As long as we have no control over what the user tries to install and run in his machine, we are always going to be vulnerable to trojans.
The proliferation of proprietary formats we are seeing that all do basically the same thing, like send sound files over the net, or view video clips, are encouraging mass downloads of programs from third party providers. These programs may well do what they said they would do, but with all this DMCA crap going on, its getting harder and harder to see if they are doing a little extra that wasn't in the bargain, like doing zombie work on the side to assist in little capers the originating author needs to pull off.
What firewall or systems programming can stop a deliberately malicious program installed by an ignorant user? Say the program "demands" access to the internet for "verification/auto-update", then you have to set the firewall to allow this program access to the net. Now what happens? Its like giving car keys to a valet parking agent. You only have to trust he's only going to do what he says he will do. To add insult to injury, consider you generally have signed any recourse you have when you click that "I agree" button that confirms you have read and understood the EULA.
What irritates me so about these "plug-ins", "macros", and "scripts" is that they are indeed executable. Nothing says the malicious person coding these things is gonna follow the rules. He is free to code some really nasties in assembler if he so desires. The state of music file distribution I find really disturbing. We have an MP3 format which is generally well understood, yet it seems everybody jumping on the bandwagon wants to use proprietary formats which are not generally understood, leaving us all open to the risks resulting from ignorance.
As a public, we aren't helping much. We agree to any damn thing they print in the EULA. As a public, we should INSIST that if we are to be kept ignorant by law how something works, if that something does something malicious, then its maker should have full responsibility for the problems it generated.
Basically I am proposing a trade. If you want the protection of law to keep the public ignorant, then you waive indemnity.
We have a patent system and copyright system in place. Both were implemented on the concept that the work was to be in the open. Why aren't encrypted work also known as "trade secret" and not afforded protection by copyright or patent? Basically, any work encrypted would be considered a "trade secret", not in the open, hence not eligible for protection by the patent or copyright system at all? But to make this happen, its gonna take the will of a lot of people to pressure the legislators to enact this. Pressure as in "if you do not do this, start polishing your resume.".
Apparently, some of the MBA's making the decisions are failing to realize that by failing to make a standard that *ALL* adhere to, they are raising the "cost of entry" to the consumer to purchase movies exhorbitantly high by requiring the lawful consumer to also purchase the requisite players.
The "cost of exit" still remains virtually nil. It costs very little to maintain your generic player.
But needs will be met.
Consider
An executive who has found a company willing to pay him a million dollars a year plus perks in exchange for his leadership skills. He specifies yet another format and has it accepted. His needs were met. His salary is paid. His guidance is followed.
A consumer who wants a copy of some movie he liked. He sees this weird format thing on the shelves, but it won't play in his player. He leaves it on the shelf, and eventually one of his friends offer him a DIVX copy. The seeker now has his movie and his needs are met.
People will see stuff they can't play in their machine, so they leave it on the shelf and look around for the generic bootleg which anything can play. This really encourages the production of bootlegs. Think you can control it with lawyers?
Review "prohibition" in the US when they tried to outlaw whiskey. It ruined a lot of otherwise productive citizens, and made a lot of gangsters rich. Just as our marijuana laws do now.
Geez, didn't they learn their lesson with this "region" fiasco? People have money but cannot legally buy what they want, but the bootleg is free for the taking!
People generally want to be honest, but geez, what are these MBA's thinking these days?
I don't know just what to think of all of today's personal interruption devices.
I thought the telephone was bad enough. Fine if your business was in marketing and it was your business to be available... but if you are in production, you are supposed to be in the lab building something, not yapping on the phone. If its that friggen important, it should be the person who engaged you to do something, and it would be in his best interest if he were to come to you personally to discuss it, not have you spending valuable time servicing phone interrupts.
Its gotten much worse lately. The phone. The fax. The mail. The email. Now cellphones. And IM. Geez, when does anybody ever do anything? We seem to be a network of routers. Somehow we find jobs where we get paid to delegate someone else to actually do anything - but who's doing anything these days? Is it offshore so you can hire people to actually do something?
Another thing that pisses me off about all this new technology is the social aspects of it... you are opening yourself up to all sorts of casual contact, and each contact eats up so much time to service. If you are not easy to contact, people leave you alone. Once someone has made contact with you, now the onus is on you to respond or they get their feelings hurt... and everybody who has taken the trouble to contact you expects a timely response. Ok, so I get a cellphone... suddenly all my family and friends want to know it. They call when I am in the middle of something. But I gotta remember my manners, make nice, and go on and on and on about the lost cat or whatever. When I am supposed to be designing something for a client.
The more things I have that can interrupt me, the less stuff I can do. By even having the stuff, I am forced to get people's feelings hurt, because once they have used it to snag me, they feel that they should be given priority time. We have placed technology at a special place in our life. Its like when we personally visit someone else, and the phone rings, it gets priority. The technology gets to do the dirty work of butting in and forcing an interrupt to shut it up.
That little priority trick ( aka "dialing for attention" ) was shown to me when I went to register for college. There was a long line in front of the desk. I didn't know if it was the right line or not. Confused, I asked another student. He didn't know either but gave me an extremely valuable piece of advice... that is to walk up to the front of the line, see if there's a phone on the desk, get the number, then call it and ask my question. Presto - instant front-of-the-line by using the phone! Walking up to someone and banging a bell until I got attention would socially be considered extremely rude, but doing the same thing using technology is quite acceptable.
This technology comes at a price. The price of being interruptible. If people know you have a personal interrupt mechanism available which others can access but not them, now you have hurt their feelings. You give them access and thats just that much less time you have to get your own stuff done.
I was at Burger King the other day, and kinda felt sad for one guy that came in with his laptop and wireless phone, trying to make the most of his lunch "hour". Here he was, trying to type up email responses on one subject, yet his cellphone would ring every time he closed it.. and it didn't sound like very productive calls to me. They sounded like he was rescheduling yesterday's work over and over again instead of doing it. I wonder if he enjoyed his burger, or had to toss down a bottle of antacid to get his body to accept food during such a barrage of interrupts.
The way this technology has mushroomed, I find it amazing anyone can actually do anything.
Quite right. What is messing up my TV is the fourier spectral components of signals on the data busses.
That's why I indicated the processor would have to be executing a known loop if you wanted to track it, as the processor clock itself is carrying no info, and has no distinguishing characteristics to differentiate it from any other generator of that frequency. Its kinda like if you were listening for music only by listening for the presence of middle C. Not easy. But if you were listening for a sequence of notes played in an expected pattern, now you have something unique to lock onto. Notice how the human mind itself is one helluva signal correlator, and often we can swear we hear music from noise sources that have a repetitive beat, such as winshield washers or washing machines? Actually, the music we are trying to hear does exist in the washing machine noise! ( So does a lot of other noise ).
If I had a pure carrier to the TV, you are right, I would lose sound by FM capture, and the screen would go black as the sync clipper would try to lock onto the "blackest" part and the DC restorer which recreates video referenced to the sync tips would find no white, nor would there be any chroma burst in the sync.
I'm sure they could see your computer's EM field. Easily!
I see my own all the time! You see, I have a TV in the next room still on rabbit ears. When I turn my computer on, channels 2, 4, and 5 become virtually unwatchable because of the processor clock harmonics being emitted in the TV channel spectrum.
Believe me, you might be surprised how much muss and fuss manufacturers go through to make sure they don't emit more EMI than some legal limit, much like auto manufacturers go through the hoops trying to minimize emissions.
The trick they are apt to use on Mars is to use several antennas at the same time to lock into the unit on Mars. Sure, there is a lot of ambient noises, and thats why the multiple antennas - you know exactly what phase delays as the signal arrives at each antenna to expect ( beamformer ). You only pay attention to the signals which arrive at the proper delays to each antenna. Being you know what the processor loop on Mars is doing, you can correlate against that same pattern . When you get correlation to that pattern showing up at the correct time displacements to each antenna, bingo. The unit on Mars is the only one that could emit the signal such that the constraints on the digital filters at the receivers here on Earth are met.
I am not on the team to do this, I am speculating on how I would attempt to do so. I do know computers are terribly noisy in the RF area, and because they emit a peculiar recognizable racket in the RF spectrum in an area that is by nature pretty quiet, it should be "relatively" easy to find. Especially one hung in a tight loop.
If you browse around for "pseudorandom noise generators", also known as "linear feedback shift registers", you will see a lot of tie-ins to "spread spectrum" communications, with technologies for digging signals out of the noise by taking advantage of correlation to known patterns.
One mourns the loss of his work, and the things it could have done much as a mother would mourn a killed child. It represents the extinguishing of all the hopes and dreams of that which one put a lot of personal effort into creating.
I understand, and mourn also. Beagle is Earth's child, sent for exploration, to go where we yet cannot reach or see. With the news of Beagle's problems comes the extinguishing of all the hopes and excitement of the discovery of new things Beagle was to uncover for us.
Hopefully, we learn what we did wrong, pick up, and try again. Space is a harsh mistress.
My condolences to the Scientists, Engineers, and Constructors of Beagle. My hope is that you do not become discouraged; rather learn all you can from what happened so you can try again.
Imagine a report being fed in that all water served in a trendy restaurant required the approval of the chef.
But the text rendered for the public view clearly states that "water served there had been personally passed by the chief cook.".
I have heard all sorts of stories of foreign lands where concepts were almost accurately translated, with hilarious results. Maybe someone has a link to a few lists. It might be very interesting to revisit those days of humor.
I think it would be correct to say "skills to grab control of things that have been done" because that implies "the skills to permit somebody to do something" and it also, more importantly, implies "the skills to prevent somebody from doing something."
is quite an improvement on mine.
I like your ending statement about creating a universe where money just doesn't matter all that much. That was the whole idea of what interested me in engineering so much. If we do this right, we can arrange things so our life support needs are all met by channeling the forces of nature, leaving us free to explore whatever it is we want to explore. With all the forces of nature at our disposal, I feel it riduculous we work as hard as we do. Especially when a helluva lot of it is meaningless busy-work.
I do take it you meant to be funny suggesting the efforts resulting in successful moon landings were falsified. With the way things were going, it looked as if space travel were to become commonplace within the next decade. The first landings were apt to become a tourist destination. What were we going to say to the international community when they went to the moon also, and failed to find our stuff? Like, who's gonna mess with it? Talk about major international embarassment. I know we in the US have done some stupid things, but hoaxing something like this would have left US with an egg on its face it would never ever be able to clean off.
I will ruminate here, as an older guy who has been following the space program since the 60's, the main paradigm shift I have noticed is that in the early days, we were determined to do it, no matter what the cost. Jokes abounded over the cost of anything related to the military. And a lot of it was true. That stuff was tested six ways from Sunday, and its properties thoroughly understood. We knew everything there was to be known about that six thousand dollar toilet seat... including if it would outgass anything toxic when subjected to 300 degrees fahrenheit in a vacuum.
These days, we seem to be quite happy dealing with things we don't thoroughly understand. In the old days, we knew exactly byte for byte what was in our machines, gate for gate, and exactly how they worked. These days, we are expected to use stuff we don't understand. And we get laughed at for using the old stuff because its old.
Latest example: I attended a seminar for a late-night TV show stock picking software. It sold for about $3,000 a pop. During the presentation, I wanted to know how the metrics designating buying and selling pressure were derived. The answer I got was something down the line that "Do you know how your car works? I don't!!! I just drive! Others fix the car. I use it. I get stuff Done! ". Right. Ignorance is a virtue?
I see more and more people's acceptance of things they don't understand, and they fail to pay attention to detail. What's the difference in how much money you spent to build a rocket if you failed to notice that the material you use to build your seals with becomes brittle if chilled?
My own take is often people have no idea of how critical *everything* is. Not just the big stuff. Its the old "for the want of a nail, the shoe was lost..." thing all over again. In today's super cost-conscious environment, you can't worry about whether the shoe is properly nailed when you have much more visible things to worry about - like the positioning of the sponsor's logo on the horse.
Only thing I can say is things are gonna get more and more interesting as the US economy tanks. From all I can tell, it has to, just as a battery constantly discharging more than it charges will eventually end up discharged. Right now, our government is trying to prop up the money supply with massive tax cuts and public debt, if we are not careful, its like the family who mortgaged their home to spend one last raucous night on the town. In a way its scary, but in a way its exciting, for I see the day coming when people with the skills to actually do something will be valued by society more than the people who have the skills to permit somebody to do something.
I wish I still had modpoints... I would have given you one for this.
There are a helluva lot of benefits to not being "owned".
You know how we like to fuss a lot about copyright law here? Well, guess what, you will find out that that law also gives you a helluva lot of leverage dealing with the suit folk.
When becoming a permanent employee, it has been customary for the employee to sign over all rights to his production as part of the bargain of being employed. Down the line of "Work for Hire.". You now come in much like a Wedding Photographer. They pay you to take the pictures, but you now have the option of requiring payment for licensing them to actually build anything you designed for them if you so choose to enforce that. You get to "keep the negatives", so to speak.
Things are changing. The old ways of doing things are going away. Its probably not realistic to think that some employer should take care of you. Likewise, its probably not realistic to expect you to sign over all rights to reproduce your creation without consideration of continuing payments to you for licensing your copyright of your work.
There is a lot of change going on. Whether its good or bad, I don't yet know. I do see a lot of advanced indication of where the new jobs are going to be. At the college I attend, I note there are very few students in math and computer science, but a helluva lot of students in the paralegal stuff. I took one class in intellectual property rights, and the classroom was packed. Stuff will be built elsewhere. The big money will be in learning to bicker successfully over who has the rights to market the things others built.
We are entering a time thats very confusing to me, as I see no support mechanisms in place, yet the system appears to continue to work. Although we call it a "service economy", somehow the rest of the world toils to produce goods for America, and accept America's trash for recycling, and America seems to provide them financial services to account for their toils. We seem to have built our empire on technological superiority, but now even that is an exportable item. We seem to retain things like numbers representing wealth, backed by faith that something backs it. And we seem to value little that which provides us with the necessities of life, such as the foundations of manufacturing and technology our empire was initially based on. Personally, I see it as a rich man's fetish over having gold faucets in the bathroom, but having little concern over whether there's any capacity to keep water in the pipes.
Things will change again when he notices the pumps have long since died, the tanks are empty, and he's thirsty.
You just hit upon the item which would push me over the edge to buy into this should they offer it.
They already are transmitting "near CD quality" compressed bitstream with accurate artist/label tags. Now, if there were some way my receiver would simply monitor the incoming bitstream and snag the incoming stream to hard disk, accumulating generic MP3 of what's transmitted.
I have no problem with paying for a subscription.
Most likely, I would listen to music coming from the drive, so I could transfer off stuff I liked for use in the car or jogging player, as well as immediately ditch the stuff that didn't do anything for me. If I do not like the first fifteen seconds of it, I want the capability of flushing it.
Being I have paid for the right to enjoy the music transmitted, if I wanna listen to a rerun, that oughta be my prerogative. Somehow, I can't feel I am cheating anybody out of anything if I have already paid to have a continuous stream of music beamed at me, and I save snippets for my own use. I guess its the same feeling I have that if I am paying my water bill, its not stealing if I fill a bottle at my kitchen faucet to take jogging with me, despite the fact Dasani might see my doing so as a lost sale of bottled water.
Its funny how business keeps playing games and wondering why people do what they do to try to adapt to their business plan. They play region encoding games so one group of people can see a movie and another cannot, then wonder why people encode and share movies. They play all sorts of encryption games with music and wonder why people share MP3. Just as this discussion has repeated over and over, people will go with a subscription model - and pay for it. Its really time consuming to go through all these workarounds to get what I want. I don't like playing all these games, but I feel I am forced into it. When all is said and done, I just want a plain vanilla file I can open up in any generic reader. Whether it be audio, video, or text. We've all been bit by these proprietary formats du jour. I don't expect to tell them what they can spend the money I exchanged for the music for, neither will I tolerate them selling me a bitstream which they still control after the sale.
If it is a fact of life that they control my personal use of the product after the sale, then I feel we must do some more research on electronic money transfers, and give me the right to control the money I exchanged for the product so I still control it even after the sale.
This is soooo offtopic, but I do wanna respond to AC's claims.
I don't know how you arrive at the conclusion that atheists are full of anger and bitterness. Or, what is an atheist?
I was raised strict Southern Baptist, and what I saw didn't seem much like "love" to me. It seemed as if our rendition of God was something our religious leaders dreamed up as an entity not only to "give" the leaders authority over us, but also serve as an entity to absorb liability for all the damage done.
It seemed like the whole affair was nothing more than just a tremendous psychological barrage dreamed up by a few people very astute in human behavioural psychology in order to enslave the "believers" and "faithful", in a manner much similar to the ones used by hackers to plant malicious zombie programs into other peoples machines. The end goal is to have unquestioned obedience to follow the leader's command ( without having to pay the power bill ).
I have even seen fathers led to tease their own kids to anger, knowing that no matter how angry the kids get, the father can always rely on the swinging leather strap of "Christian Discipline" to maintain their authority. I will grant you that the ability to overpower and hurt will get you obedience any day of the week, but it is not a good foundation to build a relationship on. The wronged ones will have something far worse than indifference stored in their hearts. If the one who beats for obedience ever loses the power to hurt, hell has no fury like the uncoiling of the bands of stored hatred.
A lot of this religious stuff reeks to me of Stanley Milgram's "Obedience to Authority". Remember that study Stanley Milgram did at the end of WWII, as he was curious if there was something peculiar about the German people that made them susceptible to the horrors thay could inflict upon others ( namely the Jews )? It turned out this whole thing is a basic human condition, where easily turn our backs on fellow humans if there is a leadership / chain of command structure in place, and we are merely "following orders" and we are not taking personal responsibility for our actions. Everybody has had the frustration of dealing with a bureaucracy, where people are only "doing their jobs", but often causing much frustration to others.
Stanley's experiments showed a very substantial proportion of our population would even very painfully electrocute an innocent person, based on nothing more than the urgings of an authority figure in a white lab coat. This is across all races of all peoples!
It is my fear that people who understand psychology more than most instantiate a "god" of their own design, then use their pool of "believers" to follow the "orders" of that "god".
Its this reason I am very reticent to place much faith in anything Man has messed with. I flat do not trust Man. Sure, he may claim "Inspired by God", but is he telling me that I am not inspired because I wanna get my belief system from what I consider to be the source of all things, not from his data, which I consider likely tainted from human intervention?
Don't get me wrong. I am very religious. I believe in the God which created Heaven, Earth, and everything in it. I am a scientist. I study God by witness of his Creation. We may call them Laws of Physics, but to me, these are God's law, coined by God himself. God's Will be Done. Its not a prayer, its fact. God is no respecter of persons. These laws are immutable - no one is exempt from them or can change them. I'm not gonna claim any special insights to God, as I can't prove a thing. I don't even know what God is, but that does not keep me from the greatest joy in my life - studying his work to try to find out. I know its a puzzle I will never solve, but who needs games when God has already given me a puzzle to solve? He does give us a helluva lot of rewards along the way as we try to unravel it. Things like medicines, and as this post noted, ways of getting the power it takes to bring our own dreams to reality.
Well, there are those "road warriors" that scare the hell out of everyone else on the road... maybe this system might be used to get the worst offenders tagged. I'd rather the assholes get nailed than have my insurance rates inexorably hiked to cover the inevitable mayhem.
I see the biggest advantage of intelligent highway systems as being able to efficiently route traffic. Imagine if we tried to run the internet the way our present system works. Joe Schmoe's router catches fire and the system snarls for hours instead of routing around it?
This system sure has a helluva lot of potential to save us all a lot of problems.
A little offtopic, but while I am thinking of insurance companies, I wonder if there are any out there which lower their risks by refusing to insure any modified vehicles? I see all these SUV type things out on the road, modified in such a manner such that not only is their center of gravity moved upward (encouraging rollover), but their bumpers won't mate ( resulting in much more damage from even casual bumps ), and their headlight height from road surface now shines down into unmodified vehicles, with the resulting glare causing it harder for the unmodified vehicle driver to see. It seems the accident statistics should indicate that an insurance company could significantly lower their payouts by refusing coverage of modified vehicles, and be able to lower premiums and attract more policyholders.
It still amazes me just how much "bang for the buck" we get from processors these days. I guess maybe I still think of the old RCA 1802 as being about the ultimate in low-power operation ( despite the fact it was really, really slow and a real bitch to program. )
I get rather aggravated when I see a lot of this new stuff coming out that appears to be running on the very edge of meltdown. Fans have always been my nemesis. Moving parts. Big. Failure prone. Noisy. Vibration.
I have always liked to build my stuff where I can seal it up and get it out of harm's way ( and bugs, dust, spilled coffee, and whatever else goes around.) I agree with the guys who speak with disgust about trying to build a DVR, but have to tolerate noisy fans.
Another thing that I find disappointing is bootup time. Having to do the same thing over and over every time I start my machine. I could only imagine having to boot the processor when the phone rang, and having some poor soul on the other end wait through the typical boot process.
Knowing my experience so far with every new software OS release taking longer and longer to boot, requiring faster and faster machines, it seemed to make just about as much sense to me to specify an embedded OS as it did to send a letter to my Congressman to have the federal government come and remove a weed I found growing in the street. Seemed a lot easier to me to walk over and address the problem directly without involving anything else.
But if they get these cores down pat, with all the intelligence of an OS without needing that lengthy bootup process... wow! Linux sure seems a natural for that, as hopefully the core will already be object-oriented aware, have GUI objects already in its repetoire, just awaiting configuration as to what to do with them.
Sounds like comparing the new cores to the old is kinda like comparing a new AVR chip to my old IMSAI 8080 machine.
I liked your post... I betcha you had a lot of fun working with those cores. I can only imagine what those guys are doing with those cores on video boards - where they can do all the 3D matrix math right on the board. Or Hauppauge - where they are doing that PVR250 stuff putting the MPEG encoder in one from what I can tell.
"You were just waiting to tout your skill in real-time embedded equipment, weren't you."
Uh, actually you are right. I do want to spread the word around on what I do. Maybe someone out there has something interesting for me to work on.
Who knows what might turn up... there's a few things out there I would love to play around with, and maybe get what I need to pay the power bill at the same time.:)
Actually, I am quite impressed. Dual processor. Linux 2.4 kernel. In a phone.
They have very substantial requirements.
Its gotta fit in the palm of your hand, not a laptop.
Its gotta work real time - when it rings and you answer it, you don't wait for processes to load or having it boot.
The thing's gotta run all day at least of nonstop run on a set of batteries!
I don't know just how they pulled this off... as I have always custom programmed my realtime embedded stuff - usually in 68000 assembler. Sometimes Atmel AVR, but damn near always in assembler. Using custom design, I can design for very low power consumption, but doing so really makes way for a lot of upfront investment in design time.
Running a 2.4 kernel. In your hand. All day. On internal batteries.... I am definitely impressed.
This is how it works. All modern receivers are of the "superheterodyne" design. What they do is mix the incoming signal spectrum from the antenna with a "local oscillator" that runs ( 10.7 Megahertz in the case of FM, 455 Kilohertz for AM, or 45 Megahertz for TV ) from the signal you wish to receive.
The signal you wish to receive will now appear right at the the 10.7 ( or other listed ) frequency at the output of the "mixer" stage, which is in the "front end" of the tuner. It is
little more than an analog multiplier with gain. In the days of the old vacuum tubes, they just fed two grids with the two signals, then extracted the multiplied output off the plate ( pentagrid converter tube ). It was inexpensive to make, and the design was so robust it would last a lifetime without readjustment.
The reason they do this is that it is very easy to build very high gain amplifiers that only work at one frequency. So the signal that you are "tuned" to is the only signal arriving at the "intermediate frequency (IF)" amplifier at the correct frequency. The IF amplifier has an extremely high gain, but only at one frequency ( typicals listed above ). So only the signal you were tuned to got amplified; the rest fall out of pass-band and are ignored.
Leaving the IF amplifier, the frequency carrier is decoded for its content ( demodulated ) and sent on to the speakers or like.
So, by using a spectrum analyzer or the like, they listen at the billboard for the faint signal of your car radio's local oscillator electronically whistling 10.7 MHz away from the signal its tuned to.
Now, TV's emit a helluva big signal at 15,756 Hz. That's the horizontal scanning frequency. Its gonna do that no matter which channel its tuned to. ( 15,750 for B/W ). This frequency is very precise. ( It has to do with being a submultiple of the 3.57545 Mhz Color Carrier - so it doesn't form herringbone patterns on the screen. ). I haven't studied any LCD TV's with a spectrum analyzer so I can't report on them, but I do know conventional displays radiate so much that you can actually pick up their emissions and recreate the image displayed on another monitor.
Oh, they will get their money all right. Take some courses in macroeconomics. You will see that governments, by using the convenience of the printed "dollar" as a unit of accounting for wealth, is able to exact substantial sums for its own use without having to get it from anybody.
When the government feels the need to, they can introduce or subtract dollars in circulation by actions by the Federal Reserve Bank, such as buying/selling Government obligations, playing with the federal funds rate, or setting deposit margins required by banks.
For instance, to make things look a bit rosier for retailers this Christmas, the government has pumped a lot of cash into circulation through actions designed to lower the interest rates. Now, on the surface this looks good. But the trouble is that now banks make loans against deposits. Those dollars the bank just "created" in the form of a loan are now in the marketplace, competing with earned dollars. Yes, things sell. The prices of houses takes another upward plunge. Yeh, we are all rich, yes? But did our pay keep up with the rising costs? A lot of us are trapped in this "jobless recovery". At the end of this, we are gonna see this whole scenario repeat... a lot of people who got themselves into debt are not gonna be able to pay it off when the interest rates inevitably rise to their rightful place a few points above the underlying inflation rate that this monetary policy is generating. Who's gonna plunk down the half-million dollars for the house you paid a half-million for when the interest rates were at 5%? Yeh, another round of foreclosures. A lot of people again lose all. A lot of bankers end up writing off loans.
I don't profess to know all the answers, but it is damn apparent to me the government is doing all they can do to rosy the economy by playing games with numbers... as I have yet to see much investment in our underlying infrastructure that supports our economy - actually I perceive the underlying infrastructure is being systemically depleted to fund these games. When I see our factories shutting down and our prize crown jewels, our technology, being exported/outsourced/ then re-imported, it scares me. Its like watching a generation station shutting down, but the control room still has power from the battery backup. Some wise-ass sold the generators, and sold management on how he really fixed the cash flow problem this week, without mentioning that next week we won't have ability to generate power.
Example: At the college I am attending, I just took a course in Intellectual Property Rights. It was packed to the limits. Several dozen students failing to enroll early enough were turned away. Down the hall was another class, Data Structures, which is one of those "bottleneck" classes through which all computer science students must pass. One section was being offered this semester. Six students. Bottom line, as I see it: About fifty students studying how to litigate over what six students will produce. Helluva way to run an economy.
Its gonna be interesting watching how they try to pull the next golden egg out of this dying goose.
WiFi is just getting started. Remember when we had those blazing 300 baud modems that were more than twice as fast as those old 110 baud teletype links?
I don't think considering the bandwidth available today is a valid projection for whats gonna happen 5 years from now. Not in this industry. I see no physical limitation here - its not like my bandwidth is dependent on some physical constant which I am powerless to change, rather its dependent on technology and protocols.
I don't think we've even begun to touch the potential of wireless technologies. I am sure as the needs arise, we will devise techniques for obtaining as much bandwidth as we need. Within a local area, we physically have the entire EM spectrum at our disposal.
As far as those cables go, anything accessible to the public is going to be a maintenance nightmare. And equally frustrating to the public who will be forced into a position to jockey for who gets the seat with the operable connection. For this, I do not wired connections are a good idea.
Incidentally, are the trains wired to power said laptops?
"seriously, how hard would it have been to stick an ethernet port in each seat? my guess is that they went with WiFi only because it was cheaper (less rework to the train)"
Well, it is a public train. The only way I see they could possibly do this is through the air... where there is nothing for anyone to damage. People can be very destructive.
I will guarantee you if you put ethernet ports out, within hours they will be plugged with chewing gum. Its just the way people are. Most of us are pure pigs. Talk to any custodian of a public place if you don't believe me.
The government would love to know exactly who "earned" how much, so taxes could be assessed.
But the degree of difficulty in tracking it makes trying to account for it very impractical, that is they will spend several dollars worth of trouble for each additional tax dollar recovered.
So, for now, they mostly tax just incomes of working people who work for corporations, which co-operate with the government ( as incentivized by tax write-offs to account for wages paid ) to finger who they paid what to. Many people in the "underground economy", paid by cash, don't pay near the going rate for tax, as there is no accounting for it. This is the reason a gardener can stay in business, when he "earns" substantially less per hour than the people he gardens for. When you earn money from anyone who needs your SSN, YOU are going to be responsible for the taxation of that money, but if you earn CASH, the person giving you that cash is essentially paying the tax on that money, so what you earned is completely yours... so you can expect to have to earn at least twice the hourly income if you work for someone who is going to report your income to the government as compared to someone who doesn't.
The problem is that with the economy changing so that big corporations are "right-sizing", having fewer and fewer employees, these people simply don't cease to exist, many do things for cash for people who still have corporate jobs. Although, we are currently in a "jobless recovery", the fact that there is an economic recovery at all means money is still being circulated. But its in cash. Untrackable. Untaxable. The government must look for a greater and greater percentage of each remaining accountable person's income to support the tax base. The remaining people don't like this concept, with the resulting loss in motivation to work unless the company hiring them pays them enough not only to cover their living expenses, but also the enormous tax burden coming from accountability. So, the person you hire personally for $20/hour to work on your car at his house, will need somewhere around $60/hr if he's working for an employer who reports his income. As people become more and more as "independent contractors", this situation will get larger. Business must compete with the little guy. Business has economy of scale going for them, and the little guy has the simplicity of running his operation sans accounting overhead and shrinkage of his earnings via taxation. As we shift more from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, the individual can provide service, in many ways, superior service, to a corporate-based enterprise. Think car repair. Household services. Personal services, etc.
Many of us no longer need the multibillion dollar corporate investments of manufacturing machinery.
And hence, don't really need to mess with the corporation, their payroll departments, their huge chains of command, or bureaucracies, when we can work directly as an individual for our customer.
As long as you can pay directly with cash, its very difficult to track and tax.
Well, guess who passes the laws?
Just as RIAA saw people making end-around-carries with their products, I'm sure the government, saddled as they are with enormous debt already, is waiting with baited breath for the technology to make every transaction a taxable affair.
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The proliferation of proprietary formats we are seeing that all do basically the same thing, like send sound files over the net, or view video clips, are encouraging mass downloads of programs from third party providers. These programs may well do what they said they would do, but with all this DMCA crap going on, its getting harder and harder to see if they are doing a little extra that wasn't in the bargain, like doing zombie work on the side to assist in little capers the originating author needs to pull off.
What firewall or systems programming can stop a deliberately malicious program installed by an ignorant user? Say the program "demands" access to the internet for "verification/auto-update", then you have to set the firewall to allow this program access to the net. Now what happens? Its like giving car keys to a valet parking agent. You only have to trust he's only going to do what he says he will do. To add insult to injury, consider you generally have signed any recourse you have when you click that "I agree" button that confirms you have read and understood the EULA.
What irritates me so about these "plug-ins", "macros", and "scripts" is that they are indeed executable. Nothing says the malicious person coding these things is gonna follow the rules. He is free to code some really nasties in assembler if he so desires. The state of music file distribution I find really disturbing. We have an MP3 format which is generally well understood, yet it seems everybody jumping on the bandwagon wants to use proprietary formats which are not generally understood, leaving us all open to the risks resulting from ignorance.
As a public, we aren't helping much. We agree to any damn thing they print in the EULA. As a public, we should INSIST that if we are to be kept ignorant by law how something works, if that something does something malicious, then its maker should have full responsibility for the problems it generated.
Basically I am proposing a trade. If you want the protection of law to keep the public ignorant, then you waive indemnity.
We have a patent system and copyright system in place. Both were implemented on the concept that the work was to be in the open. Why aren't encrypted work also known as "trade secret" and not afforded protection by copyright or patent? Basically, any work encrypted would be considered a "trade secret", not in the open, hence not eligible for protection by the patent or copyright system at all? But to make this happen, its gonna take the will of a lot of people to pressure the legislators to enact this. Pressure as in "if you do not do this, start polishing your resume.".
The "cost of exit" still remains virtually nil. It costs very little to maintain your generic player.
But needs will be met.
Consider
An executive who has found a company willing to pay him a million dollars a year plus perks in exchange for his leadership skills. He specifies yet another format and has it accepted. His needs were met. His salary is paid. His guidance is followed.
A consumer who wants a copy of some movie he liked. He sees this weird format thing on the shelves, but it won't play in his player. He leaves it on the shelf, and eventually one of his friends offer him a DIVX copy. The seeker now has his movie and his needs are met.
People will see stuff they can't play in their machine, so they leave it on the shelf and look around for the generic bootleg which anything can play. This really encourages the production of bootlegs. Think you can control it with lawyers?
Review "prohibition" in the US when they tried to outlaw whiskey. It ruined a lot of otherwise productive citizens, and made a lot of gangsters rich. Just as our marijuana laws do now.
Geez, didn't they learn their lesson with this "region" fiasco? People have money but cannot legally buy what they want, but the bootleg is free for the taking!
People generally want to be honest, but geez, what are these MBA's thinking these days?
I thought the telephone was bad enough. Fine if your business was in marketing and it was your business to be available... but if you are in production, you are supposed to be in the lab building something, not yapping on the phone. If its that friggen important, it should be the person who engaged you to do something, and it would be in his best interest if he were to come to you personally to discuss it, not have you spending valuable time servicing phone interrupts.
Its gotten much worse lately. The phone. The fax. The mail. The email. Now cellphones. And IM. Geez, when does anybody ever do anything? We seem to be a network of routers. Somehow we find jobs where we get paid to delegate someone else to actually do anything - but who's doing anything these days? Is it offshore so you can hire people to actually do something?
Another thing that pisses me off about all this new technology is the social aspects of it... you are opening yourself up to all sorts of casual contact, and each contact eats up so much time to service. If you are not easy to contact, people leave you alone. Once someone has made contact with you, now the onus is on you to respond or they get their feelings hurt... and everybody who has taken the trouble to contact you expects a timely response. Ok, so I get a cellphone... suddenly all my family and friends want to know it. They call when I am in the middle of something. But I gotta remember my manners, make nice, and go on and on and on about the lost cat or whatever. When I am supposed to be designing something for a client.
The more things I have that can interrupt me, the less stuff I can do. By even having the stuff, I am forced to get people's feelings hurt, because once they have used it to snag me, they feel that they should be given priority time. We have placed technology at a special place in our life. Its like when we personally visit someone else, and the phone rings, it gets priority. The technology gets to do the dirty work of butting in and forcing an interrupt to shut it up.
That little priority trick ( aka "dialing for attention" ) was shown to me when I went to register for college. There was a long line in front of the desk. I didn't know if it was the right line or not. Confused, I asked another student. He didn't know either but gave me an extremely valuable piece of advice... that is to walk up to the front of the line, see if there's a phone on the desk, get the number, then call it and ask my question. Presto - instant front-of-the-line by using the phone! Walking up to someone and banging a bell until I got attention would socially be considered extremely rude, but doing the same thing using technology is quite acceptable.
This technology comes at a price. The price of being interruptible. If people know you have a personal interrupt mechanism available which others can access but not them, now you have hurt their feelings. You give them access and thats just that much less time you have to get your own stuff done.
I was at Burger King the other day, and kinda felt sad for one guy that came in with his laptop and wireless phone, trying to make the most of his lunch "hour". Here he was, trying to type up email responses on one subject, yet his cellphone would ring every time he closed it.. and it didn't sound like very productive calls to me. They sounded like he was rescheduling yesterday's work over and over again instead of doing it. I wonder if he enjoyed his burger, or had to toss down a bottle of antacid to get his body to accept food during such a barrage of interrupts.
The way this technology has mushroomed, I find it amazing anyone can actually do anything.
That's why I indicated the processor would have to be executing a known loop if you wanted to track it, as the processor clock itself is carrying no info, and has no distinguishing characteristics to differentiate it from any other generator of that frequency. Its kinda like if you were listening for music only by listening for the presence of middle C. Not easy. But if you were listening for a sequence of notes played in an expected pattern, now you have something unique to lock onto. Notice how the human mind itself is one helluva signal correlator, and often we can swear we hear music from noise sources that have a repetitive beat, such as winshield washers or washing machines? Actually, the music we are trying to hear does exist in the washing machine noise! ( So does a lot of other noise ).
If I had a pure carrier to the TV, you are right, I would lose sound by FM capture, and the screen would go black as the sync clipper would try to lock onto the "blackest" part and the DC restorer which recreates video referenced to the sync tips would find no white, nor would there be any chroma burst in the sync.
I see my own all the time! You see, I have a TV in the next room still on rabbit ears. When I turn my computer on, channels 2, 4, and 5 become virtually unwatchable because of the processor clock harmonics being emitted in the TV channel spectrum.
Believe me, you might be surprised how much muss and fuss manufacturers go through to make sure they don't emit more EMI than some legal limit, much like auto manufacturers go through the hoops trying to minimize emissions.
The trick they are apt to use on Mars is to use several antennas at the same time to lock into the unit on Mars. Sure, there is a lot of ambient noises, and thats why the multiple antennas - you know exactly what phase delays as the signal arrives at each antenna to expect ( beamformer ). You only pay attention to the signals which arrive at the proper delays to each antenna. Being you know what the processor loop on Mars is doing, you can correlate against that same pattern . When you get correlation to that pattern showing up at the correct time displacements to each antenna, bingo. The unit on Mars is the only one that could emit the signal such that the constraints on the digital filters at the receivers here on Earth are met.
I am not on the team to do this, I am speculating on how I would attempt to do so. I do know computers are terribly noisy in the RF area, and because they emit a peculiar recognizable racket in the RF spectrum in an area that is by nature pretty quiet, it should be "relatively" easy to find. Especially one hung in a tight loop.
If you browse around for "pseudorandom noise generators", also known as "linear feedback shift registers", you will see a lot of tie-ins to "spread spectrum" communications, with technologies for digging signals out of the noise by taking advantage of correlation to known patterns.
One mourns the loss of his work, and the things it could have done much as a mother would mourn a killed child. It represents the extinguishing of all the hopes and dreams of that which one put a lot of personal effort into creating.
I understand, and mourn also. Beagle is Earth's child, sent for exploration, to go where we yet cannot reach or see. With the news of Beagle's problems comes the extinguishing of all the hopes and excitement of the discovery of new things Beagle was to uncover for us.
Hopefully, we learn what we did wrong, pick up, and try again. Space is a harsh mistress.
My condolences to the Scientists, Engineers, and Constructors of Beagle. My hope is that you do not become discouraged; rather learn all you can from what happened so you can try again.
Anubi.
Imagine a report being fed in that all water served in a trendy restaurant required the approval of the chef.
But the text rendered for the public view clearly states that "water served there had been personally passed by the chief cook.".
I have heard all sorts of stories of foreign lands where concepts were almost accurately translated, with hilarious results. Maybe someone has a link to a few lists. It might be very interesting to revisit those days of humor.
I like your ending statement about creating a universe where money just doesn't matter all that much. That was the whole idea of what interested me in engineering so much. If we do this right, we can arrange things so our life support needs are all met by channeling the forces of nature, leaving us free to explore whatever it is we want to explore. With all the forces of nature at our disposal, I feel it riduculous we work as hard as we do. Especially when a helluva lot of it is meaningless busy-work.
I will ruminate here, as an older guy who has been following the space program since the 60's, the main paradigm shift I have noticed is that in the early days, we were determined to do it, no matter what the cost. Jokes abounded over the cost of anything related to the military. And a lot of it was true. That stuff was tested six ways from Sunday, and its properties thoroughly understood. We knew everything there was to be known about that six thousand dollar toilet seat... including if it would outgass anything toxic when subjected to 300 degrees fahrenheit in a vacuum.
These days, we seem to be quite happy dealing with things we don't thoroughly understand. In the old days, we knew exactly byte for byte what was in our machines, gate for gate, and exactly how they worked. These days, we are expected to use stuff we don't understand. And we get laughed at for using the old stuff because its old.
Latest example: I attended a seminar for a late-night TV show stock picking software. It sold for about $3,000 a pop. During the presentation, I wanted to know how the metrics designating buying and selling pressure were derived. The answer I got was something down the line that "Do you know how your car works? I don't!!! I just drive! Others fix the car. I use it. I get stuff Done! ". Right. Ignorance is a virtue?
I see more and more people's acceptance of things they don't understand, and they fail to pay attention to detail. What's the difference in how much money you spent to build a rocket if you failed to notice that the material you use to build your seals with becomes brittle if chilled?
My own take is often people have no idea of how critical *everything* is. Not just the big stuff. Its the old "for the want of a nail, the shoe was lost..." thing all over again. In today's super cost-conscious environment, you can't worry about whether the shoe is properly nailed when you have much more visible things to worry about - like the positioning of the sponsor's logo on the horse.
Only thing I can say is things are gonna get more and more interesting as the US economy tanks. From all I can tell, it has to, just as a battery constantly discharging more than it charges will eventually end up discharged. Right now, our government is trying to prop up the money supply with massive tax cuts and public debt, if we are not careful, its like the family who mortgaged their home to spend one last raucous night on the town. In a way its scary, but in a way its exciting, for I see the day coming when people with the skills to actually do something will be valued by society more than the people who have the skills to permit somebody to do something.
There are a helluva lot of benefits to not being "owned".
You know how we like to fuss a lot about copyright law here? Well, guess what, you will find out that that law also gives you a helluva lot of leverage dealing with the suit folk.
When becoming a permanent employee, it has been customary for the employee to sign over all rights to his production as part of the bargain of being employed. Down the line of "Work for Hire.". You now come in much like a Wedding Photographer. They pay you to take the pictures, but you now have the option of requiring payment for licensing them to actually build anything you designed for them if you so choose to enforce that. You get to "keep the negatives", so to speak.
Things are changing. The old ways of doing things are going away. Its probably not realistic to think that some employer should take care of you. Likewise, its probably not realistic to expect you to sign over all rights to reproduce your creation without consideration of continuing payments to you for licensing your copyright of your work.
There is a lot of change going on. Whether its good or bad, I don't yet know. I do see a lot of advanced indication of where the new jobs are going to be. At the college I attend, I note there are very few students in math and computer science, but a helluva lot of students in the paralegal stuff. I took one class in intellectual property rights, and the classroom was packed. Stuff will be built elsewhere. The big money will be in learning to bicker successfully over who has the rights to market the things others built.
We are entering a time thats very confusing to me, as I see no support mechanisms in place, yet the system appears to continue to work. Although we call it a "service economy", somehow the rest of the world toils to produce goods for America, and accept America's trash for recycling, and America seems to provide them financial services to account for their toils. We seem to have built our empire on technological superiority, but now even that is an exportable item. We seem to retain things like numbers representing wealth, backed by faith that something backs it. And we seem to value little that which provides us with the necessities of life, such as the foundations of manufacturing and technology our empire was initially based on. Personally, I see it as a rich man's fetish over having gold faucets in the bathroom, but having little concern over whether there's any capacity to keep water in the pipes.
Things will change again when he notices the pumps have long since died, the tanks are empty, and he's thirsty.
They already are transmitting "near CD quality" compressed bitstream with accurate artist/label tags. Now, if there were some way my receiver would simply monitor the incoming bitstream and snag the incoming stream to hard disk, accumulating generic MP3 of what's transmitted.
I have no problem with paying for a subscription.
Most likely, I would listen to music coming from the drive, so I could transfer off stuff I liked for use in the car or jogging player, as well as immediately ditch the stuff that didn't do anything for me. If I do not like the first fifteen seconds of it, I want the capability of flushing it.
Being I have paid for the right to enjoy the music transmitted, if I wanna listen to a rerun, that oughta be my prerogative. Somehow, I can't feel I am cheating anybody out of anything if I have already paid to have a continuous stream of music beamed at me, and I save snippets for my own use. I guess its the same feeling I have that if I am paying my water bill, its not stealing if I fill a bottle at my kitchen faucet to take jogging with me, despite the fact Dasani might see my doing so as a lost sale of bottled water.
Its funny how business keeps playing games and wondering why people do what they do to try to adapt to their business plan. They play region encoding games so one group of people can see a movie and another cannot, then wonder why people encode and share movies. They play all sorts of encryption games with music and wonder why people share MP3. Just as this discussion has repeated over and over, people will go with a subscription model - and pay for it. Its really time consuming to go through all these workarounds to get what I want. I don't like playing all these games, but I feel I am forced into it. When all is said and done, I just want a plain vanilla file I can open up in any generic reader. Whether it be audio, video, or text. We've all been bit by these proprietary formats du jour. I don't expect to tell them what they can spend the money I exchanged for the music for, neither will I tolerate them selling me a bitstream which they still control after the sale.
If it is a fact of life that they control my personal use of the product after the sale, then I feel we must do some more research on electronic money transfers, and give me the right to control the money I exchanged for the product so I still control it even after the sale.
I was raised strict Southern Baptist, and what I saw didn't seem much like "love" to me. It seemed as if our rendition of God was something our religious leaders dreamed up as an entity not only to "give" the leaders authority over us, but also serve as an entity to absorb liability for all the damage done.
It seemed like the whole affair was nothing more than just a tremendous psychological barrage dreamed up by a few people very astute in human behavioural psychology in order to enslave the "believers" and "faithful", in a manner much similar to the ones used by hackers to plant malicious zombie programs into other peoples machines. The end goal is to have unquestioned obedience to follow the leader's command ( without having to pay the power bill ).
I have even seen fathers led to tease their own kids to anger, knowing that no matter how angry the kids get, the father can always rely on the swinging leather strap of "Christian Discipline" to maintain their authority. I will grant you that the ability to overpower and hurt will get you obedience any day of the week, but it is not a good foundation to build a relationship on. The wronged ones will have something far worse than indifference stored in their hearts. If the one who beats for obedience ever loses the power to hurt, hell has no fury like the uncoiling of the bands of stored hatred.
A lot of this religious stuff reeks to me of Stanley Milgram's "Obedience to Authority". Remember that study Stanley Milgram did at the end of WWII, as he was curious if there was something peculiar about the German people that made them susceptible to the horrors thay could inflict upon others ( namely the Jews )? It turned out this whole thing is a basic human condition, where easily turn our backs on fellow humans if there is a leadership / chain of command structure in place, and we are merely "following orders" and we are not taking personal responsibility for our actions. Everybody has had the frustration of dealing with a bureaucracy, where people are only "doing their jobs", but often causing much frustration to others.
Stanley's experiments showed a very substantial proportion of our population would even very painfully electrocute an innocent person, based on nothing more than the urgings of an authority figure in a white lab coat. This is across all races of all peoples!
It is my fear that people who understand psychology more than most instantiate a "god" of their own design, then use their pool of "believers" to follow the "orders" of that "god".
Its this reason I am very reticent to place much faith in anything Man has messed with. I flat do not trust Man. Sure, he may claim "Inspired by God", but is he telling me that I am not inspired because I wanna get my belief system from what I consider to be the source of all things, not from his data, which I consider likely tainted from human intervention?
Don't get me wrong. I am very religious. I believe in the God which created Heaven, Earth, and everything in it. I am a scientist. I study God by witness of his Creation. We may call them Laws of Physics, but to me, these are God's law, coined by God himself. God's Will be Done. Its not a prayer, its fact. God is no respecter of persons. These laws are immutable - no one is exempt from them or can change them. I'm not gonna claim any special insights to God, as I can't prove a thing. I don't even know what God is, but that does not keep me from the greatest joy in my life - studying his work to try to find out. I know its a puzzle I will never solve, but who needs games when God has already given me a puzzle to solve? He does give us a helluva lot of rewards along the way as we try to unravel it. Things like medicines, and as this post noted, ways of getting the power it takes to bring our own dreams to reality.
anubi
I see the biggest advantage of intelligent highway systems as being able to efficiently route traffic. Imagine if we tried to run the internet the way our present system works. Joe Schmoe's router catches fire and the system snarls for hours instead of routing around it?
This system sure has a helluva lot of potential to save us all a lot of problems.
A little offtopic, but while I am thinking of insurance companies, I wonder if there are any out there which lower their risks by refusing to insure any modified vehicles? I see all these SUV type things out on the road, modified in such a manner such that not only is their center of gravity moved upward (encouraging rollover), but their bumpers won't mate ( resulting in much more damage from even casual bumps ), and their headlight height from road surface now shines down into unmodified vehicles, with the resulting glare causing it harder for the unmodified vehicle driver to see. It seems the accident statistics should indicate that an insurance company could significantly lower their payouts by refusing coverage of modified vehicles, and be able to lower premiums and attract more policyholders.
I get rather aggravated when I see a lot of this new stuff coming out that appears to be running on the very edge of meltdown. Fans have always been my nemesis. Moving parts. Big. Failure prone. Noisy. Vibration.
I have always liked to build my stuff where I can seal it up and get it out of harm's way ( and bugs, dust, spilled coffee, and whatever else goes around.) I agree with the guys who speak with disgust about trying to build a DVR, but have to tolerate noisy fans.
Another thing that I find disappointing is bootup time. Having to do the same thing over and over every time I start my machine. I could only imagine having to boot the processor when the phone rang, and having some poor soul on the other end wait through the typical boot process.
Knowing my experience so far with every new software OS release taking longer and longer to boot, requiring faster and faster machines, it seemed to make just about as much sense to me to specify an embedded OS as it did to send a letter to my Congressman to have the federal government come and remove a weed I found growing in the street. Seemed a lot easier to me to walk over and address the problem directly without involving anything else.
But if they get these cores down pat, with all the intelligence of an OS without needing that lengthy bootup process... wow! Linux sure seems a natural for that, as hopefully the core will already be object-oriented aware, have GUI objects already in its repetoire, just awaiting configuration as to what to do with them.
Sounds like comparing the new cores to the old is kinda like comparing a new AVR chip to my old IMSAI 8080 machine.
I liked your post... I betcha you had a lot of fun working with those cores. I can only imagine what those guys are doing with those cores on video boards - where they can do all the 3D matrix math right on the board. Or Hauppauge - where they are doing that PVR250 stuff putting the MPEG encoder in one from what I can tell.
They have very substantial requirements.
Its gotta fit in the palm of your hand, not a laptop.
Its gotta work real time - when it rings and you answer it, you don't wait for processes to load or having it boot.
The thing's gotta run all day at least of nonstop run on a set of batteries!
I don't know just how they pulled this off... as I have always custom programmed my realtime embedded stuff - usually in 68000 assembler. Sometimes Atmel AVR, but damn near always in assembler. Using custom design, I can design for very low power consumption, but doing so really makes way for a lot of upfront investment in design time.
Running a 2.4 kernel. In your hand. All day. On internal batteries.... I am definitely impressed.
This is how it works. All modern receivers are of the "superheterodyne" design. What they do is mix the incoming signal spectrum from the antenna with a "local oscillator" that runs ( 10.7 Megahertz in the case of FM, 455 Kilohertz for AM, or 45 Megahertz for TV ) from the signal you wish to receive.
The signal you wish to receive will now appear right at the the 10.7 ( or other listed ) frequency at the output of the "mixer" stage, which is in the "front end" of the tuner. It is little more than an analog multiplier with gain. In the days of the old vacuum tubes, they just fed two grids with the two signals, then extracted the multiplied output off the plate ( pentagrid converter tube ). It was inexpensive to make, and the design was so robust it would last a lifetime without readjustment.
The reason they do this is that it is very easy to build very high gain amplifiers that only work at one frequency. So the signal that you are "tuned" to is the only signal arriving at the "intermediate frequency (IF)" amplifier at the correct frequency. The IF amplifier has an extremely high gain, but only at one frequency ( typicals listed above ). So only the signal you were tuned to got amplified; the rest fall out of pass-band and are ignored.
Leaving the IF amplifier, the frequency carrier is decoded for its content ( demodulated ) and sent on to the speakers or like.
So, by using a spectrum analyzer or the like, they listen at the billboard for the faint signal of your car radio's local oscillator electronically whistling 10.7 MHz away from the signal its tuned to.
Now, TV's emit a helluva big signal at 15,756 Hz. That's the horizontal scanning frequency. Its gonna do that no matter which channel its tuned to. ( 15,750 for B/W ). This frequency is very precise. ( It has to do with being a submultiple of the 3.57545 Mhz Color Carrier - so it doesn't form herringbone patterns on the screen. ). I haven't studied any LCD TV's with a spectrum analyzer so I can't report on them, but I do know conventional displays radiate so much that you can actually pick up their emissions and recreate the image displayed on another monitor.
When the government feels the need to, they can introduce or subtract dollars in circulation by actions by the Federal Reserve Bank, such as buying/selling Government obligations, playing with the federal funds rate, or setting deposit margins required by banks.
For instance, to make things look a bit rosier for retailers this Christmas, the government has pumped a lot of cash into circulation through actions designed to lower the interest rates. Now, on the surface this looks good. But the trouble is that now banks make loans against deposits. Those dollars the bank just "created" in the form of a loan are now in the marketplace, competing with earned dollars. Yes, things sell. The prices of houses takes another upward plunge. Yeh, we are all rich, yes? But did our pay keep up with the rising costs? A lot of us are trapped in this "jobless recovery". At the end of this, we are gonna see this whole scenario repeat... a lot of people who got themselves into debt are not gonna be able to pay it off when the interest rates inevitably rise to their rightful place a few points above the underlying inflation rate that this monetary policy is generating. Who's gonna plunk down the half-million dollars for the house you paid a half-million for when the interest rates were at 5%? Yeh, another round of foreclosures. A lot of people again lose all. A lot of bankers end up writing off loans.
I don't profess to know all the answers, but it is damn apparent to me the government is doing all they can do to rosy the economy by playing games with numbers... as I have yet to see much investment in our underlying infrastructure that supports our economy - actually I perceive the underlying infrastructure is being systemically depleted to fund these games. When I see our factories shutting down and our prize crown jewels, our technology, being exported/outsourced/ then re-imported, it scares me. Its like watching a generation station shutting down, but the control room still has power from the battery backup. Some wise-ass sold the generators, and sold management on how he really fixed the cash flow problem this week, without mentioning that next week we won't have ability to generate power.
Example: At the college I am attending, I just took a course in Intellectual Property Rights. It was packed to the limits. Several dozen students failing to enroll early enough were turned away. Down the hall was another class, Data Structures, which is one of those "bottleneck" classes through which all computer science students must pass. One section was being offered this semester. Six students. Bottom line, as I see it: About fifty students studying how to litigate over what six students will produce. Helluva way to run an economy.
Its gonna be interesting watching how they try to pull the next golden egg out of this dying goose.
A lot of new cars with undue complexity seem to have this problem. My thirty year old mechanically carbureted car does not.
I don't think considering the bandwidth available today is a valid projection for whats gonna happen 5 years from now. Not in this industry. I see no physical limitation here - its not like my bandwidth is dependent on some physical constant which I am powerless to change, rather its dependent on technology and protocols.
I don't think we've even begun to touch the potential of wireless technologies. I am sure as the needs arise, we will devise techniques for obtaining as much bandwidth as we need. Within a local area, we physically have the entire EM spectrum at our disposal.
As far as those cables go, anything accessible to the public is going to be a maintenance nightmare. And equally frustrating to the public who will be forced into a position to jockey for who gets the seat with the operable connection. For this, I do not wired connections are a good idea.
Incidentally, are the trains wired to power said laptops?
I will guarantee you if you put ethernet ports out, within hours they will be plugged with chewing gum. Its just the way people are. Most of us are pure pigs. Talk to any custodian of a public place if you don't believe me.
The government would love to know exactly who "earned" how much, so taxes could be assessed.
But the degree of difficulty in tracking it makes trying to account for it very impractical, that is they will spend several dollars worth of trouble for each additional tax dollar recovered.
So, for now, they mostly tax just incomes of working people who work for corporations, which co-operate with the government ( as incentivized by tax write-offs to account for wages paid ) to finger who they paid what to. Many people in the "underground economy", paid by cash, don't pay near the going rate for tax, as there is no accounting for it. This is the reason a gardener can stay in business, when he "earns" substantially less per hour than the people he gardens for. When you earn money from anyone who needs your SSN, YOU are going to be responsible for the taxation of that money, but if you earn CASH, the person giving you that cash is essentially paying the tax on that money, so what you earned is completely yours... so you can expect to have to earn at least twice the hourly income if you work for someone who is going to report your income to the government as compared to someone who doesn't.
The problem is that with the economy changing so that big corporations are "right-sizing", having fewer and fewer employees, these people simply don't cease to exist, many do things for cash for people who still have corporate jobs. Although, we are currently in a "jobless recovery", the fact that there is an economic recovery at all means money is still being circulated. But its in cash. Untrackable. Untaxable. The government must look for a greater and greater percentage of each remaining accountable person's income to support the tax base. The remaining people don't like this concept, with the resulting loss in motivation to work unless the company hiring them pays them enough not only to cover their living expenses, but also the enormous tax burden coming from accountability. So, the person you hire personally for $20/hour to work on your car at his house, will need somewhere around $60/hr if he's working for an employer who reports his income. As people become more and more as "independent contractors", this situation will get larger. Business must compete with the little guy. Business has economy of scale going for them, and the little guy has the simplicity of running his operation sans accounting overhead and shrinkage of his earnings via taxation. As we shift more from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, the individual can provide service, in many ways, superior service, to a corporate-based enterprise. Think car repair. Household services. Personal services, etc.
Many of us no longer need the multibillion dollar corporate investments of manufacturing machinery.
And hence, don't really need to mess with the corporation, their payroll departments, their huge chains of command, or bureaucracies, when we can work directly as an individual for our customer.
As long as you can pay directly with cash, its very difficult to track and tax.
Well, guess who passes the laws?
Just as RIAA saw people making end-around-carries with their products, I'm sure the government, saddled as they are with enormous debt already, is waiting with baited breath for the technology to make every transaction a taxable affair.
Pick up what you want.
Walk back out.
Sensor on store door notes your exit, your ID, item's ID, and processes the transaction.
It will probably print you a sales slip on your way out.
If you refuse the implant, or you can't pay, then alarms will sound unless you wait in a nice long line for manual processing.
Did you think with all this technology available, we will still have lines and checkout stands?