4 trillion bits of information per second - I take to mean samples per second, and prolly in Bytes. Images every 25 nanoseconds is pretty clear.
4E12 * 25E-9 = 100E3 pixels per image.
Now, 0.1 MPixel don't sound too impressive until you take into account the 40 MHz framerate which is just a tad bit better than your average 24 Hz movie.:>
Besides the camera, the real power in this thing is the processing required to make a decision, whether or not to keep that image, every 25 ns. And the 5 GSample of full speed (4 TS/s) RAM required to buffer the chosen 50,000 images before getting stored on that large HDD array they have.
Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick the system into running a portion of the program in `master mode' (supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply. The program could then poke a large value into its `privilege level' byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to bypass all levels of security within the file-management system, patch the system monitor, and do numerous other interesting things. In short, the barn door was wide open. Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an official `level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of `needs to be fixed yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR was entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a number of people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they simply reported the problem as `Security SIDR', and attached all of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc. The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an official patch. Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security safeguards could be subverted. They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then incorporated into a pair of programs called `Robin Hood' and `Friar Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as `ghost jobs' (daemons, in UNIX terminology); they would use the existing loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them. One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual phenomena. These included the following: * Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle of a job. * Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they would attempt to walk across the floor (see walking drives ). * The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of itself and punch a lace card. These would usually jam in the punch. * The console would print snide and insulting messages from Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa. * The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A (unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was placed into stacker B). One of the patches installed by the ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator to recollate them manually. Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X'ed them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was X'ed, the following sequence of events took place: !X id1 id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me! id1: Off (aborted) id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's men! id1: Thank you, my good fellow! Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program within a few millisecond
For all the windoze weenies:
Saying it's open-source is equivalent to saying it's a free download. In the unix world the user programming model is source code compatible rather than binary code compatible so offering a binary only is very limiting.
"If we don't take action, we end up at the mercy of unscrupulous media outlets in control of the message. They do exactly what the games they deplore do: make viewers watch by titilating them with sensationalistic violence. The difference is, games are entertainment; the news is not supposed to be."
"(One could argue that the lower frequencies are less valuable as they travel far and thus make spectrum reuse schemes much more less efficient.)"
Long range is precisely why they are valuable. High bandwidth is not why those bands are in use. The high bandwidth sections above 3 GHz will need to be cheap to support their mode of use. And the localised range is part of that cheapness.
"Point-to-point" focused microwave beams barely count, there only needs to be a few relatively small bands alloted to them because they don't cross/see each other. I guess broadcast TV has been in the priviledged seat with respect to omnidirectional range vs bandwidth. Reusing some of this band will be where the fights break out.
Just to re-iterate, the article states the lower bands below 3 GHz are scarce - this is where all the action has been in the past. It also states that that is a whole 1% of "the usable airwaves". This is a linear scale of measuring and on pure bandwidth basis is an accurate percentage (Assuming 300 GHz is cheaply doable) but when taking into account the most desirable bands for an application it's a whole other story.
Back on the pure bandwidth wagon, every time transistors can be frabricated to operate at twice the previous best frequency you have suddenly increased the available spectrum by 100% and therefore the previous total now occupies only a mere 50%.
The article is clearly biased toward making the radio band look under utilised.
"the 1% of frequencies below 3GHz are worth more than the other 99% of spectrum between 3GHz and 300GHz"
Well, I suspect, since "95% of the government's spectrum is not being used" it'll mostly all be above the 3 GHz spot.
Using linear scaling may be fare for bandwidth measurements but it's not a fare way of describing "the usable airwaves" because of the differing technologies and the unique ways that certain bands interact with other objects and the environment.
I think the key point not being well expressed in the article is that the spectrum above about 3 GHz is not as precious and should be opened to more comercial use.
The new policies are most likely just the standard msn policies due to Xtra having been purchased from Telcom NZ in the post bubble spending spree M$ has been on.
Slashdot Mirror
It's obsessive! No, it's addictive! No, it's obsessive! There's another asteroid ... Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!
Populous from 1989 is Powermonger's predecessor.
Ah, nope! Must be those bastard marketriods again.
Wasn't able to buy anything without Javascript. :( Not likely I'll be back.
I've been most impressed with the accuracy of Yokogawa scopes. They've easily compared to the best multimeter I've used for DC readings.
And the precision for an 8 bit sampler blew me away. The lines are so clean and far higher resolution than 8 bits would normally allow.
4 trillion bits of information per second - I take to mean samples per second, and prolly in Bytes. Images every 25 nanoseconds is pretty clear.
:>
4E12 * 25E-9 = 100E3 pixels per image.
Now, 0.1 MPixel don't sound too impressive until you take into account the 40 MHz framerate which is just a tad bit better than your average 24 Hz movie.
Besides the camera, the real power in this thing is the processing required to make a decision, whether or not to keep that image, every 25 ns. And the 5 GSample of full speed (4 TS/s) RAM required to buffer the chosen 50,000 images before getting stored on that large HDD array they have.
Evan
They left out the 90% who hung up the phone.
Evan
A quick google gives some funny reading ...
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:pebp5iyrBeIJ:li nuxmafia.com/~rick/eblug-lecture-2004-12-15.sxi
Quote follows:
Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick the system into running a portion of the program in `master mode' (supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply. The program could then poke a large value into its `privilege level' byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to bypass all levels of security within the file-management system, patch the system monitor, and do numerous other interesting things. In short, the barn door was wide open. Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an official `level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of `needs to be fixed yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR was entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a number of people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they simply reported the problem as `Security SIDR', and attached all of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc. The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an official patch. Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security safeguards could be subverted. They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then incorporated into a pair of programs called `Robin Hood' and `Friar Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as `ghost jobs' (daemons, in UNIX terminology); they would use the existing loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them. One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual phenomena. These included the following: * Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle of a job. * Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they would attempt to walk across the floor (see walking drives ). * The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of itself and punch a lace card. These would usually jam in the punch. * The console would print snide and insulting messages from Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa. * The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A (unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was placed into stacker B). One of the patches installed by the ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator to recollate them manually. Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X'ed them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was X'ed, the following sequence of events took place: !X id1 id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me! id1: Off (aborted) id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's men! id1: Thank you, my good fellow! Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program within a few millisecond
Yeah, not only that, all banks should require users to disable javascript before logging in.
Evan
For all the windoze weenies:
Saying it's open-source is equivalent to saying it's a free download. In the unix world the user programming model is source code compatible rather than binary code compatible so offering a binary only is very limiting.
Evan
Sounds to me like the music-mafia have simply backed off on the case since their recent change of heart regarding BitTorrent.
Evan
Not to mention that unlike Lead-Acid and Ni-Cad, Lithium's are environmentally friendly.
The big news is the same as was announced earlier this year; that Lithium-Ion can now be constructed to electrically survive in a car.
Evan
It's also a defensive reaction to irrational accusations.
"If we don't take action, we end up at the mercy of unscrupulous media outlets in control of the message. They do exactly what the games they deplore do: make viewers watch by titilating them with sensationalistic violence. The difference is, games are entertainment; the news is not supposed to be."
The number will be ever-increasing just like MIPS and it'll give the marketroids more leeway to twist the truth.
Transparency? What's that? A see-through PC?
"(One could argue that the lower frequencies are less valuable as they travel far and thus make spectrum reuse schemes much more less efficient.)"
Long range is precisely why they are valuable. High bandwidth is not why those bands are in use. The high bandwidth sections above 3 GHz will need to be cheap to support their mode of use. And the localised range is part of that cheapness.
"Point-to-point" focused microwave beams barely count, there only needs to be a few relatively small bands alloted to them because they don't cross/see each other. I guess broadcast TV has been in the priviledged seat with respect to omnidirectional range vs bandwidth. Reusing some of this band will be where the fights break out.
Just to re-iterate, the article states the lower bands below 3 GHz are scarce - this is where all the action has been in the past. It also states that that is a whole 1% of "the usable airwaves". This is a linear scale of measuring and on pure bandwidth basis is an accurate percentage (Assuming 300 GHz is cheaply doable) but when taking into account the most desirable bands for an application it's a whole other story.
Back on the pure bandwidth wagon, every time transistors can be frabricated to operate at twice the previous best frequency you have suddenly increased the available spectrum by 100% and therefore the previous total now occupies only a mere 50%.
The article is clearly biased toward making the radio band look under utilised.
With buying price directly proportional to longest wavelength of band multiplied by number of octaves covered.
"the 1% of frequencies below 3GHz are worth more than the other 99% of spectrum between 3GHz and 300GHz"
Well, I suspect, since "95% of the government's spectrum is not being used" it'll mostly all be above the 3 GHz spot.
Using linear scaling may be fare for bandwidth measurements but it's not a fare way of describing "the usable airwaves" because of the differing technologies and the unique ways that certain bands interact with other objects and the environment.
I think the key point not being well expressed in the article is that the spectrum above about 3 GHz is not as precious and should be opened to more comercial use.
The new policies are most likely just the standard msn policies due to Xtra having been purchased from Telcom NZ in the post bubble spending spree M$ has been on.