Ok so everyone points out the obvious and is quick to suggest tinfoil hats, but there might be some truth to this story (by accident). Clearly this guy nuked either the paper, moisture in the paper, or the metal strips heated up. A better experiment would have been to microwave along with a glass of water to absorb the bouncing around waves.
Those security scanners work by exciting those little metal tags (bi-metalic i think and some now out of more exotic plastic & mylar) which resonate briefly after the field is removed. Is it possible some slight engineering went into those metal strips to resonate themselves? Maybe not at the store scanner frequencies, but slightly off? Maybe the truck stop scanner was off or extra sensitive or uncalibrated.
The reason the Dept. of Treasury might do this is to be able to identify large quantities of money coming into or leaving the country. Maybe the gov't has the ability to scan for suitcases of cash.
- The chip here is not "a major breakthrough".
- The system here can be easily accomplished with two or three chips today.
- The interesting thing here is a single CMOS chip implementation.
- The VCO is probably a DVCO (distributed voltage-controlled oscillator) [this aspect of the design might be considered a design major breakthrough].
- Things don't have to be "at least one wavelength".. In MMIC design you might care about 1/2 a wavelength... but regardless the antennas are off-chip anyways. And this isn't microstip / waveguide / co-planar design here.
- If you want a large effective antenna system, you can build it with more cost. The point here is automotive which means low-cost, high-volume.
You bring up a very good point. With a simple radar detector, cops will be able to "see" you coming for miles. They'll probably legally have to using an active measuring system to "clock" you, but it can be completely automated, and they can nap in between suckers^H^H^H erm, taxpayers.
The problem with this RFID concept is the price to adoption is in the $0.10 range which is a hard thing to do. Also the antennas for these are like 3" long pieces of plastic.
I don't see what having a strong RF field generator on chip does? See, how they work is low/no power needed on-chip which is then excited by RF field and the chip replies with a signal which identifies it. What good does an on-chip "interrogator" do? And how exactly does help this adoption along?
I found the NYTimes article dumbed things down a little too much. Basically, this is a press release by a fairly young professor about a ISSCC paper to be presented next week.
CMOS is getting fast enough (could be SiGe BiCMOS chip but probably CMOS) to allow for amplifiers and ADC (analog-to-digital) that work in the radar (~25GHz on up) range & also allows for million gate DSPs and digital logic on the same chip. The analog front-end is running around 24GHz which gives a 1/4 wavelength around 3mm (antennas are implemented as PCB traces off-chip). This is an analog GHz signal where the transistors are amplifying a tiny GHz signal using analog amplifiers. Digital clock speeds are completely different. Digital is like switching completely from off to on (ie. 0 to 5V -- in reality try 2V or 3.3V). This is like a uV signal being amplified to be later converted to a digital signal with a more reasonable bandwidth that a digital CPU could handle (like your overclocked Pentium).
The parallel analog antennas & blocks which allows for parallel ADC of 8 channels.. 8 parallel radar antennas. By using parallel processing you can use the information gained by the other channels to improve your ADC or have each channel only need to work at 1/8 of the total speed. Also, having 8 antennas allows phased arrays where you can control the beam and allows you to scan the beam or block out other signals (much like cell towers can focus in on one cell signal, and why your 802.11 router has two antennas). So, depending on how much bandwidth the ADCs need & how fast the DSP is running is really the 'digital' GHz part of the chip. So the digital processing is probably a more reasonable 100's of MHz (though hard to compare DSP speed to CPU speed). The processed digital waveform can be sent high-speed off chip, or to on-chip CPU to be used to disable your cruise-control and hit the brakes for you.
Why do you care? Well by using straight CMOS the radar system can be made on one chip and not need 'exotic' GaAs/SiGe/InP (BJTs of traditional radar systems) and when the automotive chips get down to sub-$5 they will show up in every car. Also doing it this way, much smaller power is involved and you don't need circuits that look like your microwave oven waveguides.
I think the power/. has been abused to fix this guy's problem. Odds are that they DID violate some policy because they HOST message boards. Wanna bet more than one of their message boards are used by pedo's, file swappers or other illegal activities.
Of course all good midwest Universities have BOTH departments! Formerly known as EE and CIS, they are now known as ECE and CSE/CE. Washington will also soon change their EE dept name as well.
'I came up with it' from learning about quantum physics and relativity. And a little of PBS & Nova. Maybe you could read some stuff and not *sigh* so much. The premise of this is that you'd need to make the 'time machine' ==> meaning the object that allows some way of traversing time & space. Think of it as a bookmark you created with enough energy or rip in space-time or wormholes or however it can be done (IF it can be). Any point in the future you may be able to return to that time.. or maybe even anywhere along that timeline.
I'm not concerned about software-based DRM because so far it seems to be limited to Windows. What REALLY concerns me is the large number of news items I've seen lately about hardware based on "Trusted Computing".
TCG TPM is the standard settled upon for trusted computing. An interesting EETimes article is about TPM chips going into systems (costs & chipsets, etc). Described as "low-cost silicon safes for a digital key" the article states, "IBM plans to put the current version 1.1b TPM parts in all but its lowest cost notebook computers by the end of the year." As well as the inclusion of these chips in Gb Ethernet, storage, memory, and I/O buses. The TPM v1.2 standard is worth a look over to see what the future holds.
Much of the software that goes into DRM is moving up the chain (especially seeing how effective DeCSS was for DVD decoding) and into silicon. I do not quite see how Trusted Computing is really that different from a full-fledged DRM hardware system. It seems to be an easy step to make those buses and storage devices scanning for 'trusted keys' to be applied to digital finger prints of unauthorized DRM-licensed media moving around on your motherboard.
I was paid, with about 1000 DVD movies, by a video rental store that owed me money
I assume you of course have claimed this as income?! That's about $10,000-$20,000 value. Maybe the DARPA TIA project will link your Slashdot account to your IP address to your online banking account to your SSN and notify the IRS for you.
It only means that no one has invented a time-travel machine YET.. The way I understand it, IF it is at all possible then you wouldn't be able to be back in time BEFORE the creation of the time-travel machine / worm-hole / space-time effect / quantum-parallel universe traversal.
I don't get all this 'we are not worthy' coming from the masses. The way I read it, they tried to clean up some files (side note: seems a poor software system that they didn't already take this into account) so they sent this clean-up routine to Mars, but half got corrupted. This half complete program is running and crippling the system and they can't figure out what went wrong.
Wouldn't "major mucking with filesystem" -> reboot -> gee doesn't work now... be kind of obvious where they messed up.
Anyways, I don't think they get kudos for sticking with it and keeping on keeping on and finally fixing the rover. You really think NASA has a hiring policy against mere mortals. You really think the average employee working on a project would have just turned off their computer and played with their belly-button.
All it takes is a transmitter out in the middle of nowhere africa
I know this last poster is just trolling, but a lot of people do actually think like this.. Doesn't some common sense kick in at some point?!
(a) hmm.. I'll build a Capt. Midnight (tm) secret decoder antenna and point it up in the sky in some general Mars-ish direction that picks up a tiny X-Band signal
(b) then, using the data that comes one-way down from a rover (that NASA posts most of online) I'll figure out some magic way to 'control' a rover
(c) somehow, I'll then control the rover with my homemade kit-built bicycle-powered transmitter also beaming X-Band signals across the solar system
Open source OS's get security from having many people looking at code submissions and the opportunity to find and fix dangerous bugs before they are exploited.
I tire of these boring arguments.. Did EVERYONE forget that this is the largest, richest, most powerful software company EVER. Surely, they have the resources to 'fix' their code at least as competently as any Open Source project if they wanted to. They could even follow an open source model of development open only to internal developers, but they don't. They follow the old way of doing things where each developer codes their own little corner of the world.
I also am sick of this concept of 'so many eyes'.. I am sure Microsoft has more eyes than OpenBSD. They choose however to let the best people create and develop and lesser people do verification, debugging, and patches. Open Source models have the good people looking over everyone else's stuff.
You couldn't make up this kinda of confusion (from FTP directory)..
chimera 06/01/2002 12:00:00 AM
camino 03/06/2003 12:00:00 AM
thunderbird 02/08/2004 06:38:00 AM
phoenix 09/23/2002 12:00:00 AM
firebird 05/16/2003 12:00:00 AM
firefox 02/09/2004 05:58:00 AM
grendel 08/07/1999 12:00:00 AM
minimo 08/28/2003 08:21:00 PM
mozilla 10/21/2003 01:01:00 PM
Why can't they figure out these names are all dumb and poor for brand recognition.
Is Mozilla Lite just too obvious for them?! How about Mozilla Jr. and then you could make yet another cute dinosaur! You could even make a family photo out of the whole suite..
I am too dumb to know how my audio-visual equipment works and feel it is easier to write this to slashdot than to research anything. Please tell me what to do 'cause I can't be bothered to read the manual, check a website, or consult google. Oh, and I am also so damn rich (bling bling), I have both a TiVo and a ReplayTV. Please help me out, I am in such a bind.
I'm convinced the whole DDoS SCO/microsoft really is just a cover story so the media can tie a simplified little bow around the story. If a worm infected this many computers and didn't have an "objective" (aside from backdoor into your Windows machine for future usage and/or email harvesting and/or spam relaying) the news story would be too complex and there might even be a story about spammers or even the lack of action by Microsoft.
The real story is that these worms and viruses have become big business and the only people who profit from them are software vendors selling anti-virus, Microsoft through services, and spammers.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok so everyone points out the obvious and is quick to suggest tinfoil hats, but there might be some truth to this story (by accident). Clearly this guy nuked either the paper, moisture in the paper, or the metal strips heated up. A better experiment would have been to microwave along with a glass of water to absorb the bouncing around waves.
Those security scanners work by exciting those little metal tags (bi-metalic i think and some now out of more exotic plastic & mylar) which resonate briefly after the field is removed. Is it possible some slight engineering went into those metal strips to resonate themselves? Maybe not at the store scanner frequencies, but slightly off? Maybe the truck stop scanner was off or extra sensitive or uncalibrated.
The reason the Dept. of Treasury might do this is to be able to identify large quantities of money coming into or leaving the country. Maybe the gov't has the ability to scan for suitcases of cash.
I suppose the really tough part of anti-lock brakes or air-bags is 'creating the software'..
This is just another component like those two innovations. It's not intended to drive around like George Jetson.
- The chip here is not "a major breakthrough".
- The system here can be easily accomplished with two or three chips today.
- The interesting thing here is a single CMOS chip implementation.
- The VCO is probably a DVCO (distributed voltage-controlled oscillator) [this aspect of the design might be considered a design major breakthrough].
- Things don't have to be "at least one wavelength".. In MMIC design you might care about 1/2 a wavelength... but regardless the antennas are off-chip anyways. And this isn't microstip / waveguide / co-planar design here.
- If you want a large effective antenna system, you can build it with more cost. The point here is automotive which means low-cost, high-volume.
You bring up a very good point. With a simple radar detector, cops will be able to "see" you coming for miles. They'll probably legally have to using an active measuring system to "clock" you, but it can be completely automated, and they can nap in between suckers^H^H^H erm, taxpayers.
The problem with this RFID concept is the price to adoption is in the $0.10 range which is a hard thing to do. Also the antennas for these are like 3" long pieces of plastic.
I don't see what having a strong RF field generator on chip does? See, how they work is low/no power needed on-chip which is then excited by RF field and the chip replies with a signal which identifies it. What good does an on-chip "interrogator" do? And how exactly does help this adoption along?
I found the NYTimes article dumbed things down a little too much. Basically, this is a press release by a fairly young professor about a ISSCC paper to be presented next week.
CMOS is getting fast enough (could be SiGe BiCMOS chip but probably CMOS) to allow for amplifiers and ADC (analog-to-digital) that work in the radar (~25GHz on up) range & also allows for million gate DSPs and digital logic on the same chip. The analog front-end is running around 24GHz which gives a 1/4 wavelength around 3mm (antennas are implemented as PCB traces off-chip). This is an analog GHz signal where the transistors are amplifying a tiny GHz signal using analog amplifiers. Digital clock speeds are completely different. Digital is like switching completely from off to on (ie. 0 to 5V -- in reality try 2V or 3.3V). This is like a uV signal being amplified to be later converted to a digital signal with a more reasonable bandwidth that a digital CPU could handle (like your overclocked Pentium).
The parallel analog antennas & blocks which allows for parallel ADC of 8 channels.. 8 parallel radar antennas. By using parallel processing you can use the information gained by the other channels to improve your ADC or have each channel only need to work at 1/8 of the total speed. Also, having 8 antennas allows phased arrays where you can control the beam and allows you to scan the beam or block out other signals (much like cell towers can focus in on one cell signal, and why your 802.11 router has two antennas). So, depending on how much bandwidth the ADCs need & how fast the DSP is running is really the 'digital' GHz part of the chip. So the digital processing is probably a more reasonable 100's of MHz (though hard to compare DSP speed to CPU speed). The processed digital waveform can be sent high-speed off chip, or to on-chip CPU to be used to disable your cruise-control and hit the brakes for you.
Why do you care? Well by using straight CMOS the radar system can be made on one chip and not need 'exotic' GaAs/SiGe/InP (BJTs of traditional radar systems) and when the automotive chips get down to sub-$5 they will show up in every car. Also doing it this way, much smaller power is involved and you don't need circuits that look like your microwave oven waveguides.
I think the power /. has been abused to fix this guy's problem. Odds are that they DID violate some policy because they HOST message boards. Wanna bet more than one of their message boards are used by pedo's, file swappers or other illegal activities.
Of course all good midwest Universities have BOTH departments! Formerly known as EE and CIS, they are now known as ECE and CSE/CE. Washington will also soon change their EE dept name as well.
Most Big-Ten schools have renamed their EE dept. to be called "Electrical and Computer Engineering"
You could always try the EE route. Usually you need a few courses in intro. programming and maybe have to write some matlab code someday.
'I came up with it' from learning about quantum physics and relativity. And a little of PBS & Nova. Maybe you could read some stuff and not *sigh* so much. The premise of this is that you'd need to make the 'time machine' ==> meaning the object that allows some way of traversing time & space. Think of it as a bookmark you created with enough energy or rip in space-time or wormholes or however it can be done (IF it can be). Any point in the future you may be able to return to that time.. or maybe even anywhere along that timeline.
I'm not concerned about software-based DRM because so far it seems to be limited to Windows. What REALLY concerns me is the large number of news items I've seen lately about hardware based on "Trusted Computing".
TCG TPM is the standard settled upon for trusted computing. An interesting EETimes article is about TPM chips going into systems (costs & chipsets, etc). Described as "low-cost silicon safes for a digital key" the article states, "IBM plans to put the current version 1.1b TPM parts in all but its lowest cost notebook computers by the end of the year." As well as the inclusion of these chips in Gb Ethernet, storage, memory, and I/O buses. The TPM v1.2 standard is worth a look over to see what the future holds.
Much of the software that goes into DRM is moving up the chain (especially seeing how effective DeCSS was for DVD decoding) and into silicon. I do not quite see how Trusted Computing is really that different from a full-fledged DRM hardware system. It seems to be an easy step to make those buses and storage devices scanning for 'trusted keys' to be applied to digital finger prints of unauthorized DRM-licensed media moving around on your motherboard.
I assume you of course have claimed this as income?! That's about $10,000-$20,000 value. Maybe the DARPA TIA project will link your Slashdot account to your IP address to your online banking account to your SSN and notify the IRS for you.
It only means that no one has invented a time-travel machine YET.. The way I understand it, IF it is at all possible then you wouldn't be able to be back in time BEFORE the creation of the time-travel machine / worm-hole / space-time effect / quantum-parallel universe traversal.
Now we can update our links to read:
litigious greedy bastards
I don't get all this 'we are not worthy' coming from the masses. The way I read it, they tried to clean up some files (side note: seems a poor software system that they didn't already take this into account) so they sent this clean-up routine to Mars, but half got corrupted. This half complete program is running and crippling the system and they can't figure out what went wrong.
Wouldn't "major mucking with filesystem" -> reboot -> gee doesn't work now... be kind of obvious where they messed up.
Anyways, I don't think they get kudos for sticking with it and keeping on keeping on and finally fixing the rover. You really think NASA has a hiring policy against mere mortals. You really think the average employee working on a project would have just turned off their computer and played with their belly-button.
All it takes is a transmitter out in the middle of nowhere africa
I know this last poster is just trolling, but a lot of people do actually think like this.. Doesn't some common sense kick in at some point?!
(a) hmm.. I'll build a Capt. Midnight (tm) secret decoder antenna and point it up in the sky in some general Mars-ish direction that picks up a tiny X-Band signal
(b) then, using the data that comes one-way down from a rover (that NASA posts most of online) I'll figure out some magic way to 'control' a rover
(c) somehow, I'll then control the rover with my homemade kit-built bicycle-powered transmitter also beaming X-Band signals across the solar system
I tire of these boring arguments.. Did EVERYONE forget that this is the largest, richest, most powerful software company EVER. Surely, they have the resources to 'fix' their code at least as competently as any Open Source project if they wanted to. They could even follow an open source model of development open only to internal developers, but they don't. They follow the old way of doing things where each developer codes their own little corner of the world.
I also am sick of this concept of 'so many eyes'.. I am sure Microsoft has more eyes than OpenBSD. They choose however to let the best people create and develop and lesser people do verification, debugging, and patches. Open Source models have the good people looking over everyone else's stuff.
Turn on one box fan, basically some white noise, and all your bitching about clicks and keypresses goes away.
If you've ever used the Knoppix ISO then you'd know the en ISO has correct US keyboard and the de ISO has the german keyboard.
So when you boot this c't version up, you'll see a prompt and when you try and type "knoppix lang=us" you'll need to used the Shift-0
Shhhh... saying such things is considered "Troll"
No, to match FireFox, they are planning to keep with the "Fire" theme and will rename ThunderBird to FireBird
You couldn't make up this kinda of confusion (from FTP directory)..
chimera 06/01/2002 12:00:00 AM
camino 03/06/2003 12:00:00 AM
thunderbird 02/08/2004 06:38:00 AM
phoenix 09/23/2002 12:00:00 AM
firebird 05/16/2003 12:00:00 AM
firefox 02/09/2004 05:58:00 AM
grendel 08/07/1999 12:00:00 AM
minimo 08/28/2003 08:21:00 PM
mozilla 10/21/2003 01:01:00 PM
Why can't they figure out these names are all dumb and poor for brand recognition.
Is Mozilla Lite just too obvious for them?! How about Mozilla Jr. and then you could make yet another cute dinosaur! You could even make a family photo out of the whole suite..
I am too dumb to know how my audio-visual equipment works and feel it is easier to write this to slashdot than to research anything. Please tell me what to do 'cause I can't be bothered to read the manual, check a website, or consult google. Oh, and I am also so damn rich (bling bling), I have both a TiVo and a ReplayTV. Please help me out, I am in such a bind.
puuhleeze!
I'm convinced the whole DDoS SCO/microsoft really is just a cover story so the media can tie a simplified little bow around the story. If a worm infected this many computers and didn't have an "objective" (aside from backdoor into your Windows machine for future usage and/or email harvesting and/or spam relaying) the news story would be too complex and there might even be a story about spammers or even the lack of action by Microsoft.
The real story is that these worms and viruses have become big business and the only people who profit from them are software vendors selling anti-virus, Microsoft through services, and spammers.