of weapons systems ever since, and my
opinion of what is actually delivered is that it is often fraud, or close to
fraud. United States taxpayers: Your assigned duty is to find the money to pay, and to avoid thinking.)
Anyhow, during training flights it was required to pull several g's. Sometimes
at high accelerations the electronics would go completely crazy, and all
inertial reference would be lost. The only fix for this at the time was to
land, regain stability, and take off again. The aircraft that had this problem
were therefore not much use for any situation actually requiring defense.
Worse, the problem seemed to have nothing to do with any particular aircraft,
but seemed random.
One day while trying to make a faulty system work on my bench test mockup, I
discovered the reason. Some of the amplifiers that controlled the gyros had
high frequency parasitic oscillations at perhaps 100 times the normal
frequency of operation. You couldn't see the oscillations with normal
equipment because the frequency was too high. I had borrowed an oscilloscope
from some co-workers who worked on faster electronics.
The design of the amplifiers was acceptable, but many of the amplifiers had
bad solder joints. Those with bad solder joints would oscillate; oscillating
amplifiers would amplify at the required low frequency, but had a much smaller
dynamic range than amplifiers that were not oscillating. (Yes, that bad solder
joints could cause this doesn't make much logical sense, but most parasitic
oscillations don't make much logical sense.)
The amplifiers had other defects that caused them to have a high failure rate.
Every time an amplifier was pulled from an aircraft for a conventional repair,
an amplifier was drawn from stock and put in the waiting aircraft so that the
aircraft would be immediately operational. That was the reason the instability
problems kept moving from aircraft to aircraft.
I drew a circuit diagram of my test setup, wrote an article about the problem,
had a photographer take photos of the test setup, took screen photos of
the parasitic oscillations, and sent everything to those who review such things.
This had several effects. Someone at Air Defense Command headquarters wrote a
letter praising my work. When everyone was reviewed for p
The parent comment is exactly correct. You need 10 times the bandwidth if you want to see the waveform.
I said 3 times because, in my experience, that is the minimum at which I can extract any useful information. (Mostly you are looking for parasitic oscillations.)
Remember that the oscilloscope bandwidth close to the frequency of the waveform being measured distorts that waveform. (In phase if the frequency being measured is a sine wave.) You need an oscilloscope bandwidth maybe 3 times the highest frequency being measured.
ICs often have very high potential bandwidths, and, when something goes wrong, even an audio IC can have sometimes have parasitic oscillations at extremely high frequencies. If you are working on a circuit, you need to be able to see those parasitic signals.
I don't like this fact, because it is expensive, but 100 MHz seems to be a good oscilloscope bandwidth. I bought a very old Tektronix scope to get the needed bandwidth at a reasonable price.
For those who use GUIs, Java is not cross-platform. Java requires Java to be installed, and it isn't installed on recent copies of Windows. "Cross-platform" is not completely true.
I haven't been doing (much) cross-platform programming, but I'm intense about finding an acceptable way. I predicted the downfall of Novell long before it happened, and now I'm predicting that Linux will eventually become the only commonly used desktop OS, due to the fact that Microsoft managers do not seem to be able to find a way to live in the world without being abusive. Now is not the time to write a lot of Microsoft-specific code.
C++ with WxWidgets (formerly WxWindows until they were threatened by Microsoft) seems the best way.
However, the real answer is for Java to become useful for those who need extensive GUIs and fast execution. It's obvious that Java is on the right track. Programmers of business applications don't want to worry about memory allocation.
Right now I won't use Java because I write GUI intensive applications that are slow and quirky in Java. When Java is Open Source, I will still be able to write proprietary applications in Java, just like I can write proprietary applications using GCC.
The concerns of the Java community are real. Yes, there is idealism, but it is mostly realism. Java cannot fulfill the world's needs for it until it is free from the control of one company.
One thing that needs to be said is that this is worth millions of dollars
in free publicity for IBM. There are many programmers who, before IBM started
supporting Open Source, would not have considered working for IBM.
I'm not saying that IBM is asking for Java to be Open Source because of
publicity. But that support has a wonderful side-effect for the company.
It's great to have a large organization like IBM that can use its voice to do
something that has long been needed. The world needs better GUI support for
Java.
We need true native Java compilers, so that it is not easy to de-compile Java, as it is now. (I get the impression that GCJ merely makes calls to
libgcj, as the home page says, and is therefore easy to decompile. Does anyone
know if that is true?) Business logic is very easy to steal through
de-compilation.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm getting what sounds like similar behavior, but my Mozilla/Firebird/FireFox plug-in loads a copy of Acrobat 5.05, full version. Acrobat 6 loads only when I click on the Acrobat icon.
Something to add to my comment: The fact that Windows XP becomes unstable is a far, far bigger issue than a memory leak in FireFox. There must be many people who do not want this problem in Windows XP exposed. My tests show that the instability happens every time, without fail.
In Windows 98, a failure in a word processor can cause an error in a spreadsheet. I thought we got away from that flaw in Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
"Sabrina Fay" reported that Windows was fine, but Linux crashed. I ran the test numerous times, and saw the opposite behavior: Linux certainly never became unstable. Something is fishy.
Also, there was apparently no attempt by that person to reproduce actual use, in which the crashes occur much sooner.
The relevance is not just the number of tabs, but that it seems obvious that the test is showing a memory leak. All memory leaks should be fixed, so that they cannot cause other, more subtle problems. Maybe the memory leak is causing the problems with the Acrobat plug-in, for example.
It is to be hoped that FireFox will support varied usage patterns.
That's interesting. I've often thought that some bad Acrobat and FireFox interaction is causing problems.
FireFox 0.8 has memory leaks. Load enough instances and tabs, and it will always crash. (This has been verified under Linux and Windows XP.)
When FireFox crashes, it also crashes Windows XP SP1! Windows XP SP1 doesn't show an error message, but the OS becomes unstable, and it is necessary to reboot.
This is shocking to me. The explanation seems to be that the features of Windows XP that most users see run well, but a little below the surface, Windows XP is not a finished operating system. I think a fundamental definition of an operating system is that a real operating system can handle bad behavior of a program without self-destructing. So, after all these years of development, Windows is more a sociological phenomenon than an operating system. It amazes me that Microsoft managers are unable or unwilling to take care of business.
When FireFox crashes under Linux, Linux remains completely stable. (I suppose you could have guessed that.)
I have copies of all the browsers, and in my opinion FireFox is by far the best. Browsers are windows on the world for an increasing number of people, so it is important that the world has an excellent one.
I think FireFox's memory management issues should be fixed before any other work is done. Of course, that is for the FireFox/Mozilla team to decide.
(Posted using FireFox, of course.)
Governments need to decide whether they want to be trusted. If they want trust, then they should avoid any hint of sneakiness.
The U.S. government secretly overthrew a democratically elected president of Iran, President Mossadegh. That started a chain of events that eventually continued with retaliation: The destruction of the World Trade Center.
Osama bin Laden cannot be effective in being violent if he does not have support. He is far less likely to have support for his violent schemes if people generally trust the U.S. government.
The U.S. government has bombed 24 countries since the Second World War. That has lowered the level of trust. Those who live in countries that have been bombed do not always think that the violence was "justified".
Old idea: "You shall not kill." New clauses: a) Unless you need to create a distraction to further your political purposes, b) Unless you think it would help you be reelected. c) Except if you fear something that someone might do in the future. d) Except if you want the oil profits. e) Except if some of the people in the other country think that killing some of them and destroying some of their property is an excellent goal.
The main executable file of WordStar 6 was 187,000 bytes (not megabytes). That was up from maybe 130,000 bytes in WordStar 3.3. Reviewers talked about bloat.
Ventura Publisher 5.00 G1 for Windows 3.1 is still one of the best page layout programs. Later improvements ruined it.
Another photo
Don't forget the earlier examples of footshooting involving WordPerfect. Novell paid $1 billion (or was it $850 million?) for WordPerfect Corporation and sold it to Corel for $186 million about 18 months later. That's a pity, because for $50 I could have told them that WordPerfect Corporation was not a good fit for Novell.
Little-discussed facts about WordPerfect for DOS: There were plenty of menus that were 7 levels deep. It was like a video game. There may have been a pot of gold in there somewhere that no one ever discovered.
It always seemed to me that the old WP Corp. was like a Ponzi scheme. They had excellent free technical support to tell you how to find things in the forest of menus. But that could only work if they had steadily increasing sales.
That was not the end of footshooting. Corel President Michael Cowpland (I once talked to him on the phone, briefly.) was married to a woman who had a habit of dressing seductively... some described it as going about in public half-naked. Here's a quote, one of many: (Sorry, I couldn't find any of the really seductive photos.)
Most Likely to Be Talked About Behind Her Back
Marlen Cowpland: The wife of former Corel Corp. CEO Michael Cowpland and the Marie Antoinette of the Canadian rich, she appeared at the computer software company's 1999 Ottawa gala draped in a million-dollar dress following a quarter when Corel stock had lost more than half its value and the firm had bled almost $15 million. She later hosted Talk TV's Celebrity Pets. A release for Cowpland's show gives no year of birth, but did say she was born in "Quebec, Canada." The release added, "Cowpland believes that to fully experience life, you must create your own party."
The link is: news://alt.religion.adm3a
alt.RELIGION.OldComputerTerminal?
Do a lot of people post to that newsgroup? Do they worship the landfill god?
Don't blaspheme. Microsoft knows what you need better than you.
Linus Torvalds has 20 million dollars, at least. Red Hat gave him some of its stock, before it was valuable. Sure he gave away a lot of his work for free, but that only primed the pump, didn't it?
Be honest: Who would you really like to be? Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates? Would you like to be like Linus, a rich man who is loved and admired by hundreds of thousands of people? Or would you like to be like Mr. Gates, a "rich" man who cannot buy the things that really matter?
Would you like to be like Linus, a man who makes jokes that are widely repeated? Or would you like to be like Mr. Gates, a man whose voice is so scratchy that it is annoying to hear him say more than one sentence, and who is boring because he never seems to say anything unless there might be money in it?
If you have a few quirky habits, do you want to be like Alan Cox, or do you want to be like Steve Ballmer, who is widely called Monkey Boy?
If you really believe that everything you do must be for money, you have two heroes!! You can be like Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer!
Suppose Linus decides he's bored with what he's doing and wants another job? Will he need to read Monster.com? Somehow the theory in the letter is not fitting some of the facts.
It is necessary to be a scientist 100% of the time. You know someone is NOT a scientist when that person ignores data. The letter puts forth a theory of the world that does not even begin to explain information that is immediately available.
Whoever wrote the letter did not bother to examine the implications of what facts he did accept. If every programmer in the world spent the next 5 years writing free software, what would be the state of computing at the end of that period? Would all necessary software have been completely written? Would there be no more work for programmers? No, at the end of the 5 years there would be a great clamor for new programs that became possible because of the new software infrastructure.
Love creates connections between the lover and the world. The connections create opportunities. We know love works, we just don't yet completely understand how.
I recognize that most people who write free software would not think of themselves as lovers, but that's what they are.
If you are a man who has written free software, and you meet an interesting woman, and you tell a little about yourself, and you talk about what you have done to benefit the world, don't forget to ask her what she has done to benefit the world. If the answer is nothing, she's a lot less interesting than you thought at the beginning. You have created a world for yourself in which you can ask for something better.
However, there is a kernel of truth about which the letter hints. While you are loving the world, don't forget to love yourself. There must be a balance.
I hope that fewer people will add to the disfunctionality of the world by making their view of life as narrow as that of the letter.
Aexia, thanks for the link to the story about Marcus Dixon. But the story does show corruption: "The prosecutor, in what can only be perceived as an act of complete disregard for the law, facts and justice in general,
and, "In the jurors own words, the look of horror across their faces when the judge sentenced Marcus to ten years minimum could be seen by everyone. They never knew the consequences. They could not fathom that a boy could go to jail for consensual sex, and certainly not for 10 years with no possibility of parole."
When the government does something completely screwy because of deliberately pursuing some purpose other than good government, that is corruption.
The "Patriot" Act was passed without some Congressmen and women even reading it. It was named that to intimidate members of Congress. Vote against this bill and you will be against patriotism!
The "Patriot" Act was supposed to protect us against people who want to destroy our entire society. Now its being used to harass citizens who do something stupid, and have no political motive. If they get away with this, you will see more and more extensions of government police power. History has shown that, even if they don't get away with it, they will try again.
More and more we are seeing examples of prosecutors who don't want sensible justice, but who just want other people to hurt, because of their own personal mental issues. Last week the Oprah Winfrey show provided another example: An 18-year-old man had sex with a 16-year-old woman at his school. (Big surprise, there.) Later she accused him of rape, and he was found NOT guilty. But he was put into prison for 10 years anyway. The prosecutor said that was entirely justified, and that he had no problems with the punishment.
The U.S. government is rapidly becoming more corrupt. Here are just a few examples:
Killing people and destroying their property:
N.Y. Times editorial
"... Americans paid Ahmad Chalabi to gull them into a war that is costing them a billion a week and a precious human cost."
Lying about scientific facts:
"The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals..."
N.Y. Times
The Guardian
Wired News
Union of Concerned Scientists
The present terrorism against the U.S. people is partly the result of the U.S. government's secret violence:
About a year ago, I hastily put together a short, incomplete history that shows what has happened: History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories.
Okay, but what is the tuned circuit on the output? There are no "LC tanks" at 24 GHz, right?
Just guessing: The radar signal is generated by a microwave oscillator formed by some kind of folded structure on the silicon. The structure must be folded because it must be at least one wavelength of the generated frequency. The wavelength of a 24 GigaHertz signal is:
(300,000,000 meters/second [the speed of light, approx.]) / (24,000,000,000 cycles/second [24 GHz]) = 0.0125 meters, or a wavelength of 1.25 centimeters.
In photos, the radar chips are shown to be less than 1.25 centimeters in width and length. That makes me guess that there is some folded resonant structure.
Does anyone know if that assumption is correct? Is it possible to generate a signal from a structure smaller than one wavelength?
One of the articles says that the maximum transmission speed is 1 GHz, so that is the maximum speed of any digital or analog circuitry. The governmentally designated band is 22 to 29 GigaHertz, so the theoretical maximum speed of data transmission is 7 Gigahertz, the width of the frequency band.
This is a major breakthrough. A large number of these chips can be combined with digital signal processing to make a radar that has an effective antenna size much larger than each chip. Large effective antenna sizes are also great for reliable directed data transmission.
"... your data set is weak."
There is no data set presented. It's just a Slashdot comment.
"My god, I don't even know where to start with your recommendations on how to treat women."
My recommendation: "... treat women right even if they treat you badly." That applies to everyone, of course. Treat everyone right. As I mentioned, I got this idea from someone else. I think it's a good idea.
Yes, theoretically, a rise time of 1/5 that of the fastest signal. However, usually at the upper bandwidth limit, there is phase distortion and amplitude reduction. So, it seems to me that the rule of thumb might hold true. I seem to remember that some fast rise times are achieved by providing resonance near the upper bandwidth limit, or some other synthetic method, so that there is overshoot. I don't remember much about this. It that possibly an explanation for the different estimates?
Modern circuits are not so well controlled as someone might guess. To have 20 kHz output with little phase distortion, it is necessary to pass more than 200 kHz.
But that's not the issue. ICs allow the design of circuits with bandwidths that are literally physically impossible with discrete components. The fundamental bandwidth limitations of the transistors used in the IC may be 200 MHz or more, or even 1.5 gigahertz. Any small problem can cause a circuit to oscillate at 50 MHz, even if the IC is supposedly limited to far less than this.
All you need for oscillation is gain and some positive feedback. In the real world, circuits try all possible combinations almost instantaneously, and begin oscillating for reasons the designer never foresaw. For example, maybe there is capacitive coupling through the IC packaging, and the output circuit alone is oscillating.
This is only a slight exaggeration: There are 4 steps toward making a new electronic device: 1) Build the circuit. 2) Supply power for the first time. 3) Apply an oscilloscope probe and begin discovering all the reasons the circuit is oscillating when it shouldn't. 4) Then discover all the other reasons the circuit isn't working correctly, if any.
I was never a person who thought that killing people and destroying their property was a good way to resolve social problems, but at one time it was my job to repair the automatic flight control systems of fighter-interceptors in the U.S. Air Force's Air Defense Command.
These aircraft required 250 hours of maintenance per hour of flight. (Aircraft meant to be sold to other nations, also, required 15 hours of maintenance per hour of flight. I've followed the development of weapons systems ever since, and my opinion of what is actually delivered is that it is often fraud, or close to fraud. United States taxpayers: Your assigned duty is to find the money to pay, and to avoid thinking.)
Anyhow, during training flights it was required to pull several g's. Sometimes at high accelerations the electronics would go completely crazy, and all inertial reference would be lost. The only fix for this at the time was to land, regain stability, and take off again. The aircraft that had this problem were therefore not much use for any situation actually requiring defense. Worse, the problem seemed to have nothing to do with any particular aircraft, but seemed random.
One day while trying to make a faulty system work on my bench test mockup, I discovered the reason. Some of the amplifiers that controlled the gyros had high frequency parasitic oscillations at perhaps 100 times the normal frequency of operation. You couldn't see the oscillations with normal equipment because the frequency was too high. I had borrowed an oscilloscope from some co-workers who worked on faster electronics.
The design of the amplifiers was acceptable, but many of the amplifiers had bad solder joints. Those with bad solder joints would oscillate; oscillating amplifiers would amplify at the required low frequency, but had a much smaller dynamic range than amplifiers that were not oscillating. (Yes, that bad solder joints could cause this doesn't make much logical sense, but most parasitic oscillations don't make much logical sense.)
The amplifiers had other defects that caused them to have a high failure rate. Every time an amplifier was pulled from an aircraft for a conventional repair, an amplifier was drawn from stock and put in the waiting aircraft so that the aircraft would be immediately operational. That was the reason the instability problems kept moving from aircraft to aircraft.
I drew a circuit diagram of my test setup, wrote an article about the problem, had a photographer take photos of the test setup, took screen photos of the parasitic oscillations, and sent everything to those who review such things. This had several effects. Someone at Air Defense Command headquarters wrote a letter praising my work. When everyone was reviewed for p
The parent comment is exactly correct. You need 10 times the bandwidth if you want to see the waveform.
I said 3 times because, in my experience, that is the minimum at which I can extract any useful information. (Mostly you are looking for parasitic oscillations.)
Remember that the oscilloscope bandwidth close to the frequency of the waveform being measured distorts that waveform. (In phase if the frequency being measured is a sine wave.) You need an oscilloscope bandwidth maybe 3 times the highest frequency being measured.
ICs often have very high potential bandwidths, and, when something goes wrong, even an audio IC can have sometimes have parasitic oscillations at extremely high frequencies. If you are working on a circuit, you need to be able to see those parasitic signals.
I don't like this fact, because it is expensive, but 100 MHz seems to be a good oscilloscope bandwidth. I bought a very old Tektronix scope to get the needed bandwidth at a reasonable price.
For those who use GUIs, Java is not cross-platform. Java requires Java to be installed, and it isn't installed on recent copies of Windows. "Cross-platform" is not completely true.
I haven't been doing (much) cross-platform programming, but I'm intense about finding an acceptable way. I predicted the downfall of Novell long before it happened, and now I'm predicting that Linux will eventually become the only commonly used desktop OS, due to the fact that Microsoft managers do not seem to be able to find a way to live in the world without being abusive. Now is not the time to write a lot of Microsoft-specific code.
C++ with WxWidgets (formerly WxWindows until they were threatened by Microsoft) seems the best way.
However, the real answer is for Java to become useful for those who need extensive GUIs and fast execution. It's obvious that Java is on the right track. Programmers of business applications don't want to worry about memory allocation.
Right now I won't use Java because I write GUI intensive applications that are slow and quirky in Java. When Java is Open Source, I will still be able to write proprietary applications in Java, just like I can write proprietary applications using GCC.
The concerns of the Java community are real. Yes, there is idealism, but it is mostly realism. Java cannot fulfill the world's needs for it until it is free from the control of one company.
One thing that needs to be said is that this is worth millions of dollars in free publicity for IBM. There are many programmers who, before IBM started supporting Open Source, would not have considered working for IBM.
I'm not saying that IBM is asking for Java to be Open Source because of publicity. But that support has a wonderful side-effect for the company.
It's great to have a large organization like IBM that can use its voice to do something that has long been needed. The world needs better GUI support for Java.
We need true native Java compilers, so that it is not easy to de-compile Java, as it is now. (I get the impression that GCJ merely makes calls to libgcj, as the home page says, and is therefore easy to decompile. Does anyone know if that is true?) Business logic is very easy to steal through de-compilation.
At the BBB: How do you check a particular company? I don't see that anywhere on the BBB sites.