"'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
I see how this could be tracked on EBay - especially "Power Sellers" with 1000's of transactions. But on CL? that's going to be interesting to see happen.
Double Bad Here - The engineer breaking company confidentiality was out of line. Getting fired will probably be the outcome. The "journalist" (such as it is here) revealed a confidential source. That said, they will never get anyone else to talk to them off the record.
Both did the wrong thing. People on the outside of Apple don't like the "hush hush" way they do product development, but that's part of how Apple functions. If I was getting my paycheck there (and I am not, but friends of mine do!) I would keep that stuff internal as the company wants.
"Loose lips sink ships" - Good thing its not a defense contract, and just a next generation piece of consumer electronic gadgetry.
I went out as an independent contractor about 9 years back. My health care coverage has tripled in that 9 years, part of that is getting older and the big part of it is raising rates. (the big chunk is heatlh coverage rates thru the roof)
Oh, and I am healthy so I could get coverage. Forget it if you are sick. Presently costs me over $400/month, and the first $7500 isn't covered.
America encourages starting your own business and being an entrepreneur? Right, sure, utter BS - most people are captive to their corporate coverage, and don't realize there is a problem till they retire or try to go out on their own.
Support Obama and his efforts to get reform (of any form) in place. - And don't blame Democrats for a failure to pass this bill, at least they are trying to make something happen, rather than just saying "no"...
The re-purchase of silicon at many levels is a pretty common thing. Somebody comes out with a good memory chip and the world buys wafers of the chip from the other vendor. Or in a final package, or pays for their name on the outside of the package.
I have had several experiences with foundries taking a design, fabricating it for me, and then 6 months to a year later a "sister organization" comes out with a chip that looks pretty bloody similar. Then, when you do a tear-down of the competitor's chip (nitric acid and a microscope) and you find your design inside the thing. Lawsuit time if you can, but what usually happens is some form of licensing agreement.
What I would question here is what testing of the chip was done after it was assembled. Test time costs a lot of money to do, and anything that can be done to reduce that is a common strategy. Sometimes they do "blind package assembly" (no testing at the wafer level) and do testing just after final assembly.
In this case it sounds like they are doing blind assembly, and shipping out with no final test either. A shoddy way to cut costs.
This is old news, and just a variation on a theme -
As somebody who does this sort of stuff for a living - now they need to get around the IEC-60601 compliance and the FDA before they could introduce it in the USA.
Also - Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) is designed for this application and there are a bunch of "health monitors either int the works, or already out there for this:
Now if you want exciting - research into electronic eyes, electronic ears and neural pacemaker for people with epilepsy are kind of interesting. Google them and you will find them.
Its a little scary but I dated a lady for a while who thought the government was using here for non lethal weapons testing, by hitting her with EM waves.
Pity... Good looking with a very nice body... Such a waste...
Depending on the foundry process, typical CMOS has between 8 masks and 16 masks (aka reticles) for the base layer fabrication of transistors. Metal interconnect layers on top of that vary between 1 (very rare) and 20 (also pretty rare) - commonly between 4 and 8 metal layers
The latest and greatest techno-glitter is often not what's needed. The simple rugged device shown can get the interactive teaching job done, and probably endure getting dropped, kicked, and getting dumped in Cheerios.
Would you give an iPhone to a kid who is constantly throwing things around and having temper tantrums?
The subject of ECC's and the unique aspects associated with magnetic storage can fill multiple books. (start googling run length limited codes, reed-solomon, convolutional and cyclic codes, and your eyes will glaze over PDQ.)Most of whats been posted here is either wrong or pretty oversimplified (mostly just wrong) - The quick and dirty on whats unique about ECC's in disk drives is that the errors tend to be bursts rather than individualized - so getting a long string of bad data at one place is the norm, rather than the exception. (simple way of thinking about it - think of a scratch, and thats a supersimplified analogy)
Bigger sectors make sense - the 512KB standard has been around since before I designed drives (got to go back 30 years, argh!) but in the grand scheme of things it doesnt matter a whole heck of a lot. Access time is alway going to be dominated by rotational latency and there is no way around that, short of redundancy locations of data (at a heavy cost on storage density) and total storage capacity needs vs. capability are generally dominated by the areal density improvements. (Who cares about 10% of overhead for formatting, sector size, ECC placement etc. when the total storage doubles every 6 months anyhow?)
Oh, and the death of the HDD due to SSD has been greatly exaggerated, IMHO, because the need for total storage keeps going up, and the cost for $$ per GByte needs to keep that competitive. The SSD drive will be sweet for things like laptops/netbooks, thats for sure, but nobody wants to pay the serious money for terabytes of movies on a SSD, when a HDD will get it done at less cost.
Oh - and if anyone wants to say the price of SSD storage will come down and surpass that of HDD storage? Well, maybe, but the problem there is that Moore's law is running up against the limits of Physics right now. THe state of the art transistor has a gate oxide thickness of 4 atoms, and a channel length of 13 atoms. Good luck with doing fractions of atoms, there might just be a few problems with that....:)
For the most part - Newer digital designs are language driven, not schematic driven. The advent of Verilog & VHDL lead to purely digital designs done up in code.
Some of the special devices are done using transistor level design, but synchronous logic these days is a HDL (hardware description language) followed by gate level synthesis, and then autoplace and auto routing.
A lot of fine tuning along the way for high performance items does get tweaked a lot but for the most part, digital chips are created as a coding exercise.
I wish NASA would do one of several things: 1. Concentrate on robotic missions and other non-manned science. 2. Put together a serious push for a Mars mission.
Things that I feel are an utter waste of time and money: 1. Going back to the moon purely to go back. 2. LEO (Low earth orbit) projects and questionable ISS science fair projects.
Put together a real push for Mars and get people excited about science and technology again. Or make a real effort in exo-planet research and searching for life around other star systems. (I did not say "intelligent life, or infer anything about aliens and flyingf saucers there!) The tools are available for both.
Also, manned missions to Mars are not "cost effective" but you can't beat the sizzle effect that you get from the "boots on the ground" of a live mission. Best bang for the buck there comes from the unmanned and robotic research.
Sad to say, NASA, for the most part has become another government bureaucracy. I would like to be proven wrong and see them return to what the did from 1960-1970, but the congressional money path probably won't happen again.
From 1963 to 1970 was a great time to be a kid watching all this stuff happen. Too bad there were a lot of other ugly things going on at the time, (Vietnam, Watergate, etc.) but history allows us to remember the great and suppress the ugly.
How about a space elevator project? Arthur C Clarke said we would build one roughly 50 years after we stopped laughing at teh concept. Well, the laughing seems to have died down.
frequency hopping, redundancy, default routines and a multitude of other techniques get used to keep the signals (and planes) secure. They are not RC model planes.
Oh boy... A sailing friend of mine introduced me to one of these pilots - these guys have as much skill and training as the guys in the F-18 Hornets, and they are under similar stress. If they F-up they can kill some of their own, or lose a bird that costs millions to build.
The one advantage they have is that they can go home to their own bed at night (or day, or..), and if they do mess up, they can live after the fact.
This is the future of modern warfare, and having seen these things get assembled (I do some defense contracting) the technology is pretty dammed impressive.
If you think this is MS flight simulator, you are utterly clueless.
Slashdot Mirror
The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 1817:
"'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
I see how this could be tracked on EBay - especially "Power Sellers" with 1000's of transactions.
But on CL? that's going to be interesting to see happen.
Double Bad Here -
The engineer breaking company confidentiality was out of line. Getting fired will probably be the outcome.
The "journalist" (such as it is here) revealed a confidential source. That said, they will never get anyone else to talk to them off the record.
Both did the wrong thing.
People on the outside of Apple don't like the "hush hush" way they do product development, but that's part of how Apple functions. If I was getting my paycheck there (and I am not, but friends of mine do!) I would keep that stuff internal as the company wants.
"Loose lips sink ships" - Good thing its not a defense contract, and just a next generation piece of consumer electronic gadgetry.
Hmmmm... all my years working as an IC designer and all I have been creating is magic smoke??? Cool!
Thanks for making me smile.
If you really want to use optical communocation you might as well go infrared so you don't need to see it, similar to your TV remote.
Then you have all the problems (visible light or infrared) of orientation, line of sight and similar.
Hopefully the creator of this gadget has not quit their day job.
utterly stupid.
water is suicide - distilled, lab grade whatever...
As an EE I have done a little too much "suicide testing" of devices.
cold freeze you should be able to survive, the battery might need replacement, but the chips will survive.
If you want to dunk a phone into a fluid and see it survive you need to use something like 3M's Fluorinert
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert
Neat stuff - you can take a computer (No disk drive) and put it in fluid and it still keeps on running while totally immersed in the fluid.
I went out as an independent contractor about 9 years back. My health care coverage has tripled in that 9 years, part of that is getting older and the big part of it is raising rates. (the big chunk is heatlh coverage rates thru the roof)
Oh, and I am healthy so I could get coverage. Forget it if you are sick. Presently costs me over $400/month, and the first $7500 isn't covered.
America encourages starting your own business and being an entrepreneur? Right, sure, utter BS - most people are captive to their corporate coverage, and don't realize there is a problem till they retire or try to go out on their own.
Support Obama and his efforts to get reform (of any form) in place. - And don't blame Democrats for a failure to pass this bill, at least they are trying to make something happen, rather than just saying "no"...
Rant machine off...
The re-purchase of silicon at many levels is a pretty common thing. Somebody comes out with a good memory chip and the world buys wafers of the chip from the other vendor. Or in a final package, or pays for their name on the outside of the package.
I have had several experiences with foundries taking a design, fabricating it for me, and then 6 months to a year later a "sister organization" comes out with a chip that looks pretty bloody similar. Then, when you do a tear-down of the competitor's chip (nitric acid and a microscope) and you find your design inside the thing. Lawsuit time if you can, but what usually happens is some form of licensing agreement.
What I would question here is what testing of the chip was done after it was assembled. Test time costs a lot of money to do, and anything that can be done to reduce that is a common strategy. Sometimes they do "blind package assembly" (no testing at the wafer level) and do testing just after final assembly.
In this case it sounds like they are doing blind assembly, and shipping out with no final test either. A shoddy way to cut costs.
the amateur astronomer understands that Pluto is noting more than an asteroid with a big ego
The attitude gets even bigger when its closer to the sun than Neptune.....
How would you like to be demoted?
This is old news, and just a variation on a theme -
As somebody who does this sort of stuff for a living - now they need to get around the IEC-60601 compliance and the FDA before they could introduce it in the USA.
http://www.devicelink.com/mddi/archive/03/09/015.html [devicelink.com]
Something similar is in the works for hospital use:
http://www.soterawireless.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55&Itemid=18 [soterawireless.com]
That goes out over WiFi inside a hospital.
Also - Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) is designed for this application and there are a bunch of "health monitors either int the works, or already out there for this:
http://mobihealthnews.com/2577/continua-picks-zigbee-bluetooth-le-for-health-devices-sensors/ [mobihealthnews.com]
Blood Glucose monitors using this technology have been around for a while:
http://www.dexcom.com/default.aspx [dexcom.com]
Now if you want exciting - research into electronic eyes, electronic ears and neural pacemaker for people with epilepsy are kind of interesting. Google them and you will find them.
Got your Borg Implants? :-)
"storing data on rust is where the similarities end"
Ferrous oxide tape and disk drives haven't been used in new media in over 20 years (30?)
What cave have you been hiding in?
I actually know somebody who did exactly that. Yes! at Apple! No Joke!
Insert appropriate Monica Lewinsky and/or blue stained dresss joke here...
Loran C is good to about 30 feet - I have a Loran C system in my boat in addition to GPS
5 star! - enough said!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia
Its a little scary but I dated a lady for a while who thought the government was using here for non lethal weapons testing, by hitting her with EM waves.
Pity... Good looking with a very nice body... Such a waste...
he only resonates at certain frequencies....
Depending on the foundry process, typical CMOS has between 8 masks and 16 masks (aka reticles) for the base layer fabrication of transistors. Metal interconnect layers on top of that vary between 1 (very rare) and 20 (also pretty rare) - commonly between 4 and 8 metal layers
LMAO! I pre-date computers in the classroom. High school class of 1974
http://www.innovationsforlearning.org/about_teachermate.php
The latest and greatest techno-glitter is often not what's needed. The simple rugged device shown can get the interactive teaching job done, and probably endure getting dropped, kicked, and getting dumped in Cheerios.
Would you give an iPhone to a kid who is constantly throwing things around and having temper tantrums?
Often, simpler is better.
The subject of ECC's and the unique aspects associated with magnetic storage can fill multiple books. (start googling run length limited codes, reed-solomon, convolutional and cyclic codes, and your eyes will glaze over PDQ.)Most of whats been posted here is either wrong or pretty oversimplified (mostly just wrong) - The quick and dirty on whats unique about ECC's in disk drives is that the errors tend to be bursts rather than individualized - so getting a long string of bad data at one place is the norm, rather than the exception. (simple way of thinking about it - think of a scratch, and thats a supersimplified analogy)
Bigger sectors make sense - the 512KB standard has been around since before I designed drives (got to go back 30 years, argh!) but in the grand scheme of things it doesnt matter a whole heck of a lot. Access time is alway going to be dominated by rotational latency and there is no way around that, short of redundancy locations of data (at a heavy cost on storage density) and total storage capacity needs vs. capability are generally dominated by the areal density improvements. (Who cares about 10% of overhead for formatting, sector size, ECC placement etc. when the total storage doubles every 6 months anyhow?)
Oh, and the death of the HDD due to SSD has been greatly exaggerated, IMHO, because the need for total storage keeps going up, and the cost for $$ per GByte needs to keep that competitive. The SSD drive will be sweet for things like laptops/netbooks, thats for sure, but nobody wants to pay the serious money for terabytes of movies on a SSD, when a HDD will get it done at less cost.
Oh - and if anyone wants to say the price of SSD storage will come down and surpass that of HDD storage? Well, maybe, but the problem there is that Moore's law is running up against the limits of Physics right now. THe state of the art transistor has a gate oxide thickness of 4 atoms, and a channel length of 13 atoms. Good luck with doing fractions of atoms, there might just be a few problems with that.... :)
For the most part - Newer digital designs are language driven, not schematic driven. The advent of Verilog & VHDL lead to purely digital designs done up in code.
Some of the special devices are done using transistor level design, but synchronous logic these days is a HDL (hardware description language) followed by gate level synthesis, and then autoplace and auto routing.
A lot of fine tuning along the way for high performance items does get tweaked a lot but for the most part, digital chips are created as a coding exercise.
Gee.. That's nice....
I wish NASA would do one of several things:
1. Concentrate on robotic missions and other non-manned science.
2. Put together a serious push for a Mars mission.
Things that I feel are an utter waste of time and money:
1. Going back to the moon purely to go back.
2. LEO (Low earth orbit) projects and questionable ISS science fair projects.
Put together a real push for Mars and get people excited about science and technology again. Or make a real effort in exo-planet research and searching for life around other star systems. (I did not say "intelligent life, or infer anything about aliens and flyingf saucers there!) The tools are available for both.
Also, manned missions to Mars are not "cost effective" but you can't beat the sizzle effect that you get from the "boots on the ground" of a live mission. Best bang for the buck there comes from the unmanned and robotic research.
Sad to say, NASA, for the most part has become another government bureaucracy. I would like to be proven wrong and see them return to what the did from 1960-1970, but the congressional money path probably won't happen again.
From 1963 to 1970 was a great time to be a kid watching all this stuff happen. Too bad there were a lot of other ugly things going on at the time, (Vietnam, Watergate, etc.) but history allows us to remember the great and suppress the ugly.
How about a space elevator project? Arthur C Clarke said we would build one roughly 50 years after we stopped laughing at teh concept. Well, the laughing seems to have died down.
frequency hopping, redundancy, default routines and a multitude of other techniques get used to keep the signals (and planes) secure. They are not RC model planes.
Oh boy... A sailing friend of mine introduced me to one of these pilots - these guys have as much skill and training as the guys in the F-18 Hornets, and they are under similar stress. If they F-up they can kill some of their own, or lose a bird that costs millions to build.
The one advantage they have is that they can go home to their own bed at night (or day, or..), and if they do mess up, they can live after the fact.
This is the future of modern warfare, and having seen these things get assembled (I do some defense contracting) the technology is pretty dammed impressive.
If you think this is MS flight simulator, you are utterly clueless.