Distance from London:
- Paris: 415 km (258 mi)
- Madrid: 1738 km (1080 mi)
- Berlin: 1155 km (718 mi)
For comparison, DC to Orlando FL is 852 mi (1371 km), and you haven't left the country yet. Continuing to the southern end of Florida, Miami is 1062 miles (1709 km.) Please note that you've only covered about half the north-south distance of the US. It's a completely different transportation paradigm (gawd I hate using that word, but it's appropriate here.)
You can weaponize a stick. It's not terribly effective against your neighbor who also has weaponized sticks. However, if these outsiders drop a magical technology into you lap that allows you to deliver your weaponized sticks at your neighbor from a great distance, that represents a disruption in the balance of power you previously had. I think that's the true danger. Incremental improvements in anything give you time to adapt socially, an gives your neighbors a similar opportunity.
If you could attack anyone with impunity, why wouldn't you? If you receive a 50-year step-function improvement in your ability to defend yourself, the next time Thug Boy and his cronies show up with their weaponized sticks, threatening to take half of your food production for the year, you're going to blow them to hell, right?
The suburbs of DC are not bicycle-friendly. Most roads are full of "road rage" drivers who view bikes as an obstruction. I have two friends who were forced off the road by... assholes. One ended up in the hospital. Your statement needs some conditions:
>If you rode a bike, you could get to work in an hour and 15 minutes without much trouble,
if:
- car drivers were respectful and didn't go out of their way to try to kill you;
- highway restrictions didn't prohibit bikes (MD 32 prohibits walking too);
- I could maintain an *average* speed of 20MPH (I can't manage an average speed of 30MPH in my truck);
I used to have a 9.2 mile commute, and I rode my bike to work often. I didn't dare go near the busy roads, though. That was asking to die. Typical one-way times were about 45 minutes. I'd expect my current commute to take over 2.5 hours under ideal conditions (i.e. no assholes on the road.) I don't know about you, but I don't have an additional 2-3 hours to piss down a hole each day.
I bought a house many years ago. One of the legal obligations was that I had to sign-off having viewed the "Master Plan" for the county. It's a 20-year plan for development in the area, and shows where the gub'ment is planning to issue permits for different applications. They flash it under your nose so you can't bitch when "eminent domain" seizes your house for a hyperspace-bypass.
Nowhere on the Master Plan was any form of public transportation infrastructure. They should have light-rail running between major population areas, but they don't. Busses are a joke - there's no such thing as an "express" that'll take you between major areas for local distribution. Residential and commercial growth is managed based on projected tax revenue.
DC's Metro Rail system is wonderful if you're traveling radially into or out of DC. It's virtually useless if you want to go from, say, Potomac to Wheaton, or from Vienna to Braddock. Sorry, the trains don't go there.
In Maryland, they're building a new hunk of highway called the Inter-County Connector. The ICC has been held-up in court by the tree-huggers for 30+ years. Yes, 30+ years. They're finally building it now... at the cost of $4.5B for about 30 miles. It doesn't go anywhere useful (though they are building a new town at the eastern end, benefitting the land owners.) So it appears we're more than willing to sink billions into bloated highway projects, but not a dime into new public transport elements.
Public transportation infrastructure in the US is an afterthought. Always has been. I'd applaud someone proposing a monorail system, simply because he's got a plan, and that's a huge step up on the state.
The technology is one element of a systemic solution. Go play Warcraft (the original one.) You start out with one grunt. You harvest resources, enhance capabilities, and improve your situation through incremental means. Throughout the process, you've developed an infrastructure that will support your population.
Aw hell! Some bastard sent troops into my Town Square and is tearing the place to shit! Yep, you can expect the local warlord/gang/bunch_of_thugs to do that in the real world as well. You've developed a resource; someone will try to take it from you.
Simply tossing a technological measure at a community won't magically fix things. At a minimum, it'll free up someone to perform another task that wasn't an option before. It's worth doing, but needs to be part of a larger program that helps with developing comprehensive infrastructure.
BWI Airport has the LED system in the short-term garage. Overhead Green/Red indicators let you know if a spot is available, and there's another indicator at the end of the row showing if the row is full or has at least one empty. That was surprisingly useful, and eliminated a bunch of frustration (especially if you're pressed for time.)
The parking garage is a controlled environment. I'm not sure it'd have the same benefit in an open space.
I strongly disagree. Public transportation in the US sucks because it doesn't go where you want to go, when you want to go. It works well for a very limited subset of the population that lives in high-density metro areas; it's useless for any task that leaves these areas.
Now before you complain that I'm an apologist, lemme cite some facts. I took a flight from Washington National airport not too long ago. My plan was to take the bus to the Metro train, which would drop me at the airport. Decent plan, right? After a mile walk to the nearest bus stop, I stood there for 45+ minutes waiting for the bus, which didn't show up. At that point, I had burned my "extra" time budget and was in danger of missing my flight. I jogged home, got in my car, and drove to the airport. I passed the bus some 60 minutes after it was scheduled to make a stop. Why didn't I drive to the Metro and continue from there? Because it was a weekend, and the trains run on a 12-minute schedule. With the bus-delay, I was in danger of missing the plane if I missed the Metro by the perfect amount.
Similarly, I *can* take public transportation to work, but I did the calculations, and the one-way time varies from 3 to 4 hours. That's for a 26-mile commute distance. Public transportation is coordinated at the local level here, so it's a horrible PiTA to switch across five different transport methods to get somewhere - bus, train, bus, different bus, etc. Schedules between municipalities are completely uncoordinated, so it takes maximum time to go anywhere. If you don't value your time, it's a wonderful way to burn through it.
What's that? I should move closer to work? Unfortunately, my office is located in an industrial business park. There isn't a residential area within 5 miles. Further, even if I could make that work, I'd be a huge distance from everything else. The US isn't laid-out for a public transportation infrastructure. It's been pasted on as an afterthought, and it sucks. We'd need to make some horrific changes to install a useful transport network, and I don't expect that to happen in my lifetime.
I've gone through the gamut of permutations - the task is one for work. Our CF-to-IDE adapters have been buzzed-out to make sure the DMA lines weren't pegged. There are several on the market that have the DMA signals tied high or low, though I can't comprehend why. We've also made sure the DASP and PDIAG signals are connected (those are necessary during the auto-detect phase.) We have fielded products that have a custom PCB connected to a Cirrus EP9312 Arm9 CPU. The CF adapter in that app works fine, including DMA transfers.
I'm convinced that the CF card vendors are pandering to their primary market, which I believe is the digital camera folks. There's strong demand for high performance, and IDE isn't known for that. I can easily see Big Camera Company handing a briefcase of cash to CF Card Vendor to improve performance by altering the bus interface. The factory-specified card works great, but aftermarket cards don't. Funny that.
Given the variance between manufacturers of CF cards, we've been unable to find a solution that we have any confidence in. We require products with CF cards to be designed such that the CF card is alone on the IDE bus. Other IDE peripherals go on a separate connection. That's annoying in some situations where we're pressed for space, but is seems to be necessary.
I've been struggling with CF cards in embedded applications, and I can verify that they don't always comply with the interface specs. I've gone through at least a half-dozen different CF card brands, and all display some form of misbehavior if they're put on an IDE chain with another device. By themselves they work fine, but add a CD-ROM or a hard drive, and the system will fail with either bus timeouts or stalled transfers. My suspicion is that the CF card vendors are playing games with performance metrics in photography apps, and in those environments they can bend the spec because there's exactly zero chance of another device being installed on the interface.
As far as I can tell (without a bus analyzer,) there's something hinky happening during device auto-detection and initialization. Many times, the CF card will be detected as the Master device, but no Slave device will be detected. Swap to a different brand CF card, and the symptom will change - both devices will auto-detect, but the IDE bus will throw timeout errors during boot. Swapping in just about any not-a-CF-card device, and everything is fine.
I absolutely concur. I'll usually be blunt and indicate that I'm interested in the solution methodology and not the specific answer, and I'll probably send the candidate down a dead-end road to see how he reacts.
During an interview a couple of years ago, the candidate was stunned when I said that I didn't have an answer to the problem, and that we'd solve it together. So I explained, "Son, life doesn't come with a User Manual, Reference Guide, or more importantly, an Answer Key in the back." I think he completely missed the point, and unsurprisingly, had little in the way of problem solving skills. Reminds me of a line in Men in Black - "Gentlemen, congratulations. You're everything we've come to expect from years of government training."
When I came out of college, I went on a particularly brutal interview. One section involved critical timing paths (I'm an EE,) and the interviewer tossed a simple schematic on the whiteboard. I looked at it for about 5 seconds, and told him what it did. He paused and asked, "Are you sure?" His tone clearly indicated that I was incorrect. I looked again, and stood my ground. I further pointed out that he had a potential setup/hold timing violation depending on what parts he was using. I spent over an hour with this guy, and he asked some seriously challenging questions. I found out after the fact that he was notorious for chewing-up and spitting-out candidates, and that his interviews rarely lasted more than 20 minutes (he was effectively the CTO, so time mattered.)
The lesson here is that a proper interview is geared toward making sure you have both technical chops and people skills that are compatible with the company. I can teach you new tech stuff... I probably can't teach you how to be less of an asshat. A bad attitude is destructive, no matter what degree of "leet skills" you think you have. Unless you're being harassed or threatened, walking out of an interview is a mistake.
I wish I had mod points for you. The Shuttle was a lie from the get-go, though I don't think the original intent was malicious. I suspect they were "overly optimistic." Additionally, the Shuttle's mission objectives were fungible, which only results in programmatic feature-creep. The individual launch cost exceeding USD$1B doesn't help matters. You'd expect the cost to go down once they figure it out right? Nah, that only happens in an environment where there's a competitive alternative. Otherwise, no incentive exists to reduce costs.
In a rational world, the Shuttle and the Saturn V could co-exist. They have very different mission capabilities, and should be considered complimentary resources. Unfortunately, we don't live in a rational world, and politicians were intent on destroying the legacy of their predecessors. The Saturn V stood as a monument to JFK, and folks from the Republican Party saw an opportunity to tear it down and replace it with the Shuttle. Burns my bacon, it does.
I should further clarify that I'm not suggesting that you could substitute silicon for carbon, and end up with bipedal hominids who strongly resemble us... only with silver skin. That's Hollywood working within their abilities to map actors into roles. I'm thinking substantially more basic life. Think one-celled critters; bacteria; viruses.
I was watching some coverage of NASA's recent earthmoving (marsmoving?) efforts, and was stunned at just how stoopid the reporters can be. I expect that the NASA folks do understand that life doesn't have to play by the earth-based ruleset, but that it's a good place to start. It's very likely that all the inner planets have some form of cross-contamination (i.e. localized exogenesis.) I wouldn't expect critters from Earth to fare well on either Mars or Venus, but some molds might. I've got some tenacious mold growing in my crawlspace, and that's a pretty inhospitable place. The stuff keeps coming back in spite of my best "scorched earth" efforts.
Hang on a second, and let's examine exactly what predicates "life." You need to have raw materials available. There needs to be an energy gradient. There needs to be a closed-cycle chemical reaction for the transport of energy. There needs to be a solvent for the mechanical transport of chemicals.
On Earth, we've got the solar influx for the energy gradient, water is the solvent, and the carbon compounds provide the chemical-reaction basis. Environmentally, the Earth's temperature and atmospheric pressure put us near the solvent's triple point, with the majority of the solvent in the liquid phase.
Could you conceive of a place where ammonia is the solvent? You'll need environmental constraints such that there's an abundance of the solvent in a form conducive to mechanical transport. You might still have carbon-based life forms, but they wouldn't be using the water-cycle we know here on Earth. Why is that such a fantasy?
If you're going to argue that "I haven't seen it yet, therefore it can't possibly exist," I'd recommend some introspection on the definition of the word "preconception."
Under Earth-like environmental conditions, carbon has several advantages. But what happens when you move away from Earth's environment? Suppose that the ambient temperature on LV-426 was substantially higher than on Earth. Put it somewhere favorable to silicon, but disadvantageous to carbon. Are you absolutely certain that carbon would still rule the roost?
Honestly, I tire of people who are convinced that earth-life is the only possible solution. It works here. Fine. Change the environmental conditions such that carbon compounds fall apart readily, or water as a solvent doesn't exist in all three phases. Silicon instead of carbon. Methane or ammonia instead of water. Won't happen on Earth, but it might somewhere else.
First, you have to accept that you can't just create "heat" or "cold" from nothing, nor can you destroy it. You can, however, move it from one place to another. As water freezes into ice, it absorbs "cold" from the local environment. Similarly, when it melts, it releases the "cold" into the surroundings. That's how the ice-pack air conditioner works.
"Hot" and "cold" are basically the same thing, only with opposite polarities. The above thermal exchange could be viewed as "melting ice absorbs heat" and "freezing ice releases heat." So the thing you really need to worry about is the ice pack moving heat into your freezer. With more items in the freezer, you have a bigger "cold" buffer which will offset the "heat" dumped into the freezer by the freezing water. Remember, "heat" can't be destroyed, only moved. It's just a matter of time until the "heat" accumulates to a problematic level.
I run a small business on the side, helping people deal with Catastrophic Retention of Accumulated Pthermions in their home refrigeration systems. For a nominal fee, I can have a crew come over and purge the pthermions from your freezer, ensuring years of continued, reliable service.
I was totally let-down by the end of the story. This was a perfect example of amateur sleuthing, which should have resulted in a thief being apprehended at the bottom of the hour, only to mutter "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you pesky kids and your ubiquitous ad-hoc wireless networking."
The Market dictates that you always adopt the lowest-cost model of operation. Dumping your toxic manufacturing byproduct into the local water supply is much cheaper than processing it (ref: Love Canal.) We have common property - water, air, etc. Strict market adherence leads to the Tragedy of the Commons. Government forces are intended to provide a counterpressure where The Market leads us to very undesirable places.
The Ethanol Mandate is pandering to the corn lobby, and results from corruption in the government. Not a good example. Note also that I said "One of the functions of a government..." i.e. "that's what it's supposed to do." Implementation is somewhat less... exact.
While the landfills and muni waste streams contain copious raw materials, the processors aren't geared to use that stream as an input. They've invested billions into the current infrastructure - mined ore, crude oil, raw lumber, etc. Changing to a different feedstock, regardless of how "better" or "more efficient" it may be, requires a huge expenditure of cash. The economists call that "front loading," in that all your expenses are paid up front, as opposed to sticking with the current infrastructure, which is much more profitable in the short term.
Everyone these days is playing the short-term strategy, so you get short-sighted responses. Shouldn't be much of a surprise. One of the functions of a government is to force a policy that a free-market won't readily adopt. I'd love to see the poultry farmers on Maryland's Eastern Shore be required to supply their excess of liqui-poo to a municipal thermal depolymerization plant, instead of polluting the Chesapeake Bay with the runoff. It ain't happening without a shove, in spite of the feedstock being a high-energy-density, easily processed material.
A bunch of folks are bemoaning the 56k number, as it seems rather an odd rate. Awright younguns, hop up here on Uncle MigraineMan's lap while he tells you a story...
Back when communicating between two distant places involved two tin cans and some wet string, some mighty smart folks invented digital telephony. First, they decided to sample the voice audio at 8kHz - after all, they were only obligated to deliver audio bandwidth in the 300-3000 Hz range (affectionately referred to as "three hundred to three K C" back in the day.) You might be surprised to find that a 14-bit analog-to-digital converter that sampled at 8kHz was quit the engineering marvel... and was a circuit board about the size of an ATX motherboard. Not wanting to transmit all those pesky bits, another bunch of smart lads realized that the human ear isn't a linear device, so they encoded the 14-bit linear samples using the dreaded u-Law encoding table. That made each sample a more manageable 8-bit value.
Whelp1: But Uncle MigraineMan, what's that got to do with 56k?
Now just settle down a bit. [MM sips from pocket flask.] So the bright young engineers decide that 24 is a nice round number, so they grouped 24 voice channels together into a Digital Signal 1, or DS1. If you follow with the math, you multiply 8-bits by 8000 samples per second to get 64000 bits per second, then by the 24 channels to get... anybody?
Whelp2: 1,536,000. But Uncle MigraineMan, everybody knows that a DS1 is 1.544Mbps!
That's right. One of them bright young engineers realized that they couldn't tell head from tail with all the voice channels looking the same, so they added some bits to mark the start and end of the DS1. That brings us up to the current line rate.
After a while, the phone company - and note that I said "the" phone company, as there was only one at the time - started using these fancy DS1 signals as connections within their network. They started noticing that when a bunch of calls on a DS1 were silent, sometimes the DS1 equipment would drop out, causing many disgruntled customers. And as I always say, if it affects the revenue stream, it gets immediate attention.
The bright young engineers studied the problem, and discovered that a long period of silence could cause a long string of all-zeroes in the fancy DS1 signal, causing the terminal hardware to think the line had been cut. To remedy this situation, the bright young engineers decided to add some "1" bits to the audio channels to maintain what they call "ones density." That's a fancy way of sayin' they limit the number of consecutive zeroes so the fancy DS1 line equipment doesn't get confused. They decided that, since this is voice audio, and they've already compressed it with the dreaded u-Law code, no one would notice if they "stole" that least-significant-bit and made it always a "1". It is, after all, "least significant." Who's going to miss it?
Whelp1: So there's only 7-bits of usable data in each voice channel? That's nuts!
Well, it made sense at the time. Eventually, computer usage forced the phone company to upgrade it's equipment to support "clear channel" transport, instead of the "robbed bit" format. That caused a whole passle of problems during the transition. Ultimately, something called B8ZS was pretty much universally adopted. Another day, I'll tell you a scary story about something called ZBTSI. Now y'all run along.
Honestly, I don't like it either. The Dad is an upstanding guy, though his personal prejudices will occasionally color his decisions. I've watched him walk away from a number of questionable deals involving a briefcase full of cash. That takes guts. I respect him because he's earned my respect. And I agree that we'd have a better society if people would stand behind their principles and put ethical behavior before the fast cash-grab.
First-sale is relevant. As a business owner, I'm not obligated to sell anything to anyone... but that's not much of a business. When I do sell something, the purchaser may take his item out into the parking lot and smash it to bits if he likes. I may not like it, but it's his prerogative to do so. If he returns to my shop and asks to purchase another item, fully intending to smash it to bits, I can:
. a) refuse to sell, as I don't like his behavior
. b) sell in spite of my personal dislike
There has to be a certain amount of disassociation between seller and buyer for transactions to occur. It'd be a nightmare otherwise. How would you handle restrictive oversight in the case of resale? loss? gift giving? I view it very much like freedom of speech - I may vehemently object to what you're saying, but I respect your right to say it. And the above is the "small business" example. In larger businesses, officers of the company have a fiduciary obligation to act in the best interest of the company. That means putting your personal opinion aside during the evaluation of contracts, sales, and acquisitions. If you're a publicly traded company, the personal disassociation is even more important. Declining an acquisition offer on the basis of "it's bad for our core values" is perfectly valid. Declining because "I can't stand Company X" will get you in a heap of trouble.
As for The Dad, he didn't get forced out of business by competitors with no scruples. I'll try to give the executive summary -
. The Dad flew to Foreign Country (FC) to demo some hi-tech equipment.
. After the demo, FC refused to let him leave unless he abandoned the demo equipment
. He abandoned the equipment after being threatened with improsonment
. FC reverse engineered the demo equipment
. The State Department got involved, ultimately telling The Dad to "drop it," as FC is a favored nation
Many years later, The Dad was offered an acquisition deal. It was good money with a reputable firm. The Dad tried to slide in a clause that would prohibit the company from doing business with FC. Directly or indirectly. Ever. That was the deal breaker.
The Dad stood by his principles. He sleeps fine at night. The business is gone. It could have been a tremendous thing had the acquisition gone through. Another company stepped up and filled the void. To my knowledge, the acquiring company doesn't do much business internationally, to this day. FC still got what it wanted, in spite of The Dad's principled stand. His actions were completely irrelevant, except to us. The only damage he inflicted was to his own family. FC didn't bat an eye.
Exactly. If you look at the FIPS 140 documents, you'll see layers of data- and physical-security that need to be implemented. Currently, the SSH folks are only considering the raw data encryption requirement at the endpoints. The ISPs' analysis techniques will force the SSH folks to consider the end-to-end link as a single unit, and they'll implement more structures to deny the ISPs any visibility. I fully expect such a move to cost the ISPs more bandwidth. "All these channels look like random data, all the time." Yep.
Unfortunately, the "principled man" often doesn't stay in business, because the "principled" decisions don't jive with First Sale Doctrine. You listening to me, Dad?
Yes, The Dad went out of business because he refused to sell his products to people who might use them in ways he didn't like. There was always this uncomfortable pause between where he'd ask what the end use was and the customer declining to answer. That usually was immediately followed by the customer saying "no thanks" because they wouldn't enter into a sale contract that had strings attached. Funny, I wouldn't buy a car that could only be started if I justified the trip to someone else.
You can stand on your political soapbox all you like. Expect your customers to find a way around the obstruction you present. You are motivating them to do so. At the end of the day, all you've done is devalue your patent to the point of worthlessness.
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Distance from London:
- Paris: 415 km (258 mi)
- Madrid: 1738 km (1080 mi)
- Berlin: 1155 km (718 mi)
For comparison, DC to Orlando FL is 852 mi (1371 km), and you haven't left the country yet. Continuing to the southern end of Florida, Miami is 1062 miles (1709 km.) Please note that you've only covered about half the north-south distance of the US. It's a completely different transportation paradigm (gawd I hate using that word, but it's appropriate here.)
Rodinia has always been at war with Laurentia.
You can weaponize a stick. It's not terribly effective against your neighbor who also has weaponized sticks. However, if these outsiders drop a magical technology into you lap that allows you to deliver your weaponized sticks at your neighbor from a great distance, that represents a disruption in the balance of power you previously had. I think that's the true danger. Incremental improvements in anything give you time to adapt socially, an gives your neighbors a similar opportunity.
If you could attack anyone with impunity, why wouldn't you? If you receive a 50-year step-function improvement in your ability to defend yourself, the next time Thug Boy and his cronies show up with their weaponized sticks, threatening to take half of your food production for the year, you're going to blow them to hell, right?
The suburbs of DC are not bicycle-friendly. Most roads are full of "road rage" drivers who view bikes as an obstruction. I have two friends who were forced off the road by ... assholes. One ended up in the hospital. Your statement needs some conditions:
>If you rode a bike, you could get to work in an hour and 15 minutes without much trouble,
if:
- car drivers were respectful and didn't go out of their way to try to kill you;
- highway restrictions didn't prohibit bikes (MD 32 prohibits walking too);
- I could maintain an *average* speed of 20MPH (I can't manage an average speed of 30MPH in my truck);
I used to have a 9.2 mile commute, and I rode my bike to work often. I didn't dare go near the busy roads, though. That was asking to die. Typical one-way times were about 45 minutes. I'd expect my current commute to take over 2.5 hours under ideal conditions (i.e. no assholes on the road.) I don't know about you, but I don't have an additional 2-3 hours to piss down a hole each day.
I bought a house many years ago. One of the legal obligations was that I had to sign-off having viewed the "Master Plan" for the county. It's a 20-year plan for development in the area, and shows where the gub'ment is planning to issue permits for different applications. They flash it under your nose so you can't bitch when "eminent domain" seizes your house for a hyperspace-bypass.
... at the cost of $4.5B for about 30 miles. It doesn't go anywhere useful (though they are building a new town at the eastern end, benefitting the land owners.) So it appears we're more than willing to sink billions into bloated highway projects, but not a dime into new public transport elements.
Nowhere on the Master Plan was any form of public transportation infrastructure. They should have light-rail running between major population areas, but they don't. Busses are a joke - there's no such thing as an "express" that'll take you between major areas for local distribution. Residential and commercial growth is managed based on projected tax revenue.
DC's Metro Rail system is wonderful if you're traveling radially into or out of DC. It's virtually useless if you want to go from, say, Potomac to Wheaton, or from Vienna to Braddock. Sorry, the trains don't go there.
In Maryland, they're building a new hunk of highway called the Inter-County Connector. The ICC has been held-up in court by the tree-huggers for 30+ years. Yes, 30+ years. They're finally building it now
Public transportation infrastructure in the US is an afterthought. Always has been. I'd applaud someone proposing a monorail system, simply because he's got a plan, and that's a huge step up on the state.
The technology is one element of a systemic solution. Go play Warcraft (the original one.) You start out with one grunt. You harvest resources, enhance capabilities, and improve your situation through incremental means. Throughout the process, you've developed an infrastructure that will support your population.
Aw hell! Some bastard sent troops into my Town Square and is tearing the place to shit! Yep, you can expect the local warlord/gang/bunch_of_thugs to do that in the real world as well. You've developed a resource; someone will try to take it from you.
Simply tossing a technological measure at a community won't magically fix things. At a minimum, it'll free up someone to perform another task that wasn't an option before. It's worth doing, but needs to be part of a larger program that helps with developing comprehensive infrastructure.
BWI Airport has the LED system in the short-term garage. Overhead Green/Red indicators let you know if a spot is available, and there's another indicator at the end of the row showing if the row is full or has at least one empty. That was surprisingly useful, and eliminated a bunch of frustration (especially if you're pressed for time.)
The parking garage is a controlled environment. I'm not sure it'd have the same benefit in an open space.
I strongly disagree. Public transportation in the US sucks because it doesn't go where you want to go, when you want to go. It works well for a very limited subset of the population that lives in high-density metro areas; it's useless for any task that leaves these areas.
Now before you complain that I'm an apologist, lemme cite some facts. I took a flight from Washington National airport not too long ago. My plan was to take the bus to the Metro train, which would drop me at the airport. Decent plan, right? After a mile walk to the nearest bus stop, I stood there for 45+ minutes waiting for the bus, which didn't show up. At that point, I had burned my "extra" time budget and was in danger of missing my flight. I jogged home, got in my car, and drove to the airport. I passed the bus some 60 minutes after it was scheduled to make a stop. Why didn't I drive to the Metro and continue from there? Because it was a weekend, and the trains run on a 12-minute schedule. With the bus-delay, I was in danger of missing the plane if I missed the Metro by the perfect amount.
Similarly, I *can* take public transportation to work, but I did the calculations, and the one-way time varies from 3 to 4 hours. That's for a 26-mile commute distance. Public transportation is coordinated at the local level here, so it's a horrible PiTA to switch across five different transport methods to get somewhere - bus, train, bus, different bus, etc. Schedules between municipalities are completely uncoordinated, so it takes maximum time to go anywhere. If you don't value your time, it's a wonderful way to burn through it.
What's that? I should move closer to work? Unfortunately, my office is located in an industrial business park. There isn't a residential area within 5 miles. Further, even if I could make that work, I'd be a huge distance from everything else. The US isn't laid-out for a public transportation infrastructure. It's been pasted on as an afterthought, and it sucks. We'd need to make some horrific changes to install a useful transport network, and I don't expect that to happen in my lifetime.
I've gone through the gamut of permutations - the task is one for work. Our CF-to-IDE adapters have been buzzed-out to make sure the DMA lines weren't pegged. There are several on the market that have the DMA signals tied high or low, though I can't comprehend why. We've also made sure the DASP and PDIAG signals are connected (those are necessary during the auto-detect phase.) We have fielded products that have a custom PCB connected to a Cirrus EP9312 Arm9 CPU. The CF adapter in that app works fine, including DMA transfers.
I'm convinced that the CF card vendors are pandering to their primary market, which I believe is the digital camera folks. There's strong demand for high performance, and IDE isn't known for that. I can easily see Big Camera Company handing a briefcase of cash to CF Card Vendor to improve performance by altering the bus interface. The factory-specified card works great, but aftermarket cards don't. Funny that.
Given the variance between manufacturers of CF cards, we've been unable to find a solution that we have any confidence in. We require products with CF cards to be designed such that the CF card is alone on the IDE bus. Other IDE peripherals go on a separate connection. That's annoying in some situations where we're pressed for space, but is seems to be necessary.
I've been struggling with CF cards in embedded applications, and I can verify that they don't always comply with the interface specs. I've gone through at least a half-dozen different CF card brands, and all display some form of misbehavior if they're put on an IDE chain with another device. By themselves they work fine, but add a CD-ROM or a hard drive, and the system will fail with either bus timeouts or stalled transfers. My suspicion is that the CF card vendors are playing games with performance metrics in photography apps, and in those environments they can bend the spec because there's exactly zero chance of another device being installed on the interface.
As far as I can tell (without a bus analyzer,) there's something hinky happening during device auto-detection and initialization. Many times, the CF card will be detected as the Master device, but no Slave device will be detected. Swap to a different brand CF card, and the symptom will change - both devices will auto-detect, but the IDE bus will throw timeout errors during boot. Swapping in just about any not-a-CF-card device, and everything is fine.
I absolutely concur. I'll usually be blunt and indicate that I'm interested in the solution methodology and not the specific answer, and I'll probably send the candidate down a dead-end road to see how he reacts.
... I probably can't teach you how to be less of an asshat. A bad attitude is destructive, no matter what degree of "leet skills" you think you have. Unless you're being harassed or threatened, walking out of an interview is a mistake.
During an interview a couple of years ago, the candidate was stunned when I said that I didn't have an answer to the problem, and that we'd solve it together. So I explained, "Son, life doesn't come with a User Manual, Reference Guide, or more importantly, an Answer Key in the back." I think he completely missed the point, and unsurprisingly, had little in the way of problem solving skills. Reminds me of a line in Men in Black - "Gentlemen, congratulations. You're everything we've come to expect from years of government training."
When I came out of college, I went on a particularly brutal interview. One section involved critical timing paths (I'm an EE,) and the interviewer tossed a simple schematic on the whiteboard. I looked at it for about 5 seconds, and told him what it did. He paused and asked, "Are you sure?" His tone clearly indicated that I was incorrect. I looked again, and stood my ground. I further pointed out that he had a potential setup/hold timing violation depending on what parts he was using. I spent over an hour with this guy, and he asked some seriously challenging questions. I found out after the fact that he was notorious for chewing-up and spitting-out candidates, and that his interviews rarely lasted more than 20 minutes (he was effectively the CTO, so time mattered.)
The lesson here is that a proper interview is geared toward making sure you have both technical chops and people skills that are compatible with the company. I can teach you new tech stuff
I wish I had mod points for you. The Shuttle was a lie from the get-go, though I don't think the original intent was malicious. I suspect they were "overly optimistic." Additionally, the Shuttle's mission objectives were fungible, which only results in programmatic feature-creep. The individual launch cost exceeding USD$1B doesn't help matters. You'd expect the cost to go down once they figure it out right? Nah, that only happens in an environment where there's a competitive alternative. Otherwise, no incentive exists to reduce costs.
In a rational world, the Shuttle and the Saturn V could co-exist. They have very different mission capabilities, and should be considered complimentary resources. Unfortunately, we don't live in a rational world, and politicians were intent on destroying the legacy of their predecessors. The Saturn V stood as a monument to JFK, and folks from the Republican Party saw an opportunity to tear it down and replace it with the Shuttle. Burns my bacon, it does.
I should further clarify that I'm not suggesting that you could substitute silicon for carbon, and end up with bipedal hominids who strongly resemble us ... only with silver skin. That's Hollywood working within their abilities to map actors into roles. I'm thinking substantially more basic life. Think one-celled critters; bacteria; viruses.
I was watching some coverage of NASA's recent earthmoving (marsmoving?) efforts, and was stunned at just how stoopid the reporters can be. I expect that the NASA folks do understand that life doesn't have to play by the earth-based ruleset, but that it's a good place to start. It's very likely that all the inner planets have some form of cross-contamination (i.e. localized exogenesis.) I wouldn't expect critters from Earth to fare well on either Mars or Venus, but some molds might. I've got some tenacious mold growing in my crawlspace, and that's a pretty inhospitable place. The stuff keeps coming back in spite of my best "scorched earth" efforts.
Hang on a second, and let's examine exactly what predicates "life." You need to have raw materials available. There needs to be an energy gradient. There needs to be a closed-cycle chemical reaction for the transport of energy. There needs to be a solvent for the mechanical transport of chemicals.
On Earth, we've got the solar influx for the energy gradient, water is the solvent, and the carbon compounds provide the chemical-reaction basis. Environmentally, the Earth's temperature and atmospheric pressure put us near the solvent's triple point, with the majority of the solvent in the liquid phase.
Could you conceive of a place where ammonia is the solvent? You'll need environmental constraints such that there's an abundance of the solvent in a form conducive to mechanical transport. You might still have carbon-based life forms, but they wouldn't be using the water-cycle we know here on Earth. Why is that such a fantasy?
If you're going to argue that "I haven't seen it yet, therefore it can't possibly exist," I'd recommend some introspection on the definition of the word "preconception."
Under Earth-like environmental conditions, carbon has several advantages. But what happens when you move away from Earth's environment? Suppose that the ambient temperature on LV-426 was substantially higher than on Earth. Put it somewhere favorable to silicon, but disadvantageous to carbon. Are you absolutely certain that carbon would still rule the roost?
Honestly, I tire of people who are convinced that earth-life is the only possible solution. It works here. Fine. Change the environmental conditions such that carbon compounds fall apart readily, or water as a solvent doesn't exist in all three phases. Silicon instead of carbon. Methane or ammonia instead of water. Won't happen on Earth, but it might somewhere else.
First, you have to accept that you can't just create "heat" or "cold" from nothing, nor can you destroy it. You can, however, move it from one place to another. As water freezes into ice, it absorbs "cold" from the local environment. Similarly, when it melts, it releases the "cold" into the surroundings. That's how the ice-pack air conditioner works.
"Hot" and "cold" are basically the same thing, only with opposite polarities. The above thermal exchange could be viewed as "melting ice absorbs heat" and "freezing ice releases heat." So the thing you really need to worry about is the ice pack moving heat into your freezer. With more items in the freezer, you have a bigger "cold" buffer which will offset the "heat" dumped into the freezer by the freezing water. Remember, "heat" can't be destroyed, only moved. It's just a matter of time until the "heat" accumulates to a problematic level.
I run a small business on the side, helping people deal with Catastrophic Retention of Accumulated Pthermions in their home refrigeration systems. For a nominal fee, I can have a crew come over and purge the pthermions from your freezer, ensuring years of continued, reliable service.
I was totally let-down by the end of the story. This was a perfect example of amateur sleuthing, which should have resulted in a thief being apprehended at the bottom of the hour, only to mutter "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you pesky kids and your ubiquitous ad-hoc wireless networking."
Gawd, I remember fighting for access to the amber-screen VT-500 series terminals in the computer lab because they were so much easier on the eyes.
I hope there's sarcasm in there ...
..." i.e. "that's what it's supposed to do." Implementation is somewhat less ... exact.
The Market dictates that you always adopt the lowest-cost model of operation. Dumping your toxic manufacturing byproduct into the local water supply is much cheaper than processing it (ref: Love Canal.) We have common property - water, air, etc. Strict market adherence leads to the Tragedy of the Commons. Government forces are intended to provide a counterpressure where The Market leads us to very undesirable places.
The Ethanol Mandate is pandering to the corn lobby, and results from corruption in the government. Not a good example. Note also that I said "One of the functions of a government
While the landfills and muni waste streams contain copious raw materials, the processors aren't geared to use that stream as an input. They've invested billions into the current infrastructure - mined ore, crude oil, raw lumber, etc. Changing to a different feedstock, regardless of how "better" or "more efficient" it may be, requires a huge expenditure of cash. The economists call that "front loading," in that all your expenses are paid up front, as opposed to sticking with the current infrastructure, which is much more profitable in the short term.
Everyone these days is playing the short-term strategy, so you get short-sighted responses. Shouldn't be much of a surprise. One of the functions of a government is to force a policy that a free-market won't readily adopt. I'd love to see the poultry farmers on Maryland's Eastern Shore be required to supply their excess of liqui-poo to a municipal thermal depolymerization plant, instead of polluting the Chesapeake Bay with the runoff. It ain't happening without a shove, in spite of the feedstock being a high-energy-density, easily processed material.
A bunch of folks are bemoaning the 56k number, as it seems rather an odd rate. Awright younguns, hop up here on Uncle MigraineMan's lap while he tells you a story ...
... and was a circuit board about the size of an ATX motherboard. Not wanting to transmit all those pesky bits, another bunch of smart lads realized that the human ear isn't a linear device, so they encoded the 14-bit linear samples using the dreaded u-Law encoding table. That made each sample a more manageable 8-bit value.
... anybody?
Back when communicating between two distant places involved two tin cans and some wet string, some mighty smart folks invented digital telephony. First, they decided to sample the voice audio at 8kHz - after all, they were only obligated to deliver audio bandwidth in the 300-3000 Hz range (affectionately referred to as "three hundred to three K C" back in the day.) You might be surprised to find that a 14-bit analog-to-digital converter that sampled at 8kHz was quit the engineering marvel
Whelp1: But Uncle MigraineMan, what's that got to do with 56k?
Now just settle down a bit. [MM sips from pocket flask.] So the bright young engineers decide that 24 is a nice round number, so they grouped 24 voice channels together into a Digital Signal 1, or DS1. If you follow with the math, you multiply 8-bits by 8000 samples per second to get 64000 bits per second, then by the 24 channels to get
Whelp2: 1,536,000. But Uncle MigraineMan, everybody knows that a DS1 is 1.544Mbps!
That's right. One of them bright young engineers realized that they couldn't tell head from tail with all the voice channels looking the same, so they added some bits to mark the start and end of the DS1. That brings us up to the current line rate.
After a while, the phone company - and note that I said "the" phone company, as there was only one at the time - started using these fancy DS1 signals as connections within their network. They started noticing that when a bunch of calls on a DS1 were silent, sometimes the DS1 equipment would drop out, causing many disgruntled customers. And as I always say, if it affects the revenue stream, it gets immediate attention.
The bright young engineers studied the problem, and discovered that a long period of silence could cause a long string of all-zeroes in the fancy DS1 signal, causing the terminal hardware to think the line had been cut. To remedy this situation, the bright young engineers decided to add some "1" bits to the audio channels to maintain what they call "ones density." That's a fancy way of sayin' they limit the number of consecutive zeroes so the fancy DS1 line equipment doesn't get confused. They decided that, since this is voice audio, and they've already compressed it with the dreaded u-Law code, no one would notice if they "stole" that least-significant-bit and made it always a "1". It is, after all, "least significant." Who's going to miss it?
Whelp1: So there's only 7-bits of usable data in each voice channel? That's nuts!
Well, it made sense at the time. Eventually, computer usage forced the phone company to upgrade it's equipment to support "clear channel" transport, instead of the "robbed bit" format. That caused a whole passle of problems during the transition. Ultimately, something called B8ZS was pretty much universally adopted. Another day, I'll tell you a scary story about something called ZBTSI. Now y'all run along.
Honestly, I don't like it either. The Dad is an upstanding guy, though his personal prejudices will occasionally color his decisions. I've watched him walk away from a number of questionable deals involving a briefcase full of cash. That takes guts. I respect him because he's earned my respect. And I agree that we'd have a better society if people would stand behind their principles and put ethical behavior before the fast cash-grab.
First-sale is relevant. As a business owner, I'm not obligated to sell anything to anyone ... but that's not much of a business. When I do sell something, the purchaser may take his item out into the parking lot and smash it to bits if he likes. I may not like it, but it's his prerogative to do so. If he returns to my shop and asks to purchase another item, fully intending to smash it to bits, I can:
. a) refuse to sell, as I don't like his behavior
. b) sell in spite of my personal dislike
There has to be a certain amount of disassociation between seller and buyer for transactions to occur. It'd be a nightmare otherwise. How would you handle restrictive oversight in the case of resale? loss? gift giving? I view it very much like freedom of speech - I may vehemently object to what you're saying, but I respect your right to say it. And the above is the "small business" example. In larger businesses, officers of the company have a fiduciary obligation to act in the best interest of the company. That means putting your personal opinion aside during the evaluation of contracts, sales, and acquisitions. If you're a publicly traded company, the personal disassociation is even more important. Declining an acquisition offer on the basis of "it's bad for our core values" is perfectly valid. Declining because "I can't stand Company X" will get you in a heap of trouble.
As for The Dad, he didn't get forced out of business by competitors with no scruples. I'll try to give the executive summary -
. The Dad flew to Foreign Country (FC) to demo some hi-tech equipment.
. After the demo, FC refused to let him leave unless he abandoned the demo equipment
. He abandoned the equipment after being threatened with improsonment
. FC reverse engineered the demo equipment
. The State Department got involved, ultimately telling The Dad to "drop it," as FC is a favored nation
Many years later, The Dad was offered an acquisition deal. It was good money with a reputable firm. The Dad tried to slide in a clause that would prohibit the company from doing business with FC. Directly or indirectly. Ever. That was the deal breaker.
The Dad stood by his principles. He sleeps fine at night. The business is gone. It could have been a tremendous thing had the acquisition gone through. Another company stepped up and filled the void. To my knowledge, the acquiring company doesn't do much business internationally, to this day. FC still got what it wanted, in spite of The Dad's principled stand. His actions were completely irrelevant, except to us. The only damage he inflicted was to his own family. FC didn't bat an eye.
Exactly. If you look at the FIPS 140 documents, you'll see layers of data- and physical-security that need to be implemented. Currently, the SSH folks are only considering the raw data encryption requirement at the endpoints. The ISPs' analysis techniques will force the SSH folks to consider the end-to-end link as a single unit, and they'll implement more structures to deny the ISPs any visibility. I fully expect such a move to cost the ISPs more bandwidth. "All these channels look like random data, all the time." Yep.
Unfortunately, the "principled man" often doesn't stay in business, because the "principled" decisions don't jive with First Sale Doctrine. You listening to me, Dad?
Yes, The Dad went out of business because he refused to sell his products to people who might use them in ways he didn't like. There was always this uncomfortable pause between where he'd ask what the end use was and the customer declining to answer. That usually was immediately followed by the customer saying "no thanks" because they wouldn't enter into a sale contract that had strings attached. Funny, I wouldn't buy a car that could only be started if I justified the trip to someone else.
You can stand on your political soapbox all you like. Expect your customers to find a way around the obstruction you present. You are motivating them to do so. At the end of the day, all you've done is devalue your patent to the point of worthlessness.