With the current market focused on exploiting economies of scale to produce the current generation of high density FLASH in 65nm processes. So far this has been VERY lucrative for the companies that bet the farm on building dedicated 65nm fabs for FLASH.
IMO: MRAM has unfortunately come a little late to the party. In it's current role it is kind of the Beta Max of the solid-state storage device market.
Currently only Freescale produces MRAM in any quantity, and they currently only produce 4Mbit parts on a couple of 180nm fabs.
I don't think there is any question that MRAM has the potential to meet or exceed FLASH on the density/price curve. What might keep it out of the high-density market is one of it's great inherent strengths; it doesn't wear out. Who wants to sell storage modules that don't EOL themselves? Try and sell that to your pointy-haired boss' pointy-haired boss... ---- General Electric wasn't interested in mass manufactured light bulbs until Edison figured out how to get them to FAIL reliably.
For them that doesn't know: Edison's original design was a carbon impregnated cotton filament, in as near a total vacuum as could be produced in those days. It didn't suffer from filament migration, and other effects that cause modern bulbs to fail. If the original design had been refined as it was, General Electric could have saturated the market for light bulbs in a relatively short time, and been driven out of the market due to the Edison bulb having no predictable EOL.
Speculative Journalism being applied by the media after a pilot reported seeing a meteor in the area is simply irresponsible.
I do consider airline pilots to be somewhat expert observers, in that they are highly trained to be highly aware of what is going on in a large envelope of airspace around their aircraft, trying to tie a meteor trail to a general area over open ocean without at least two fairly accurate and independent measurements of it's apparent heading and inclination is just nonsense.
From my own experience:
in the summer of 1996 I was Volunteer In Park Ranger for Olympic National Park. One stormy night I witnessed a truly spectacular lightening storm while on my duty station in the back country. From my location I had clear line of sight to about 120 degrees of horizon that included some rather dramatic peaks about 2 to 5 miles away, depending on the particular angle one wanted to look. Most of the peaks were higher than my POV.
At one point a particularly energetic bolt lit up the basin and as my vision cleared I noticed there a brilliant orange star glowing in an area that I knew to a fairly steep bluff a couple of miles away. I pulled a surplus army issue orienteering compass out of my pocket and quickly got a heading and inclination fix, and wrote them down. The orange star grew brighter until I could see flames licking into the sky and then it gradually faded to a dim glow, and then to a memory.
Next morning after having almost no sleep due to Mother Nature's fantastic show, I sat down with a big mug of cowboy coffee, and converted my heading and inclination measurement into a lat-long position.
For anyone who has not done this the process is pretty simple but you have to have some reference info. You must know your position and altitude, and you have to have a way to take an accurate heading fix AND inclination against a reference level. The compass I used had the features required to take the measurements. Then with a ruler and pencil I sketched out the heading on a topo map. Then on an accompanying sheet of graph paper sketched out the triangle that represented my inclination measurement and calculated the altitude. Examining the map I found the relief-line that represented that altitude and drew a nice dot at the point where my heading line intersected the relief. I then interpolated the lat-long cords from the map's grid, and radioed this along with as much detail about what I saw to Fire Command over radio, and at the same time filled out an incident report. The calculations took about 10 minutes.
About 3 hours later a helicopter approached the area I had reported, and contacted me, saying that they found the burned out tree. The pilot commented that my position fix was within 50m, and that seemed to impress him.
My point is that there is no way a pilot over open water is going to get even a region fix on a meteor trail without some critically important reference points, and a careful measurement.
"In that general vicinity," would be vague hand-waving over a volume of several hundred to several thousand cubic miles of air-space.
There's a big difference between moving pieces on the board to generate threat actually and, you know,.... actually taking trades.
MAD was a concept that generated strategic, political pressure, and capital investment in WMD without any actually being fired in anger. The moron with the deepest pockets wins.
Robotic weapon systems don't have that same constraint. Utilizing robotic systems that are based on conventional warfare tactics, takes the yellow ribbons in the homeland out of the equation. National will to engage in war becomes a purely economic consideration on the home front, ie. cost of equipment and delivery. And the Pentagon gets to sell franchises to Reality TV for Robot-to-Robot combat..... just edit out the squishy casualties before delivery.
This would seem to make waging a war easier, in the socio-political sense, as native sons and daughters are far less likely to be casualties, even in asymmetric conflicts. Afghanistan and Iraq seem to show that if the dominant aggressor can keep the media from publishing "horrors of war" and keep native casualties low, the wars can go on indefinitely.
It is well established that just obliterating the opponent's equipment, installations, supplies, and manufacturing base is not sufficient to declare victory... Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq demonstrate clearly that the end game is policing.... and that is a very expensive(well beyond economic) and bloody mission for the dominant combatant to engage in.
A key assumption here is that these robotic systems eventually are capable of performing all the roles a typical soldier is trained for in todays militaries. I see no technical reason that a anime style mobile suit has to have the meat-puppet in situ... to be effective. The soldier can be sitting in a since comfy office complex in Kansas to perform combat duties, and go home to his wife and kids at night.
It might make some support roles a little more dangerous... Such systems are still going to need field support, and that is more difficult to perform via teleoperation, but even that might be possible.
Well my point was that once its perched then no it doesn't really need to look convincingly like a bird because nobody is going to see it.
This is true, in theory. However if a security detail has a rough idea of the shape, size, and tactics of a potential threat, then they are going to optimize their patrol methods to find instances of the threat.
They are going to alter the environment around a sensitive installation to make it as difficult as possible for such a threat to successfully infiltrate.
For a 29" wingspan bird-like surveillance drone. I would expect that trees, utility poles, lamp-posts, and other high vantage points are going to get removed... and those that cant be moved are going to get modified such that it would be impossible for such a drone to land.
It's more likely that such drones are going to be used for urban surveillance. If they look like crows, small hawks, or seagulls it might work for a while, but not for long.
Robot wars mean less human casualties. It's an important part of the path away from our animal instincts to fight each other.
Less human casualties as measured by who? The winners?
currently, Robotic Warfare(TM) is an attempt to address asymmetrical conflicts. By reducing the human capital required to prevail, it reduces the cost/benefit equation to an actuarial risk rather than an intractiable socio-political-financial risk.
In conflicts where all the combat units are robotic, how do wars conclude? At first blood? I doubt very seriously that the prevailing army is going to stop at, "Check! Mate in 3!"
If anything, the amount of collateral damage will increase, and can be blamed on "equipment failure" with a dramatic shrug from the chain of command.
During a Terry Stop an Officer generally is evaluating a lot of behavior, someone who is intoxicated enough to be impaired, is going to be fairly obvious. The sobriety test is a way to remove bias from the equation. By the time an officer has decided to FST he is either convinced of impairment, and needs to prove it, or is harassing, with no intention of arresting.
Think of it this way: Do you carry a hidden tape recorder in your pocket so that you can record all your conversations with your friends and colleagues, just because the weird guy down the street is paying you 10 bucks a week to let him listen in on anything he likes? Would you consider that acceptable behaviour from any of your friends and colleagues?
In most states the act of recording without notification/consent and/or the act of sharing those recordings is a crime.
In some states even relating that information to a third party in some other form (like a transcript) without consent from the original parties is a crime....
Maybe some of these privacy issues should be addressed on that level in court.... After all, my computer talking to your computer over a public network could reasonably interpreted as a private communication in a public space.
It was initiated between two specific IP addresses and was not using a broadcast mode.
I cannot find the case law ATM, but it has been established that it is possible to have a private conversation in a public space. Why should virtual public spaces be excluded from that interpretation?
In the RL if I initiate a phone call with a business, the business cannot assume that my contacting them gives them the right to record the communication, they must notify me if they intended to make such a recording.
"Hi thank you for calling XYZ, Corp Technical support! Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line for the next available service representative. This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes."...
Name me a portable music player other than an iPod that anyone you know owns.
iRiver IFP-390T
It does a lot that my iPodTouch 1G does not do.... and of course the IPod can do things the the iRiver does not do.... they are very complementary devices for my purposes.
wrong.... they are both providing point data.... a compass provides orientation data..
Accelerometers can make up for a lost GPS signal for a few moments, but cannot provide orientation data except in VERY specific circumstances. IF you are being accelerated or decelerated in any axis an accelerometer cannot give you reliable orientation.
Compasses and gyros fill the bill.
In REAL NAVIGATION SYSTEMS(tm) you have GPS plus 3 axis of acceleration and 3 axis of Gyro AND a compass.
If you do not have all these elements your results will be damn near useless for anything but orienteering on a known map.
Umm iPhone is a circa 1998 desktop-class computer, stuffed into a 11cm X 6cm X 0.5cm form factor with a qvga comparable display.
One of it's many embedded peripherals happens to be a 3G phone.
I think you misunderstand. It's not a Phone with an embedded computer module. It's a computer with an embedded Phone module.
Comparing an iPhone to a dedicated "dumb phone" is simply unfair. Even the Blackberries don't compare in terms of performance and capability....
Let's get real here.... the iPhone is really a PDA that has an embedded phone. Expecting it to perform like a dedicated phone, in terms of battery life is, IMO unreasonable.
Could be the kid was already armed for **AA and just needed to load the appropriate rounds addressing the facts of her case into his bandoliers.
when I was doing on-site computer repair I carried 95% of what was needed to fix ANY Macintosh computer (or compatble clone), with ANY conceivable issue in two small briefcases.
And yes that included hardware component failures as well. If I had reason to believe that I was dealing with a major component failure(Mobo or HD or PSU) I would bring the indicated components as well....
In some states it's possible to record without notification, but it becomes a criminal act if that recording is relayed in any way to a party not originally party to the conversation.
In WA it's a class C felony to record a conversation in any medium without notification to the parties involved. Even if that conversation is held in a place that is, defacto a public location. The State recognizes that it is possible to have a conversation in public that is really a private transaction.
So in this context the recording violation could be applied to a party to the conversation recording without notification, or an actor that is not party to the conversation recording it without notification, even when the conversation is in a public space.
It's important to note: Only notification is required. Consent is implied if the parties to the conversation proceed with the conversation after being notified.
One could argue that a data transaction is a conversation between two computers, and that the actors who are involved in initiating that data transaction fit the definition of having a private conversation in a public area.... . Don't know if that would fly in court, as IANAL.
Slashdot Mirror
With the current market focused on exploiting economies of scale to produce the current generation of high density FLASH in 65nm processes. So far this has been VERY lucrative for the companies that bet the farm on building dedicated 65nm fabs for FLASH.
IMO: MRAM has unfortunately come a little late to the party. In it's current role it is kind of the Beta Max of the solid-state storage device market.
Currently only Freescale produces MRAM in any quantity, and they currently only produce 4Mbit parts on a couple of 180nm fabs.
I don't think there is any question that MRAM has the potential to meet or exceed FLASH on the density/price curve. What might keep it out of the high-density market is one of it's great inherent strengths; it doesn't wear out. Who wants to sell storage modules that don't EOL themselves? Try and sell that to your pointy-haired boss' pointy-haired boss...
----
General Electric wasn't interested in mass manufactured light bulbs until Edison figured out how to get them to FAIL reliably.
For them that doesn't know: Edison's original design was a carbon impregnated cotton filament, in as near a total vacuum as could be produced in those days. It didn't suffer from filament migration, and other effects that cause modern bulbs to fail. If the original design had been refined as it was, General Electric could have saturated the market for light bulbs in a relatively short time, and been driven out of the market due to the Edison bulb having no predictable EOL.
Speculative Journalism being applied by the media after a pilot reported seeing a meteor in the area is simply irresponsible.
I do consider airline pilots to be somewhat expert observers, in that they are highly trained to be highly aware of what is going on in a large envelope of airspace around their aircraft, trying to tie a meteor trail to a general area over open ocean without at least two fairly accurate and independent measurements of it's apparent heading and inclination is just nonsense.
From my own experience:
in the summer of 1996 I was Volunteer In Park Ranger for Olympic National Park. One stormy night I witnessed a truly spectacular lightening storm while on my duty station in the back country. From my location I had clear line of sight to about 120 degrees of horizon that included some rather dramatic peaks about 2 to 5 miles away, depending on the particular angle one wanted to look. Most of the peaks were higher than my POV.
At one point a particularly energetic bolt lit up the basin and as my vision cleared I noticed there a brilliant orange star glowing in an area that I knew to a fairly steep bluff a couple of miles away. I pulled a surplus army issue orienteering compass out of my pocket and quickly got a heading and inclination fix, and wrote them down. The orange star grew brighter until I could see flames licking into the sky and then it gradually faded to a dim glow, and then to a memory.
Next morning after having almost no sleep due to Mother Nature's fantastic show, I sat down with a big mug of cowboy coffee, and converted my heading and inclination measurement into a lat-long position.
For anyone who has not done this the process is pretty simple but you have to have some reference info. You must know your position and altitude, and you have to have a way to take an accurate heading fix AND inclination against a reference level. The compass I used had the features required to take the measurements. Then with a ruler and pencil I sketched out the heading on a topo map. Then on an accompanying sheet of graph paper sketched out the triangle that represented my inclination measurement and calculated the altitude. Examining the map I found the relief-line that represented that altitude and drew a nice dot at the point where my heading line intersected the relief. I then interpolated the lat-long cords from the map's grid, and radioed this along with as much detail about what I saw to Fire Command over radio, and at the same time filled out an incident report. The calculations took about 10 minutes.
About 3 hours later a helicopter approached the area I had reported, and contacted me, saying that they found the burned out tree. The pilot commented that my position fix was within 50m, and that seemed to impress him.
My point is that there is no way a pilot over open water is going to get even a region fix on a meteor trail without some critically important reference points, and a careful measurement.
"In that general vicinity," would be vague hand-waving over a volume of several hundred to several thousand cubic miles of air-space.
On the contrary we are richer because they focused their efforts on turning wilderness into villages, then towns, then cities.
Yeah I guess enslaving, and then murdering the natives had a bit more priority that preservation of the landing site.
Aw come on that never stopped Manifest Destiny before....
Don't be such a wet blanket. /sarcasm
Why not? I personally think that preserving the artifacts of the first moon landing should be considered important.
Though realistically.... Neil Armstrong's first boot print was most likely obliterated when the LEM blasted off.
There's a lot of moon up there. I see no reason to disturb the existing landing sites until we have the means to preserve them properly.
There's a big difference between moving pieces on the board to generate threat actually and, you know,.... actually taking trades.
MAD was a concept that generated strategic, political pressure, and capital investment in WMD without any actually being fired in anger. The moron with the deepest pockets wins.
Robotic weapon systems don't have that same constraint. Utilizing robotic systems that are based on conventional warfare tactics, takes the yellow ribbons in the homeland out of the equation. National will to engage in war becomes a purely economic consideration on the home front, ie. cost of equipment and delivery. And the Pentagon gets to sell franchises to Reality TV for Robot-to-Robot combat..... just edit out the squishy casualties before delivery.
This would seem to make waging a war easier, in the socio-political sense, as native sons and daughters are far less likely to be casualties, even in asymmetric conflicts. Afghanistan and Iraq seem to show that if the dominant aggressor can keep the media from publishing "horrors of war" and keep native casualties low, the wars can go on indefinitely.
It is well established that just obliterating the opponent's equipment, installations, supplies, and manufacturing base is not sufficient to declare victory... Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq demonstrate clearly that the end game is policing.... and that is a very expensive(well beyond economic) and bloody mission for the dominant combatant to engage in.
A key assumption here is that these robotic systems eventually are capable of performing all the roles a typical soldier is trained for in todays militaries. I see no technical reason that a anime style mobile suit has to have the meat-puppet in situ... to be effective. The soldier can be sitting in a since comfy office complex in Kansas to perform combat duties, and go home to his wife and kids at night.
It might make some support roles a little more dangerous... Such systems are still going to need field support, and that is more difficult to perform via teleoperation, but even that might be possible.
Well my point was that once its perched then no it doesn't really need to look convincingly like a bird because nobody is going to see it.
This is true, in theory. However if a security detail has a rough idea of the shape, size, and tactics of a potential threat, then they are going to optimize their patrol methods to find instances of the threat.
They are going to alter the environment around a sensitive installation to make it as difficult as possible for such a threat to successfully infiltrate.
For a 29" wingspan bird-like surveillance drone. I would expect that trees, utility poles, lamp-posts, and other high vantage points are going to get removed... and those that cant be moved are going to get modified such that it would be impossible for such a drone to land.
It's more likely that such drones are going to be used for urban surveillance. If they look like crows, small hawks, or seagulls it might work for a while, but not for long.
Robot wars mean less human casualties. It's an important part of the path away from our animal instincts to fight each other.
Less human casualties as measured by who? The winners?
currently, Robotic Warfare(TM) is an attempt to address asymmetrical conflicts. By reducing the human capital required to prevail, it reduces the cost/benefit equation to an actuarial risk rather than an intractiable socio-political-financial risk.
In conflicts where all the combat units are robotic, how do wars conclude? At first blood? I doubt very seriously that the prevailing army is going to stop at, "Check! Mate in 3!"
If anything, the amount of collateral damage will increase, and can be blamed on "equipment failure" with a dramatic shrug from the chain of command.
You seem to be implying that I should as a matter of course include on future postings..... of this nature....
I think you have a point.
During a Terry Stop an Officer generally is evaluating a lot of behavior, someone who is intoxicated enough to be impaired, is going to be fairly obvious. The sobriety test is a way to remove bias from the equation. By the time an officer has decided to FST he is either convinced of impairment, and needs to prove it, or is harassing, with no intention of arresting.
Think of it this way: Do you carry a hidden tape recorder in your pocket so that you can record all your conversations with your friends and colleagues, just because the weird guy down the street is paying you 10 bucks a week to let him listen in on anything he likes? Would you consider that acceptable behaviour from any of your friends and colleagues?
In most states the act of recording without notification/consent and/or the act of sharing those recordings is a crime.
In some states even relating that information to a third party in some other form (like a transcript) without consent from the original parties is a crime....
Maybe some of these privacy issues should be addressed on that level in court.... After all, my computer talking to your computer over a public network could reasonably interpreted as a private communication in a public space.
It was initiated between two specific IP addresses and was not using a broadcast mode.
I cannot find the case law ATM, but it has been established that it is possible to have a private conversation in a public space.
Why should virtual public spaces be excluded from that interpretation?
In the RL if I initiate a phone call with a business, the business cannot assume that my contacting them gives them the right to record the communication, they must notify me if they intended to make such a recording.
"Hi thank you for calling XYZ, Corp Technical support! Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line for the next available service representative. This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." ...
Ummm.....I have well... four
x86
PPC
ARM9
68K
and that doesn't include non-general embedded systems that don't do "Real OSes"
Sounds like you are slipping, man.
You should check into a clinic or something to get that Homogeneity treated.
Name me a portable music player other than an iPod that anyone you know owns.
iRiver IFP-390T
It does a lot that my iPodTouch 1G does not do.... and of course the IPod can do things the the iRiver does not do.... they are very complementary devices for my purposes.
wrong.... they are both providing point data.... a compass provides orientation data..
Accelerometers can make up for a lost GPS signal for a few moments, but cannot provide orientation data except in VERY specific circumstances. IF you are being accelerated or decelerated in any axis an accelerometer cannot give you reliable orientation.
Compasses and gyros fill the bill.
In REAL NAVIGATION SYSTEMS(tm) you have GPS plus 3 axis of acceleration and 3 axis of Gyro AND a compass.
If you do not have all these elements your results will be damn near useless for anything but orienteering on a known map.
Umm iPhone is a circa 1998 desktop-class computer, stuffed into a 11cm X 6cm X 0.5cm form factor with a qvga comparable display.
One of it's many embedded peripherals happens to be a 3G phone.
I think you misunderstand. It's not a Phone with an embedded computer module. It's a computer with an embedded Phone module.
Comparing an iPhone to a dedicated "dumb phone" is simply unfair. Even the Blackberries don't compare in terms of performance and capability....
Let's get real here.... the iPhone is really a PDA that has an embedded phone. Expecting it to perform like a dedicated phone, in terms of battery life is, IMO unreasonable.
It rather worries me that so many of the younger generation have never truly experienced heterogeneous environments.
So you are saying the kids these days are into.... um... homogeneity? lol.
This whole issue ties to a concept in Law.
Namely, the fruits of a poisonous tree.
It is not acceptable for a party to obtain benefit from the fruits of their criminal act.
This principle has a lot of implications, only one of which is rejecting evidence obtained illegally.
The KaZaA angle.... Would that be Tortuous Interference ala Blizzard v. MDY?
And would KaZaA need to be a party to the case?
Could be the kid was already armed for **AA and just needed to load the appropriate rounds addressing the facts of her case into his bandoliers.
when I was doing on-site computer repair I carried 95% of what was needed to fix ANY Macintosh computer (or compatble clone), with ANY conceivable issue in two small briefcases.
And yes that included hardware component failures as well. If I had reason to believe that I was dealing with a major component failure(Mobo or HD or PSU) I would bring the indicated components as well....
Agreed these rules will be found in the State's evidentiary rules for the Court.
I believe Lewinsky's friend was prosecuted. I don't recall what the verdict was...
In some states it's possible to record without notification, but it becomes a criminal act if that recording is relayed in any way to a party not originally party to the conversation.
In WA it's a class C felony to record a conversation in any medium without notification to the parties involved. Even if that conversation is held in a place that is, defacto a public location. The State recognizes that it is possible to have a conversation in public that is really a private transaction.
So in this context the recording violation could be applied to a party to the conversation recording without notification, or an actor that is not party to the conversation recording it without notification, even when the conversation is in a public space.
It's important to note: Only notification is required. Consent is implied if the parties to the conversation proceed with the conversation after being notified.
One could argue that a data transaction is a conversation between two computers, and that the actors who are involved in initiating that data transaction fit the definition of having a private conversation in a public area.... . Don't know if that would fly in court, as IANAL.
Tell that to MDY in MDY v. Blizzard...
MDY got assraped for providing tools that allowed end users to violate TOS.
OTOH: Since KaZaA is not a party to this suit I expect the judge
with not rule on the issue of KaZaA's TOS.
does that imply that you are:
a. A Douchebag
b. A Cockroach
c. A Lawyer
d. GTFO
Please choose one.
Inquiring Minds would like to know.