A web server is 'way cheaper than switches and blinky lights, and doesn't wear out.
Of course putting in a Pic just to be a web server isn't ideal. But it serves as a proof-of-concept: If you can embed a web server in a Pic, you can embed it in whatever tiny micro you are using to control the device. It just costs you a little more ROM space, a sliver of RAM, and a connector for whaetever you're using for a line.
It will be better yet when embedded micros come with Homenet (or the like) support. Talk to your home computer over the power line at the cost of a couple capacitors on the board and the use of a couple otherwise unused pins, or something to that effect.
Can anyone explain to everyone here how the T1 & T3 and OC3 rates work?
Sure. I've been architecting an ASIC for an "edge router" for the last year, and I've had to live and breathe this stuff.
ENORMOUSLY simplified:
DSn (n= 1, 1C, 2, 3, 4NA) refer to data format standards. Tn (n= 1, 1C, 2, 3, 4NA) refer to standards for carrying those formats on wires. Similarly, STS-n and OC-n refer to the SONET standards for data formats and carrying them on an optical fiber, respectively.
These are standards for US/Canada. Japan is virtually identical (Jn; n=1,...). Europe did something similar but incompatable, of course. B-)
The basic quantum of data is 8,000 8-bit bytes ("octets") per second (nicknamed a "DS0"). This is 64,000 bits per second, enough for one phone call. (Some phone equipment steals one bit out of the byte every 6 frames for signaling {ring, dialing, off-hook}, making one of the bits untrustworthy, which is part of why modems maxed out at about 56,000 BPS rather than 64,000.) And yes, that IS a decimal 8,000, not 8K.
DS1/T1 packs one bit of overhead and 24 bytes of payload into a 193-bit "frame". A T1 feed will typically be "unchannelized" - you get to use the 24 bytes. So the data rate is 1.544 Mhz, and you get to use 1.536 Mbps. For PPP the data will typically be HDLC packets, but some applications will use ATM cells (stuffed with packets fragmented according to the AAL5 standard). The data packaging and protocols will consume some of that remaining bandwidth.
(ISDN come in two flavors. One ("primary rate"?) uses a T1 but steals one of the 24 DS0s for signaling. The other ("base rate"?) is a format similar in style to a T1, but with the payload stripped down to 2 DS0 channels plus a narrow signaling channel. ISDN makes "digital phone calls" of DS0 bandwidth. Typical equipment can make multiple calls and use MultiLink PPP to combine them into a bigger pipe.)
Higher rates were originally designed to pack up and carry lower rates. A "channelized" DS2 carries 4 DS1s, a DS3 carries 7 DS2s (i.e. 28 DS1s). But if you buy a point-to-point DS3 you can also use it "unchannelized":
An unchannelized DS3/T3 runs at 44.736 MHz. One bit in 85 is used for overhead, and the rest are payload, so you get about 44.21 Mhz raw bandwidth. Again your typical PPP feed will use HDLC, but an ISP talking to a DSLAM will use ATM cells. If he expects to do voice-over-packet he might use the "PLCP mapping" of the ATM cells into the DS3 to trade away about 4% of the bandwidth to pass timing information to the DSLAM. (T1 clock rates are tightly synchronized, to keep the DS0s - which are the voice sampling rate - synchronized, preventing "clicks" in your phone. T3 rates are very accurate, but NOT tightly synchronized. A click every three days is acceptable. A click every few minutes is not.)
An OC-1/STS-1 has, per second: - 8000 frames, each composed of - 9 rows, each composed of - 90 octets. For a total bit rate of 51.84 Mhz. The first three octets in each row are used for overhead related to alligning and tranporting the data. The rest is payload. Depending on what the payload IS, perhaps one byte per row might be used for overhead there, as well.
The payload is allowed to "float" within the 87*9 non-overhead bytes of the framing structure, so that when it hops from one framing to another the box where it hops doesn't need a big buffer to get it alligned, and so things don't break if the boxes' clocks drift. Part of the 3-bytes-per-row overhead is a pointer showing where the start of the payload's frame is currently located within the STS frame.
You'll notice that the STS-1 rate is similar to the T3 rate, and that's NOT an accident. The SONET standard was designed to interface with the existing phone network, and the T3 was the layer where they started. One of the many possible payloads of an OC-1/STS-1 is a DS3. So for raw usable data rates think OC-1 = T3. You'll be dead on if it's carrying a T3, and real close if it's carrying something else.
An STS-n/OC-n is N times the STS-1/OC-1 rate, and carries N times the payload. Unlike the DSn hierarchy, which has separate standards for each layer, SONET defines a general mechanism for higher rates. So the particular rates that are of interest are the ones for which equipment manufacturers chose to build the equipment.
The format of an STS-n is just N STS-1s, with their framing alligned, interleaved by byte, i.e. the first byte from STS-1 number one, then the first from from STS-1 number 2, and so on for N bytes. Then the second byte from STS-1 nubmer 1, and so on forever.
There are two flavors of combining them. An STS-n/OC-n is N separate STS-1/OC-1 channels. An STS-nC/OC-nC is a single channel: There are still N STS-1 framing strucures, but a single payload is smeared out across all of them.
Once you've got one sample, you need to check it against others to find the variations (especially: to find the oddball stuff unique to the baseline).
But that's a LOT easier once you've got the baseline established. You can hybridize the baseline DNA strands with strands from the new target to zero in on the differences.
Meanwhile, you can work with the baseline to identify the location and function of each gene. You start examining the variants as they become available.
Identifying genetic diseases before they occur is all well and good but is it really that valuable if all we can tell people right now is that twenty years down the line you're going to get Hunington's disease or someother incurable ailment and die?
The outlook for coming up with effective genetic therapies is pretty bleak. We haven't really been able to treat even the diseases that are purely genetic and are caused by a well defined mutation.
That's about to change, big time!
A hack using a combination of DNA and RNA has been constructed, which zeros in on a particular site on the cell's DNA, clamps on hard (using the RNA portion of the composite molecule), and prompts the cell to make exactly the desired edit (apparently by convincing the DNA repair enzymes that there's work to do).
Not only that, but if you just put the DNA/RNA hacking molecule OUTSIDE the cell and temporarily tweak one parameter (pressure, I think it was), the cell takes up the molecule and transports it to the nucleus.
So you can edit cultured cells in the desired manner, then implant them in the patient. If the disease is, say, an enzyme deficiency, you're done.
Edit some stem cells and inject them, and they'll replace or gradually convert whole organs.
If you need to work on a lot of cells in some tissue of the patient at once, you might be able to just shoot him up with this stuff until his cells are swimming in it, then pop him into a hyperbaric chamber to get the cells to take it up. If that doesn't work, try using viral envelopes as nanotech syringes.
There's LOTS of possibilities. The revolution is almost upon us.
The information may not ever actually exist on Federal Servers.
You misunderstand what the government is accused of doing.
What the government agency did was buy "targeted" adds on several of the big search-engine sites. Then, when anyone made a keyword search that included drug-related keywords (example: "grow pot") they were likely to get an "anti drug" banner add from the government along with their results.
The banner add was served from a government computer, with a name that sounded kinda druggy and not AT ALL government. The government computer got the user's IP address, the contents of the query (encoded into the URL for the convenience of the advertiser's add-targeting software), and all the other information about the user that the browser hands out. And it placed a cookie on the user's computer, to label him from then on. They admit to tracking the users' email addresses "to gauge the effectiveness of the (alleged anti-drug propaganda) campaign".
Browsers hand out a LOT of information, and some of it can be used by other tools (such as finger, reverse domain number lookup, and domain registration data bases) to identify the user and/or his employer (if he's browsing from work).
The potential for abuse is astronomical. For instance: If they trace some drug-related queries back to a company domain, they might contact the employer, insinuate that the employee is a druggie, and tell the employer to look in the user's cookie file for proof.
I could easily compose a dozen other nightmare scenarios.
(I tried to submit this info a couple days ago, with a reference, when it first came to light, but slashdot rejected the article.)
# is the musical symbol to augment a natural note a half tone, making it sharp
In other words, increment it (by a half-step - the basic quantum of the even-tempered scale).
So it's a double pun against C++ (i.e. "C incremented by one", or "The next step beyond C"). The other, of course, being that # looks like two +es overlaid.
I note that by chosing "sharp" (add a half-step) they are only claiming half as much improvement over C as C++ does. B-)
By perfect I wasn't referring to the eyesight (where an official { = lie } redefinition of "perfect" might apply) but to lens shape (where the officials haven't trashed the language.)
Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. B-)
Now what I want is broad spectrum eyesight..IR, maybe a bit of UV...
IR is tough, but UV is easy. The retina is sensitive to it, and the cornea and humors pass it. Just remove the lens and substitute something that passes UV (such as glass). If you're so old that your lens has hardened and won't flex well to focus, you won't even miss it.
This operation was standard for lens disease in the WW II era - with some interesting side effects:
Some oldsters who had had it done and who knew code were assigned to ships stationed off the French coast. The French Resistance had UV semaphore lights, and would blink messages to the ships. The blinks were invisible to normal eyes, and even if you had instruments you'd have to know where to aim. But those with the operation could just look at the coast, and the light would stand out like a blinking spotlight (which it was).
The definitive text on ground-based ultraviolet astronomy was written by an astronomer who had had the operation, and for whom UV stars were naded-eye objects. B-)
I wonder if in theory they could use the measurements to smooth out all the imperfections, presumably using laser surgery, and permanently give you the super vision.
Almost certainly. (At least for one focus distance, and probably near-ideal for most of the range of focus.)
All the mirror is doing is temporarily removing the eye's deviation from an ideal lens. Laser surgery should be able to permanently remove the imperfections (at least in one layer of the lens system), producing the equivalent of the mirror + eye system without the mirror.
This would be equivalent to having perfect eyes (or very close) - not the approximation the meat machine (even in its best incarnations) comes with. That would be the best that could be done with an eye that size, made of those materials. You might be able to do slightly better by separately perfecting both the lens and the cornea.
Now you could probably get better yet by substituting other materials (or a multi-lens mix of them) to get less chromatic abberation, or to focus better over a broader range of distances. And of COURSE you could do better by making the eye bigger. But it is interesting to see that the "stock" eye averages far enough from perfect that a very noticable improvement can be made by reshaping it (or the virtual equivalent).
Selling crack is illegal (atleast in the United States), but you can legally say "If you want crack, go down to 6th street and ask for Tony, he will set you up".
The person that bought the crack will be aresseted for possieon of an illegal substance. The person selling the crack will be arrested for distrubating an illegal substance. What the hell are the going to arrest you with, talking about an illegal substance?
(IANAL, so let's see if I get the terms right...)
Facilitating. Accessory before the fact. Conspiracy (if they can show you and the dealer had some kind of agreement - even a trivial one that gives you nothing - and they can construe almost any contact or information transfer as agreement).
Seems to me these laws and interpretations need to be struck as well. As I read the Constitution such speech is protected. But that won't keep you out of jail while you're waiting for the courts to agree.
[Microsoft] put the auto-preview in *intentionally*, and were responsible for all the dodgy code. So get them.
Can't get them with this law, because it was passed after they did it. (You might get them partly, for stuff they ship after the law goes into effect...)
But it would be interesting to go after them for negligence in a civil suit. B-)
That's interesting.. so, that would mean the image effectively "hits" the screen and can't go any farther back, so wouldn't that kill some of the depth of the image and put things on the same plane that aren't mean to be?
Actually the images can appear to be anywhere from the end of your nose to infinity (and beyond! B-) ). It's just that if they're far from the screen in either direction your eyes will try to focus on the apparent location, and end up DEfocussing the image (which is actually on the screen, not at the apparent depth). This can lead to eyestrain.
A hack to avoid it is to compensate with glasses. If the images of interest are mainly far behind the screen, for instance, wear reading glasses. That will focus an image that is actually at reading distance when your eyes try to focus far away.
However, I imagine it is a fairly restrictive veiwing angle and thusnot that great if you want to show something to others.
It's not all THAT bad. (If this is what I think it is) there are a SET of narrow angles from the screen where the stereo effect works correctly.
They're bisected by another set of angles where the depth is reversed, and the space between the clean images (normal or reversed depth) has regions where the two images wash into each other.
So a person can sit closely beside you (distance from your right eye to his left is one, three, five, etc. times the distance between your eyes) and simultaneously see the same image.
The main problems are...
- You have to be at distance from the screen equal to a constant times the spacing between your eyes (plus or minus maybe 20%) to get the effect. At the wrong distance the images for each eye also bleed into the other eye, giving you a triple image - the one you want, plus two single-eye ghosts.
- Images TOO far ahead of or behind the screen will give you eyestrain - because your eyes have to focus at the distance to the screen, but the paralax depth cue says the object is far from the screen. So your eye muscles hunt and get tired.
There are a number of emailham radio bridges operated by yacht clubs for boaters.
Contact the clubs in the area of your home port for more info. (Please don't contact them unless you plan to actually use it for offshore boating - the clubs have limited resources, so we'd ruin it for real users by slashdotting them out of curiosity.)
You can use an off-the-shelf ham TNC and your boat's longwave radio. (You don't have a longwave? Well GET one if you're going offshore! Longwave licenses for boaters are easy to get, and your boat's HF is line-of-sight, so it quits once you're over the horizon from land.)
They must be used sparingly - it's a single 1200 baud channel (further degraded by by the protocol's handshaking turnarounds), shared by everybody using that bridge (which essentially means everybody in that part of the ocean).
How could you show that "physics is invariant between reference frames"?
You don't show it. You assume it. Both the special and the general theories START from assuming that: - Physical laws are observed to be identical in reference frames moving at different velocities. - The speed of light is observed to be the same in reference frames moving at different velocities. and derives all the space-twisting, mass-boosting, time-dialating wierdness from reconciling those two assumptions (which are accurate to measurable limits for ordinary velocities).
Special relativity deals with reference frames that are moving at constant velocity relative to each other. General relativity adds the complications to handle accellerated reference frames and gravity, along with the third assumption that inertial and gravitational mass are the same.
Perhaps a BIT oversimplified. B-) But that's the basic idea.
MCI was the first. It put microwave antennas on buildings and towers, and sold long-distance service. (They're those dishes with the red lightning bolt.) And it sued to break the AT&T monopoly on long distance service.
Once that monopoly was broken, Sprint was exactly what you described: It started as Southern Pacific Railroad selling unused capacity of their new fiber-along-the-right-of-way as another (the second?) competetive long-distance company. The name is an acronym for the railroad's original networking project - Southern Pacific Railroad Net .
Not to be outdone, MCI joined the bandwagon and leased fibre rights along another right-of-way. (If I recall correctly MCI made a deal with another railroad, and it was yet another company who cut one with a power company to run fiber under the big power towers.)
Seems to me we must determine whether the "leading edge" is a hypothetical made up to save causality or a real information carrier resulting from the bandwidth limitation of the pulse. To separate these cases we must answer this question:
Does the apparatus recreate the entire pulse, or just the main body?
Phrased another way: If the information is all contained in the hypothetical "leading edge", does the leading edge get reproduced with the same lead as the rest of the pulse?
The way to answer this is to send the allegedly sped-up pulse through one or several additional steps (or a much longer device) and see if it continues to be transmitted FTL and correctly recreated in each device. Keep increasing the hop count or the length of the hop until the total time the pulse arrived early (as compared with propagaion in vacuum) exceeds the time-length of the hypothetical leading edge, and the pulse is either distorted beyond readability or still intact.
If it arrives intact, then the WHOLE PULSE, including any information it carried, got moved forward, sending information FTL. If it doesn't, then the information went out in the leading edge, and the FTL transmission was only apparent.
The only reason we ever thought of light as a hard speed limit is because some (Like Albert) thought this would violate cause and effect not any physical law
Even with special relativity you can show that if you can send a signal faster than c in one frame of reference, you can pick another frame of reference where the signal goes backward in time.
And since physics is invariant between reference frames you could use anoter moving-with-respect-to-the-first-frame apparatus to send another faster-than-light signal (as viewed in the second frame) to return the information to its starting point in the first reference frame's space (as viewed in BOTH frames), arriving before it left.
Now you've got a signal back in time to a point inside the "past" light-cone of the moment in spacetime where it originated (or at least before it entered the first FTL apparatus). Use it to disable the sending signal (as by realligning a mirror if turning off the laser is too slow, given the length of your apparati) and you've got a causality paradox.
THAT's why "some (Like Albert)" thought this would violate cause and effect.
Unlearning is ESPECIALLY necessary for new grads
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Too Old To Code?
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When new people come out of college they are fresh and full of energy. They may have to learn skills, but that is easier then UN-learning bad habits.
The problem is that schools teach bad habits, too.
A few years ago Minsky divided Computer Science education into three periods of about 10 years each:
First period: The schools had no clue what to teach. So they taught the students how to re-invent everything that had just been invented. (For instance: Every grad was expected to be able to write his own compiler.) There was an excessive focus on mathematical skills (at least partly to simplify rationing of the limited number of enrollment slots, due to the limited availability of computer time).
Result: A 4-year degree was actually a handicap - because it took longer to convince the newgrad than a non-grad that there was something else he needed to know to be productive.
Period 2: The schools got their curricula organized and produced people with useful skills.
Result: A 4-year degree was more useful than not. But work experience - about two years of it - was still necessary before a grad became really productive, and getting that "break-in" job was sometimes difficult. (You also needed a contiguous two-year stint to prove you would stick around until a project was done before you could start job-hopping.)
Period 3: The schools got too heavily into formalisms - to the point of religion.
Result: Again students needed to be cracked loose from a mold before they could start learning what they really needed, and a 4-year degree became a liability.
Particular problems are graduates of Ivy League and other big-name schools (at all degree levels) and PhDs (from all schools). One thing Ivy Leaguers learn is conversational gambits that let them shut down those who disagree with them and/or later appropriate credit for their ideas. Grads from big-name schools often think that if it wasn't taught in their classes it isn't importand. PhDs sometimes suffer from that as well, and also are heavily invested in being right whenever they open their mouths.
To program or design effectively you have to accept being wrong occasionally, recognizing it early and backing out quickly before too much effort is wasted. You have to learn not to back out too often. You have to learn that an adequate but standardized and well-documented design and/or style is more effective than burning cycles hunting for the "best" design/style. You have to learn to work in a team - letting others be expert, too. You have to learn that knowledge is teritorial, not hierarchical - often the person with the right answer is not the person with the highest certification. And you have to learn to learn - that you come to any job with only SOME of the knowlege needed to perform it, and you must know how to pick up the rest as you go.
But by period 3 a new generation of management was loose upon the world. And many companies would only hire people with the degrees - and sometimes only degrees from certain colleges. So the degrees became necessary for entry at many places, regardless of their actual lack of predictive ability Re job performance.
Also, a slew of management fads came in by that time: They each have their own buzzwords, but this is what they amount to: Age discrimination (new grad to late 40s). Sex discrimination. Race discrimination (for US upper-to-middle class Anglos, East Indians, Orientals). Handicap discrimination.
And a convenient myth was created: That there was a "talent shortage" in the US. So lower-paid immigrants could be hired to replace higher-paid US workers.
Of course this is gross mismanagement. And it hurts the companies that let their administrators it - by limiting their potential recruit pool and leading them to pay a premium for non-job related employee "features" while ignoring the actual work-related skill set. They get away with it because the added value of HiTek is so great that mismanagement can piss away an INCREDIBLE amount of resources and still keep the company in the black - for a while.
But the myths work to the advantage of those with skill and experience, and the little startup companies that are willing to hire them. Because there's a large pool of very skilled labor available, to those who are willing to hunt it down and pay for it. And there are challenging and lucrative positions available to those with the skills to fill them.
As you become more experienced it takes longer to find a good fit - because there are fewer jobs that actually require all those skills.
I was educated in Minsky's first period. I worked my way most of the way through college, got to all-but-some-distribution-requirements, then let my consulting practice expand to full time and never got that degree. By then I had the "equivalent experience" that once appeared on the job reqs. I've accepted holes in employment - once nearly a year long - rather than let my salary or billing rate drop from monotonic increasing (though if I had it to do over I'd take a stop-loss consult about 4 months into that long break. B-) ) I've avoided becoming management, yet have pulling down six figures for a while now as an individual contributor - even salaried.
But my current job will probably be my last: Thirty years in the industry - mainly in software - got me the one thing it was all intended to get me: in the door of a startup at the right time as it was putting together the right product. The startup was collecting the experineced industry experts, and now I was one of 'em. We've already been bought out for enough that I could retire on the options that have already vested. But I won't yet - because I expect the thing I'm co-archetecting to expand the bottom line until the shares' current value will seem like peanuts - and there's three more years of vesting to go.
It used a MIPS and Linux. The design was wide open, the power miniscule. (Something like 7 watts running flat out, as I recall. Same as an incandescent nightlight.) The fan was just so people would trust it. It dissipated so little power that a fan wasn't necessary unless you were running it in an oven - at which point it was counterproductive. B-) )
I used one of those in a previous job. We were developing for embedded MIPS and needed a compiler. Gnu wasn't supporting cross-platform and we didn't know about Cygnus' patches to fix that. (Over a K of lines when they got fed up and forked the code base.) So we bought a Qube as an utterly cheap way ($1K) to get a MIPS/GNU development platform.
My main gripe with the Cobalt Qube was that the 12V for the disk drive didn't go through the switching regulator. If they'd regulated it so it would be reliable with a raw supply from about 11.25 to 13.75 it would have been IDEAL to babysit a cabin powered off a solar/lead-acid system.
(Or almost ideal. The single PCI expansion slot - intended for a particular 100Mbps ethernet card (to supliment the built-in 10-base-t) - was only fed the +5 supply, which limited flexibility a bit.)
Loading a new kernel was interesting. You had to name it this particular name that looked like a game in a directory owned by one of Cobalt's developers. (Don't recall it at the moment.) It was the only other file the ROM bootloader would boot.
1. What effect will this type of memory device has under radiation bombardments?
The conductive state is a (poly?)crystaline material that shorts two electrodes.
The resistive state has a region of amorphous (glassy) material in the space between the electrodes, surrounded by the remaining material which is still in the (poly?)crystaline state.
Writing it consists of MELTING the region between the electrodes, leaving it either cool enough that it solidifies quickly into the amorphous state, or hot enough that it solidifies slowly and the crystals grow into the melted region as it freezes. Think frost on a window in the winter.
(Of course at these scales, even "slowly" is measured in nanoseconds of elapsed time.)
Charge carriers from particles won't make significant increases in current in the glassy state, or remelt it and let it crystalize. Particles might disrupt SOME of the crystaline conductive state - but there is a LOT of it in parallel. By the time enough raidation hits it to increase its resistance measurably the rest of the components in the computer will be approaching the "sand" state.
Think about trying to use radiation to disrupt a wire until it won't conduct, or a glass bottle until it will.
2. What effect will magnetic forces (and/or electro-magnetic forces) has on this type of memory?
It isn't made of magnetic material. (Again, think of using a magnet to disrupt a copper wire until it stops conducting, or a glass bottle until it starts.)
If you put a big enough EMP into such a chip you might generate enough voltage and current to write the bit. But you'll probably fry both the static protection and the components in the pad driver/receivers on the chip's terminals with much smaller EMPs, because the interconnect wiring is a much bigger antenna.
Slashdot Mirror
A web server is 'way cheaper than switches and blinky lights, and doesn't wear out.
Of course putting in a Pic just to be a web server isn't ideal. But it serves as a proof-of-concept: If you can embed a web server in a Pic, you can embed it in whatever tiny micro you are using to control the device. It just costs you a little more ROM space, a sliver of RAM, and a connector for whaetever you're using for a line.
It will be better yet when embedded micros come with Homenet (or the like) support. Talk to your home computer over the power line at the cost of a couple capacitors on the board and the use of a couple otherwise unused pins, or something to that effect.
Can anyone explain to everyone here how the T1 & T3 and OC3 rates work?
...). Europe did something similar but incompatable, of course. B-)
...
Sure. I've been architecting an ASIC for an "edge router" for the last year, and I've had to live and breathe this stuff.
ENORMOUSLY simplified:
DSn (n= 1, 1C, 2, 3, 4NA) refer to data format standards. Tn (n= 1, 1C, 2, 3, 4NA) refer to standards for carrying those formats on wires. Similarly, STS-n and OC-n refer to the SONET standards for data formats and carrying them on an optical fiber, respectively.
These are standards for US/Canada. Japan is virtually identical (Jn; n=1,
For data only a few are in common use. These are:
Unchannelized T1/DS1
Unchannelized T3/DS3
STS-n/OC-n n=1, 3, 12, 24, 48,
The basic quantum of data is 8,000 8-bit bytes ("octets") per second (nicknamed a "DS0"). This is 64,000 bits per second, enough for one phone call. (Some phone equipment steals one bit out of the byte every 6 frames for signaling {ring, dialing, off-hook}, making one of the bits untrustworthy, which is part of why modems maxed out at about 56,000 BPS rather than 64,000.) And yes, that IS a decimal 8,000, not 8K.
DS1/T1 packs one bit of overhead and 24 bytes of payload into a 193-bit "frame". A T1 feed will typically be "unchannelized" - you get to use the 24 bytes. So the data rate is 1.544 Mhz, and you get to use 1.536 Mbps. For PPP the data will typically be HDLC packets, but some applications will use ATM cells (stuffed with packets fragmented according to the AAL5 standard). The data packaging and protocols will consume some of that remaining bandwidth.
(ISDN come in two flavors. One ("primary rate"?) uses a T1 but steals one of the 24 DS0s for signaling. The other ("base rate"?) is a format similar in style to a T1, but with the payload stripped down to 2 DS0 channels plus a narrow signaling channel. ISDN makes "digital phone calls" of DS0 bandwidth. Typical equipment can make multiple calls and use MultiLink PPP to combine them into a bigger pipe.)
Higher rates were originally designed to pack up and carry lower rates. A "channelized" DS2 carries 4 DS1s, a DS3 carries 7 DS2s (i.e. 28 DS1s). But if you buy a point-to-point DS3 you can also use it "unchannelized":
An unchannelized DS3/T3 runs at 44.736 MHz. One bit in 85 is used for overhead, and the rest are payload, so you get about 44.21 Mhz raw bandwidth. Again your typical PPP feed will use HDLC, but an ISP talking to a DSLAM will use ATM cells. If he expects to do voice-over-packet he might use the "PLCP mapping" of the ATM cells into the DS3 to trade away about 4% of the bandwidth to pass timing information to the DSLAM. (T1 clock rates are tightly synchronized, to keep the DS0s - which are the voice sampling rate - synchronized, preventing "clicks" in your phone. T3 rates are very accurate, but NOT tightly synchronized. A click every three days is acceptable. A click every few minutes is not.)
An OC-1/STS-1 has, per second:
- 8000 frames, each composed of
- 9 rows, each composed of
- 90 octets.
For a total bit rate of 51.84 Mhz. The first three octets in each row are used for overhead related to alligning and tranporting the data. The rest is payload. Depending on what the payload IS, perhaps one byte per row might be used for overhead there, as well.
The payload is allowed to "float" within the 87*9 non-overhead bytes of the framing structure, so that when it hops from one framing to another the box where it hops doesn't need a big buffer to get it alligned, and so things don't break if the boxes' clocks drift. Part of the 3-bytes-per-row overhead is a pointer showing where the start of the payload's frame is currently located within the STS frame.
You'll notice that the STS-1 rate is similar to the T3 rate, and that's NOT an accident. The SONET standard was designed to interface with the existing phone network, and the T3 was the layer where they started. One of the many possible payloads of an OC-1/STS-1 is a DS3. So for raw usable data rates think OC-1 = T3. You'll be dead on if it's carrying a T3, and real close if it's carrying something else.
An STS-n/OC-n is N times the STS-1/OC-1 rate, and carries N times the payload. Unlike the DSn hierarchy, which has separate standards for each layer, SONET defines a general mechanism for higher rates. So the particular rates that are of interest are the ones for which equipment manufacturers chose to build the equipment.
The format of an STS-n is just N STS-1s, with their framing alligned, interleaved by byte, i.e. the first byte from STS-1 number one, then the first from from STS-1 number 2, and so on for N bytes. Then the second byte from STS-1 nubmer 1, and so on forever.
There are two flavors of combining them. An STS-n/OC-n is N separate STS-1/OC-1 channels. An STS-nC/OC-nC is a single channel: There are still N STS-1 framing strucures, but a single payload is smeared out across all of them.
Once you've got one sample, you need to check it against others to find the variations (especially: to find the oddball stuff unique to the baseline).
But that's a LOT easier once you've got the baseline established. You can hybridize the baseline DNA strands with strands from the new target to zero in on the differences.
Meanwhile, you can work with the baseline to identify the location and function of each gene. You start examining the variants as they become available.
Identifying genetic diseases before they occur is all well and good but is it really that valuable if all we can tell people right now is that twenty years down the line you're going to get Hunington's disease or someother incurable ailment and die?
The outlook for coming up with effective genetic therapies is pretty bleak. We haven't really been able to treat even the diseases that are purely genetic and are caused by a well defined mutation.
That's about to change, big time!
A hack using a combination of DNA and RNA has been constructed, which zeros in on a particular site on the cell's DNA, clamps on hard (using the RNA portion of the composite molecule), and prompts the cell to make exactly the desired edit (apparently by convincing the DNA repair enzymes that there's work to do).
Not only that, but if you just put the DNA/RNA hacking molecule OUTSIDE the cell and temporarily tweak one parameter (pressure, I think it was), the cell takes up the molecule and transports it to the nucleus.
So you can edit cultured cells in the desired manner, then implant them in the patient. If the disease is, say, an enzyme deficiency, you're done.
Edit some stem cells and inject them, and they'll replace or gradually convert whole organs.
If you need to work on a lot of cells in some tissue of the patient at once, you might be able to just shoot him up with this stuff until his cells are swimming in it, then pop him into a hyperbaric chamber to get the cells to take it up. If that doesn't work, try using viral envelopes as nanotech syringes.
There's LOTS of possibilities. The revolution is almost upon us.
The information may not ever actually exist on Federal Servers.
You misunderstand what the government is accused of doing.
What the government agency did was buy "targeted" adds on several of the big search-engine sites. Then, when anyone made a keyword search that included drug-related keywords (example: "grow pot") they were likely to get an "anti drug" banner add from the government along with their results.
The banner add was served from a government computer, with a name that sounded kinda druggy and not AT ALL government. The government computer got the user's IP address, the contents of the query (encoded into the URL for the convenience of the advertiser's add-targeting software), and all the other information about the user that the browser hands out. And it placed a cookie on the user's computer, to label him from then on. They admit to tracking the users' email addresses "to gauge the effectiveness of the (alleged anti-drug propaganda) campaign".
Browsers hand out a LOT of information, and some of it can be used by other tools (such as finger,
reverse domain number lookup, and domain registration data bases) to identify the user and/or his employer (if he's browsing from work).
The potential for abuse is astronomical. For instance: If they trace some drug-related queries back to a company domain, they might contact the employer, insinuate that the employee is a druggie, and tell the employer to look in the user's cookie file for proof.
I could easily compose a dozen other nightmare scenarios.
(I tried to submit this info a couple days ago, with a reference, when it first came to light, but slashdot rejected the article.)
# is the musical symbol to augment a natural note a half tone, making it sharp
In other words, increment it (by a half-step - the basic quantum of the even-tempered scale).
So it's a double pun against C++ (i.e. "C incremented by one", or "The next step beyond C"). The other, of course, being that # looks like two +es overlaid.
I note that by chosing "sharp" (add a half-step) they are only claiming half as much improvement over C as C++ does. B-)
in eyesight perfect is defined as the average.
By perfect I wasn't referring to the eyesight (where an official { = lie } redefinition of "perfect" might apply) but to lens shape (where the officials haven't trashed the language.)
Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. B-)
Now what I want is broad spectrum eyesight..IR, maybe a bit of UV...
IR is tough, but UV is easy. The retina is sensitive to it, and the cornea and humors pass it. Just remove the lens and substitute something that passes UV (such as glass). If you're so old that your lens has hardened and won't flex well to focus, you won't even miss it.
This operation was standard for lens disease in the WW II era - with some interesting side effects:
Some oldsters who had had it done and who knew code were assigned to ships stationed off the French coast. The French Resistance had UV semaphore lights, and would blink messages to the ships. The blinks were invisible to normal eyes, and even if you had instruments you'd have to know where to aim. But those with the operation could just look at the coast, and the light would stand out like a blinking spotlight (which it was).
The definitive text on ground-based ultraviolet astronomy was written by an astronomer who had had the operation, and for whom UV stars were naded-eye objects. B-)
I wonder if in theory they could use the measurements to smooth out all the imperfections, presumably using laser surgery, and permanently give you the super vision.
Almost certainly. (At least for one focus distance, and probably near-ideal for most of the range of focus.)
All the mirror is doing is temporarily removing the eye's deviation from an ideal lens. Laser surgery should be able to permanently remove the imperfections (at least in one layer of the lens system), producing the equivalent of the mirror + eye system without the mirror.
This would be equivalent to having perfect eyes (or very close) - not the approximation the meat machine (even in its best incarnations) comes with. That would be the best that could be done with an eye that size, made of those materials. You might be able to do slightly better by separately perfecting both the lens and the cornea.
Now you could probably get better yet by substituting other materials (or a multi-lens mix of them) to get less chromatic abberation, or to focus better over a broader range of distances. And of COURSE you could do better by making the eye bigger. But it is interesting to see that the "stock" eye averages far enough from perfect that a very noticable improvement can be made by reshaping it (or the virtual equivalent).
Selling crack is illegal (atleast in the United States), but you can legally say "If you want crack, go down to 6th street and ask for Tony, he will set you up".
The person that bought the crack will be aresseted for possieon of an illegal substance. The person selling the crack will be arrested for distrubating an illegal substance. What the hell are the going to arrest you with, talking about an illegal substance?
(IANAL, so let's see if I get the terms right...)
Facilitating. Accessory before the fact. Conspiracy (if they can show you and the dealer had some kind of agreement - even a trivial one that gives you nothing - and they can construe almost any contact or information transfer as agreement).
Seems to me these laws and interpretations need to be struck as well. As I read the Constitution such speech is protected. But that won't keep you out of jail while you're waiting for the courts to agree.
Judges should not take into account anonymous hate mail presented by a petitioner as evidence that there is a credible threat against the petitioner.
This is because the petitioners can create throwaway accounts, generate as much hate mail as they feel they need, and send it to themselves.
The same applies to Anonymous Slashdot postings, as well.
(This is not to say that there haven't been genuine stupid emails and postings. But who knows how many, if any, of them are real?)
"On the internet nobody can tell you're the MPAA." B-)
[Microsoft] put the auto-preview in *intentionally*, and were responsible for all the dodgy code. So get them.
Can't get them with this law, because it was passed after they did it. (You might get them partly, for stuff they ship after the law goes into effect...)
But it would be interesting to go after them for negligence in a civil suit. B-)
That's interesting.. so, that would mean the image effectively "hits" the screen and can't go any farther back, so wouldn't that kill some of the depth of the image and put things on the same plane that aren't mean to be?
Actually the images can appear to be anywhere from the end of your nose to infinity (and beyond! B-) ). It's just that if they're far from the screen in either direction your eyes will try to focus on the apparent location, and end up DEfocussing the image (which is actually on the screen, not at the apparent depth). This can lead to eyestrain.
A hack to avoid it is to compensate with glasses. If the images of interest are mainly far behind the screen, for instance, wear reading glasses. That will focus an image that is actually at reading distance when your eyes try to focus far away.
However, I imagine it is a fairly restrictive veiwing angle and thusnot that great if you want to show something to others.
It's not all THAT bad. (If this is what I think it is) there are a SET of narrow angles from the screen where the stereo effect works correctly.
They're bisected by another set of angles where the depth is reversed, and the space between the clean images (normal or reversed depth) has regions where the two images wash into each other.
So a person can sit closely beside you (distance from your right eye to his left is one, three, five, etc. times the distance between your eyes) and simultaneously see the same image.
The main problems are...
- You have to be at distance from the screen equal to a constant times the spacing between your eyes (plus or minus maybe 20%) to get the effect. At the wrong distance the images for each eye also bleed into the other eye, giving you a triple image - the one you want, plus two single-eye ghosts.
- Images TOO far ahead of or behind the screen will give you eyestrain - because your eyes have to focus at the distance to the screen, but the paralax depth cue says the object is far from the screen. So your eye muscles hunt and get tired.
Is it also available on land - say in valleys surrounded by mountains and far from an ISP's POP?
[Weather reports] can make the difference of crossing on your 40' Hunter or your 10' life raft.
Especially if you're chosing a Hunter to take offshore. B-)
Sorry, couldn't resist. My wife the marine-architecture fan has a LOT to say about Hunters.
There are a number of emailham radio bridges operated by yacht clubs for boaters.
Contact the clubs in the area of your home port for more info. (Please don't contact them unless you plan to actually use it for offshore boating - the clubs have limited resources, so we'd ruin it for real users by slashdotting them out of curiosity.)
You can use an off-the-shelf ham TNC and your boat's longwave radio. (You don't have a longwave? Well GET one if you're going offshore! Longwave licenses for boaters are easy to get, and your boat's HF is line-of-sight, so it quits once you're over the horizon from land.)
They must be used sparingly - it's a single 1200 baud channel (further degraded by by the protocol's handshaking turnarounds), shared by everybody using that bridge (which essentially means everybody in that part of the ocean).
I stand corrected.
How could you show that "physics is invariant between reference frames"?
You don't show it. You assume it. Both the special and the general theories START from assuming that:
- Physical laws are observed to be identical in reference frames moving at different velocities.
- The speed of light is observed to be the same in reference frames moving at different velocities.
and derives all the space-twisting, mass-boosting, time-dialating wierdness from reconciling those two assumptions (which are accurate to measurable limits for ordinary velocities).
Special relativity deals with reference frames that are moving at constant velocity relative to each other. General relativity adds the complications to handle accellerated reference frames and gravity, along with the third assumption that inertial and gravitational mass are the same.
Perhaps a BIT oversimplified. B-) But that's the basic idea.
As I recall:
MCI was the first. It put microwave antennas on buildings and towers, and sold long-distance service. (They're those dishes with the red lightning bolt.) And it sued to break the AT&T monopoly on long distance service.
Once that monopoly was broken, Sprint was exactly what you described: It started as Southern Pacific Railroad selling unused capacity of their new fiber-along-the-right-of-way as another (the second?) competetive long-distance company. The name is an acronym for the railroad's original networking project - Southern Pacific Railroad Net .
Not to be outdone, MCI joined the bandwagon and leased fibre rights along another right-of-way. (If I recall correctly MCI made a deal with another railroad, and it was yet another company who cut one with a power company to run fiber under the big power towers.)
Seems to me we must determine whether the "leading edge" is a hypothetical made up to save causality or a real information carrier resulting from the bandwidth limitation of the pulse. To separate these cases we must answer this question:
Does the apparatus recreate the entire pulse, or just the main body?
Phrased another way: If the information is all contained in the hypothetical "leading edge", does the leading edge get reproduced with the same lead as the rest of the pulse?
The way to answer this is to send the allegedly sped-up pulse through one or several additional steps (or a much longer device) and see if it continues to be transmitted FTL and correctly recreated in each device. Keep increasing the hop count or the length of the hop until the total time the pulse arrived early (as compared with propagaion in vacuum) exceeds the time-length of the hypothetical leading edge, and the pulse is either distorted beyond readability or still intact.
If it arrives intact, then the WHOLE PULSE, including any information it carried, got moved forward, sending information FTL. If it doesn't, then the information went out in the leading edge, and the FTL transmission was only apparent.
The only reason we ever thought of light as a hard speed limit is because some (Like Albert) thought this would violate cause and effect not any physical law
Even with special relativity you can show that if you can send a signal faster than c in one frame of reference, you can pick another frame of reference where the signal goes backward in time.
And since physics is invariant between reference frames you could use anoter moving-with-respect-to-the-first-frame apparatus to send another faster-than-light signal (as viewed in the second frame) to return the information to its starting point in the first reference frame's space (as viewed in BOTH frames), arriving before it left.
Now you've got a signal back in time to a point inside the "past" light-cone of the moment in spacetime where it originated (or at least before it entered the first FTL apparatus). Use it to disable the sending signal (as by realligning a mirror if turning off the laser is too slow, given the length of your apparati) and you've got a causality paradox.
THAT's why "some (Like Albert)" thought this would violate cause and effect.
When new people come out of college they are fresh and full of energy. They may have to learn skills, but that is easier then UN-learning bad habits.
The problem is that schools teach bad habits, too.
A few years ago Minsky divided Computer Science education into three periods of about 10 years each:
First period: The schools had no clue what to teach. So they taught the students how to re-invent everything that had just been invented. (For instance: Every grad was expected to be able to write his own compiler.) There was an excessive focus on mathematical skills (at least partly to simplify rationing of the limited number of enrollment slots, due to the limited availability of computer time).
Result: A 4-year degree was actually a handicap - because it took longer to convince the newgrad than a non-grad that there was something else he needed to know to be productive.
Period 2: The schools got their curricula organized and produced people with useful skills.
Result: A 4-year degree was more useful than not. But work experience - about two years of it - was still necessary before a grad became really productive, and getting that "break-in" job was sometimes difficult. (You also needed a contiguous two-year stint to prove you would stick around until a project was done before you could start job-hopping.)
Period 3: The schools got too heavily into formalisms - to the point of religion.
Result: Again students needed to be cracked loose from a mold before they could start learning what they really needed, and a 4-year degree became a liability.
Particular problems are graduates of Ivy League and other big-name schools (at all degree levels) and PhDs (from all schools). One thing Ivy Leaguers learn is conversational gambits that let them shut down those who disagree with them and/or later appropriate credit for their ideas. Grads from big-name schools often think that if it wasn't taught in their classes it isn't importand. PhDs sometimes suffer from that as well, and also are heavily invested in being right whenever they open their mouths.
To program or design effectively you have to accept being wrong occasionally, recognizing it early and backing out quickly before too much effort is wasted. You have to learn not to back out too often. You have to learn that an adequate but standardized and well-documented design and/or style is more effective than burning cycles hunting for the "best" design/style. You have to learn to work in a team - letting others be expert, too. You have to learn that knowledge is teritorial, not hierarchical - often the person with the right answer is not the person with the highest certification. And you have to learn to learn - that you come to any job with only SOME of the knowlege needed to perform it, and you must know how to pick up the rest as you go.
But by period 3 a new generation of management was loose upon the world. And many companies would only hire people with the degrees - and sometimes only degrees from certain colleges. So the degrees became necessary for entry at many places, regardless of their actual lack of predictive ability Re job performance.
Also, a slew of management fads came in by that time: They each have their own buzzwords, but this is what they amount to: Age discrimination (new grad to late 40s). Sex discrimination. Race discrimination (for US upper-to-middle class Anglos, East Indians, Orientals). Handicap discrimination.
And a convenient myth was created: That there was a "talent shortage" in the US. So lower-paid immigrants could be hired to replace higher-paid US workers.
Of course this is gross mismanagement. And it hurts the companies that let their administrators it - by limiting their potential recruit pool and leading them to pay a premium for non-job related employee "features" while ignoring the actual work-related skill set. They get away with it because the added value of HiTek is so great that mismanagement can piss away an INCREDIBLE amount of resources and still keep the company in the black - for a while.
But the myths work to the advantage of those with skill and experience, and the little startup companies that are willing to hire them. Because there's a large pool of very skilled labor available, to those who are willing to hunt it down and pay for it. And there are challenging and lucrative positions available to those with the skills to fill them.
As you become more experienced it takes longer to find a good fit - because there are fewer jobs that actually require all those skills.
I was educated in Minsky's first period. I worked my way most of the way through college, got to all-but-some-distribution-requirements, then let my consulting practice expand to full time and never got that degree. By then I had the "equivalent experience" that once appeared on the job reqs. I've accepted holes in employment - once nearly a year long - rather than let my salary or billing rate drop from monotonic increasing (though if I had it to do over I'd take a stop-loss consult about 4 months into that long break. B-) ) I've avoided becoming management, yet have pulling down six figures for a while now as an individual contributor - even salaried.
But my current job will probably be my last: Thirty years in the industry - mainly in software - got me the one thing it was all intended to get me: in the door of a startup at the right time as it was putting together the right product. The startup was collecting the experineced industry experts, and now I was one of 'em. We've already been bought out for enough that I could retire on the options that have already vested. But I won't yet - because I expect the thing I'm co-archetecting to expand the bottom line until the shares' current value will seem like peanuts - and there's three more years of vesting to go.
... that they dropped the Cobalt design.
It used a MIPS and Linux. The design was wide open, the power miniscule. (Something like 7 watts running flat out, as I recall. Same as an incandescent nightlight.) The fan was just so people would trust it. It dissipated so little power that a fan wasn't necessary unless you were running it in an oven - at which point it was counterproductive. B-) )
I used one of those in a previous job. We were developing for embedded MIPS and needed a compiler. Gnu wasn't supporting cross-platform and we didn't know about Cygnus' patches to fix that. (Over a K of lines when they got fed up and forked the code base.) So we bought a Qube as an utterly cheap way ($1K) to get a MIPS/GNU development platform.
My main gripe with the Cobalt Qube was that the 12V for the disk drive didn't go through the switching regulator. If they'd regulated it so it would be reliable with a raw supply from about 11.25 to 13.75 it would have been IDEAL to babysit a cabin powered off a solar/lead-acid system.
(Or almost ideal. The single PCI expansion slot - intended for a particular 100Mbps ethernet card (to supliment the built-in 10-base-t) - was only fed the +5 supply, which limited flexibility a bit.)
Loading a new kernel was interesting. You had to name it this particular name that looked like a game in a directory owned by one of Cobalt's developers. (Don't recall it at the moment.) It was the only other file the ROM bootloader would boot.
1. What effect will this type of memory device has under radiation bombardments?
The conductive state is a (poly?)crystaline material that shorts two electrodes.
The resistive state has a region of amorphous (glassy) material in the space between the electrodes, surrounded by the remaining material which is still in the (poly?)crystaline state.
Writing it consists of MELTING the region between the electrodes, leaving it either cool enough that it solidifies quickly into the amorphous state, or hot enough that it solidifies slowly and the crystals grow into the melted region as it freezes. Think frost on a window in the winter.
(Of course at these scales, even "slowly" is measured in nanoseconds of elapsed time.)
Charge carriers from particles won't make significant increases in current in the glassy state, or remelt it and let it crystalize. Particles might disrupt SOME of the crystaline conductive state - but there is a LOT of it in parallel. By the time enough raidation hits it to increase its resistance measurably the rest of the components in the computer will be approaching the "sand" state.
Think about trying to use radiation to disrupt a wire until it won't conduct, or a glass bottle until it will.
2. What effect will magnetic forces (and/or electro-magnetic forces) has on this type of memory?
It isn't made of magnetic material. (Again, think of using a magnet to disrupt a copper wire until it stops conducting, or a glass bottle until it starts.)
If you put a big enough EMP into such a chip you might generate enough voltage and current to write the bit. But you'll probably fry both the static protection and the components in the pad driver/receivers on the chip's terminals with much smaller EMPs, because the interconnect wiring is a much bigger antenna.
The technical details of this article are close to zero, if you look closely.
Read the foils from the presentation of the research report here.
It gives far more detail than I've ever seen for an announcement of any other memory technology. B-)