They won't have to prop open your eyes, they have a more subtle way to get it done.
A little history first -- This is the reason that many years ago, the networks worked together (sort of) to carefully time their advertising so that it all runs at once. You flip the channel, and all the other channels have their adverts running in time-sync.
Cable channels made that a bit tougher to do, but for the most part everyone remains in-sync for ads.
The more modern way of doing it -- Lets not forget the gobs and gobs of "embedded advertising" that is out there. That Hummer on CSI-Miami is an embedded ad. Those Coca-Cola glasses on American Idol are another example. Anyplace that you can see a product name or brand name identity in a TV show is a paid advertisement.
Sticking with the CSI example, the camera they used to take pictures with used to have no name on it. The show got popular, and all of a sudden it became a Nikon camera.
My system is 3 PC's all running XP, a Red-Hat Linux box, and a WiFi port. After F***ing around with Windows XP network, reading a lot of IT help sites on the subject, I got it to work.
Then I went through auto-update land and it all came tumbling down. ^%%!!!!*****! (and then the "wizards" that "auto-muck" without checking if they have permission added in their damage) Attempts to re-configure and return to functionality failed. (Even did system restores on everything to back when it was all healthy and working.)
At that point I threw up my hands and installed Network Magic. That got it to plug and play. The annoying thing with NM is that they do an annual lease, and I am now an addict to their lease.
The shuttle is now 30 years old. (Yup! first shuttle rolled out in 1976...)
NASA (and the funding behind it, namely Congress) should get their act together on a modern replacement. Either the cheapest possible method to get people into orbit, or concentrate their money on robotic replacements.
Adding a "module to remotely land the craft" speaks well to the fact that people are not needed on board.
Adding that module as an "add on dumped in the cargo bay" speak well to the fact that it is duct tape put on a very old machine.
The shuttle is like the Energizer Bunny for two reasons IMHO:
Everybody wants "man in space" but is not willing to spend the money to do it right.
The re-outfiting of the shuttle for each new flight has been set up to spread the money spent across multiple states, and multiple congressional districts. Depending on where you are, it's either "pork" or "bringing home the bacon" and that gets it throug the funding process in congress.
Serious money spent on robotic space exploration would get you good "bang for the buck" but people want an "Apollo 11 on Mars" because it is a lot sexier. Robotic exploration does not have to worry about all the life support issues, and can be more cost effective.
I am in favor of both, but the glory days of NASA ended back in the early 70's, now it is just another inefficient government agency. The "cold war" is over...
Anybody here running a 30 year old computer? I doubt it. Why are we still flying a 30 year old shuttle?
In case you have not noticed, the CMOS scaling of Moore is undergoing some squirming and shrinking problems. Have you noticed the clock scaling of microprocessos has been a bit more stable in the last year or two?
Latest and greatest feature size on the transistor (now starting production) is 45 nanometers. Research devices are at 10nm to 25nm.
I have been on the R+D floor of Cray (Chippewa Falls Wisconsin anyone?) and the systems used for thermal cooling of these machines is impressive. When they talk "need to limit power consumption" the motivation is that the power generating stations are limited to 10-12 Megawatts.
The comment on "the big machines that the federal government has are not listed" is probably correct (I Don't know for certain either...) but then 99.95% of the engineers inside Cray don't know what their computers get used for.
Any significant cell phone vendor has its own digital ASIC team doing a fully dedicated logic ASIC. Impossible to be feature (or cost!) competitive by doing this any other way.
The alternative model is Qualcomm which develops a full chip set (everything, RF front end to the Sigma-Delta ADC/DAC that drive the speaker and hear the microphone.)which then gets bundled into assorted CDMA phone sets.
These chips don't require cutting edge speed, rather they are totally cost vs. feature driven. (How many toys and games can you pump into your digital ASIC and firmware for the best cost/feature tradeoff?)
Be it in-house digital ASIC team, or the "end to end bundle" of Qualcomm, they still will have to have the digital ASIC ready and able for easy customization. (Samsung phone playing Pong and Toshiba phone playing anime' graphics, so to speak.)Consequently, the value is in the Verilog/VHDL code, and the capability to make additions, so that there is one and only one logic ASIC. That's a "must have" due to cost-power-size issues, all critical in cell phones.
If Intel thinks they can sell a chip for this that fits the "Intel motherboard and chip set model" it won't happen. Considering they are dumping this group that is bleeding red ink, that is not too surprising.
Heinlein was one of the Sci-Fi authors that stimulated the imagination, while staying within the bounds (albeit loosely) of "possible" scientific reality.
Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Larry Niven, to name a few.
Heinlein also had some interesting commentary on some "not PC" topics as well:
The patent system has a lot of problems, especially considering the nature of many patents not being understood, even by members of the patent office.
From what I have seen (applying for patents) is that if the patent application is not totally off the wall, it gets granted, after a cursory inspection. (Perpetual motion machines, and "the wheel" tend to be disallowed, but not much else.)
Due to that, the patent serves as a placeholder (legal record of date and content) in time, until it gets challenged in court. When it gets challenged, then it (might!) be examined on its merits.
Even there, it is a bit of a joke. Juries are not qualified to review a lot of intellectual property issues. Any Slash-Dot reader would be thrown off a patent trial because their technical knowledge would be too great to consider them "impartial" - the court wants ignorance, or a "blank slate" for a juror.
IMHO - A proper "jury of peers" for intellectual property law would be a group of scientist and engineer types. However, that does not happen.
There are a glut of patents out there that will never survive court challenges, even with a jury of non-technical types. A pile of patents on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cell phone chips all are in direct conflict with each other. Nobody will bother to sort that out.
The alternative is "trade secrets" which was the method we used in the disk drive world. Things changed so quickly there that by the time you got a patent, the product would be obolete anyhow. Product life cycle of a disk drive is 3-6 months, and a patent takes 2-3 years to issue.
After spending 15 years of my life designing disk drives, I need to laugh at the banter on this topic.
Destroy the drive by crushing it, quick and easy. Or - A sealed cylinder with the appropriate chemicals designed to inject into the internals of the drive to destroy the surface of the plated media would do it as well.
Remember this needs to happen in seconds. You are ditching a plane or making an unscheduled landing on a hostile airstrip. Overwrites and all that take too long.
A lot of the "recovered data from damaged drives" is urban legend. This is especially true of HDD's developed in the last 5 years. Older drives were easier to tear apart.
Encryption is not going to cut it. Cyphers can be broken, that's what a lot of the MPP supercomputers get used for.
You want military secrets? Get a few good looking hookers to ply the right engineers and military folks with booze and sex and you will get the information you are looking for. Sometime the old-fashioned way works the best.:)
Right now the most reliable drives come from Western Digital.
Having worked for Seagate/WD/Quantum/Maxtor/IBM (yeah silicon valley migrant farm worker type) ***right now*** WD produces the best drives. Seagate quality leaves lots to be desired. Circa 1995-2000 Quantum had the best quality, but that has gone away due to cost cutting.
Opinion is my own, yeah, but its based upon being inside these companies, not just using their products.
This "wonderful idea" for 802.11 hot spots, which are essentially coverage circles that are 30 meters in diameter will be obsolete in 3 years.
Anybody trying to use 802.11 (aka WiFi) to cover an entire city must be either clueless in technology or a politician.
The proper solution for this is just now emerging, in the form of 802.16a (aka WiMax) which gives coverage circles larger than 5Km, which can be used to provide city wide coverage, without too much pain. (Google it, there's plenty of stuff out there.)
WiFi was designed to get rid of that last 30 meters of Ethernet cable. and for that it serves well. People have been trying to use it in so many applications that it was never designed for.
Double the number of registers? I dont think so. How about parity (one extra bit) and ECC? Its been in the communication world forever.
The "optimal voltage" is dependent on the foundry process and the threshold voltage associated therewith. Latest and smallest (90nm) sits at a power supply of 1.1V and has gate oxide leakage problems like you would not believe. After all the gate oxide thickness is about 6 atoms right now.
Running at reduced power supply voltage does reduce power, but the penalty is paid for in several areas: reduced driver capability, not able towork at the fastest clock rate, susceptible to environemnt noise, much more sensitive to analog issues.
What you are describing now becomes an analog design issue.
Re:GaAs??? GaAs is material of the future...
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
GaAs has a big problem with yield loss in manufacturing.
As such, it is ok for small stuff (under 20 transistors)but is not going to fly for million transistor CPU's
Religion Sex and Politics
on
Verified Voting
·
· Score: 1, Troll
The three classical taboo subjects of the workplace.
It is my sincere hope that (relative) sanity will be restored to the US federal government in the near future.
On a personal note, I now know three guys (USMC from this area) dead in Iraq.
Anyhow, Then we can all go back the discussions on religion and sex. Those two don't have a paper trail to properly verify them either.
Seriously, a tight election in 2000 and 2004 have shown what a POS our voting system presently is.
Need to get an upgrade... Shall we outsource the job to India or China?
Re:Dont Bother Reading Long Article
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 1
1. I did read the article. 2. It is well written and oriented to engineers. 3. There is good depth and detail there. 4. A lot of slash-dot folks use this as place to spout babble without reading the content. For hundreds of examples, just look at all the assorted postings. 5. Consider the source, no need to defend your work to the "babble rousers"
Hmmm - There are a good many "niche publications" out there that it is no longer possible to find the author for... Less so in mainsteam works however.
Lots of specialized technical documents are in this category. However, people generally don't challenge the copyright of something obscure like that.
I ask the question what is this group looking for? What motivates this case? SInce it is a legal group, they are motivated by money, so I would want to know more about why they are truly doiong this before I would support this effort.
Can anyone "follow the money" and find why this is being done?
IMHO it is important that there be multiple venues for publication. Technical journals and magazines that specialize in an area seem to complement each other.
Some of my stuff has published in IEEE journals, other items in Electronic Design and EDN magazines. The writing style is totally different, and how you present things is totally different.
Also, what a journal rejects, frequently the magazine loves to have.
In both cases, the concept of "peer review" is important. (Although not perfect...) Out of control internet publishing means that the readers have to seperate the good and the bad themselves, and some of the readers are not qualified to do so. Peer review prior to publication at least gives some validation of content.
Slashdot Mirror
Already done.
You fast forward. That forces you to look at the ad a bit.
The capability to do 30 second and 1 minute jumps existed.
It got axed due to total avoidnace of advertisements
You got 3 minutes of ads? Hit the 1 minute jump button 3 times and back to the show.
No ads, no fast forwarding.
The fast forward through the ad became the compromise.
Old news.
They won't have to prop open your eyes, they have a more subtle way to get it done.
A little history first --
This is the reason that many years ago, the networks worked together (sort of) to carefully time their advertising so that it all runs at once. You flip the channel, and all the other channels have their adverts running in time-sync.
Cable channels made that a bit tougher to do, but for the most part everyone remains in-sync for ads.
The more modern way of doing it --
Lets not forget the gobs and gobs of "embedded advertising" that is out there. That Hummer on CSI-Miami is an embedded ad. Those Coca-Cola glasses on American Idol are another example. Anyplace that you can see a product name or brand name identity in a TV show is a paid advertisement.
Sticking with the CSI example, the camera they used to take pictures with used to have no name on it. The show got popular, and all of a sudden it became a Nikon camera.
My system is 3 PC's all running XP, a Red-Hat Linux box, and a WiFi port. After F***ing around with Windows XP network, reading a lot of IT help sites on the subject, I got it to work.
Then I went through auto-update land and it all came tumbling down. ^%%!!!!*****! (and then the "wizards" that "auto-muck" without checking if they have permission added in their damage) Attempts to re-configure and return to functionality failed. (Even did system restores on everything to back when it was all healthy and working.)
At that point I threw up my hands and installed Network Magic. That got it to plug and play. The annoying thing with NM is that they do an annual lease, and I am now an addict to their lease.
Anybody know an alternative to Network Magic?
tnx...
http://www.ajnr.org/cgi/content/full/25/1/77
Real world probe grid put on the brain...
Lots of fun, been there, done that...
A little neurosurgery anyone?
The shuttle is now 30 years old. (Yup! first shuttle rolled out in 1976...)
NASA (and the funding behind it, namely Congress) should get their act together on a modern replacement. Either the cheapest possible method to get people into orbit, or concentrate their money on robotic replacements.
Adding a "module to remotely land the craft" speaks well to the fact that people are not needed on board.
Adding that module as an "add on dumped in the cargo bay" speak well to the fact that it is duct tape put on a very old machine.
The shuttle is like the Energizer Bunny for two reasons IMHO:
Everybody wants "man in space" but is not willing to spend the money to do it right.
The re-outfiting of the shuttle for each new flight has been set up to spread the money spent across multiple states, and multiple congressional districts. Depending on where you are, it's either "pork" or "bringing home the bacon" and that gets it throug the funding process in congress.
Serious money spent on robotic space exploration would get you good "bang for the buck" but people want an "Apollo 11 on Mars" because it is a lot sexier. Robotic exploration does not have to worry about all the life support issues, and can be more cost effective.
I am in favor of both, but the glory days of NASA ended back in the early 70's, now it is just another inefficient government agency. The "cold war" is over...
Anybody here running a 30 year old computer? I doubt it. Why are we still flying a 30 year old shuttle?
In case you have not noticed, the CMOS scaling of Moore is undergoing some squirming and shrinking problems. Have you noticed the clock scaling of microprocessos has been a bit more stable in the last year or two?
Latest and greatest feature size on the transistor (now starting production) is 45 nanometers. Research devices are at 10nm to 25nm.
A useful collection of info: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd46-23.html
I have been on the R+D floor of Cray (Chippewa Falls Wisconsin anyone?) and the systems used for thermal cooling of these machines is impressive. When they talk "need to limit power consumption" the motivation is that the power generating stations are limited to 10-12 Megawatts.
The comment on "the big machines that the federal government has are not listed" is probably correct (I Don't know for certain either...) but then 99.95% of the engineers inside Cray don't know what their computers get used for.
Go figure...
The alternative model is Qualcomm which develops a full chip set (everything, RF front end to the Sigma-Delta ADC/DAC that drive the speaker and hear the microphone.)which then gets bundled into assorted CDMA phone sets.
These chips don't require cutting edge speed, rather they are totally cost vs. feature driven. (How many toys and games can you pump into your digital ASIC and firmware for the best cost/feature tradeoff?)
Be it in-house digital ASIC team, or the "end to end bundle" of Qualcomm, they still will have to have the digital ASIC ready and able for easy customization. (Samsung phone playing Pong and Toshiba phone playing anime' graphics, so to speak.)Consequently, the value is in the Verilog/VHDL code, and the capability to make additions, so that there is one and only one logic ASIC. That's a "must have" due to cost-power-size issues, all critical in cell phones.
If Intel thinks they can sell a chip for this that fits the "Intel motherboard and chip set model" it won't happen. Considering they are dumping this group that is bleeding red ink, that is not too surprising.
Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Larry Niven, to name a few.
Heinlein also had some interesting commentary on some "not PC" topics as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange _Land
Do you grok?
From what I have seen (applying for patents) is that if the patent application is not totally off the wall, it gets granted, after a cursory inspection. (Perpetual motion machines, and "the wheel" tend to be disallowed, but not much else.)
Due to that, the patent serves as a placeholder (legal record of date and content) in time, until it gets challenged in court. When it gets challenged, then it (might!) be examined on its merits.
Even there, it is a bit of a joke. Juries are not qualified to review a lot of intellectual property issues. Any Slash-Dot reader would be thrown off a patent trial because their technical knowledge would be too great to consider them "impartial" - the court wants ignorance, or a "blank slate" for a juror.
IMHO - A proper "jury of peers" for intellectual property law would be a group of scientist and engineer types. However, that does not happen.
There are a glut of patents out there that will never survive court challenges, even with a jury of non-technical types. A pile of patents on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cell phone chips all are in direct conflict with each other. Nobody will bother to sort that out.
The alternative is "trade secrets" which was the method we used in the disk drive world. Things changed so quickly there that by the time you got a patent, the product would be obolete anyhow. Product life cycle of a disk drive is 3-6 months, and a patent takes 2-3 years to issue.
http://www.effectiveelectrons.com/
After spending 15 years of my life designing disk drives, I need to laugh at the banter on this topic.
:)
Destroy the drive by crushing it, quick and easy.
Or -
A sealed cylinder with the appropriate chemicals designed to inject into the internals of the drive to destroy the surface of the plated media would do it as well.
Remember this needs to happen in seconds. You are ditching a plane or making an unscheduled landing on a hostile airstrip. Overwrites and all that take too long.
A lot of the "recovered data from damaged drives" is urban legend. This is especially true of HDD's developed in the last 5 years. Older drives were easier to tear apart.
Encryption is not going to cut it. Cyphers can be broken, that's what a lot of the MPP supercomputers get used for.
You want military secrets? Get a few good looking hookers to ply the right engineers and military folks with booze and sex and you will get the information you are looking for. Sometime the old-fashioned way works the best.
It is with deep hope that the federal government does not control our defense strategies over the internet.
Of course, with the open sourse strategy and all of its strengths, that might be an improvement.
Enough said...
The greatest game of 2005 --
The dating game of course!
That hasn't changed in thousands of years!
ooops, this is slash-dot...
that was the Hitachi Power drive IC that provides the power for both the motor and the servo.
It was a POS with no margin in the design.
Right now the most reliable drives come from Western Digital.
Having worked for Seagate/WD/Quantum/Maxtor/IBM (yeah silicon valley migrant farm worker type) ***right now*** WD produces the best drives. Seagate quality leaves lots to be desired. Circa 1995-2000 Quantum had the best quality, but that has gone away due to cost cutting.
Opinion is my own, yeah, but its based upon being inside these companies, not just using their products.
This "wonderful idea" for 802.11 hot spots, which are essentially coverage circles that are 30 meters in diameter will be obsolete in 3 years.
Anybody trying to use 802.11 (aka WiFi) to cover an entire city must be either clueless in technology or a politician.
The proper solution for this is just now emerging, in the form of 802.16a (aka WiMax) which gives coverage circles larger than 5Km, which can be used to provide city wide coverage, without too much pain. (Google it, there's plenty of stuff out there.)
WiFi was designed to get rid of that last 30 meters of Ethernet cable. and for that it serves well. People have been trying to use it in so many applications that it was never designed for.
hm......
Double the number of registers?
I dont think so.
How about parity (one extra bit) and ECC? Its been in the communication world forever.
The "optimal voltage" is dependent on the foundry process and the threshold voltage associated therewith. Latest and smallest (90nm) sits at a power supply of 1.1V and has gate oxide leakage problems like you would not believe. After all the gate oxide thickness is about 6 atoms right now.
Running at reduced power supply voltage does reduce power, but the penalty is paid for in several areas: reduced driver capability, not able towork at the fastest clock rate, susceptible to environemnt noise, much more sensitive to analog issues.
What you are describing now becomes an analog design issue.
GaAs has a big problem with yield loss in manufacturing.
As such, it is ok for small stuff (under 20 transistors)but is not going to fly for million transistor CPU's
The three classical taboo subjects of the workplace.
It is my sincere hope that (relative) sanity will be restored to the US federal government in the near future.
On a personal note, I now know three guys (USMC from this area) dead in Iraq.
Anyhow, Then we can all go back the discussions on religion and sex. Those two don't have a paper trail to properly verify them either.
Seriously, a tight election in 2000 and 2004 have shown what a POS our voting system presently is.
Need to get an upgrade... Shall we outsource the job to India or China?
1. I did read the article.
2. It is well written and oriented to engineers.
3. There is good depth and detail there.
4. A lot of slash-dot folks use this as place to spout babble without reading the content. For hundreds of examples, just look at all the assorted postings.
5. Consider the source, no need to defend your work to the "babble rousers"
Disclaimer: I am a member of the IEEE
Does this mean that Google is going to embrace the Yahoo concept of local Googles?
Is this anything like having a bunch of little Googles running around out of control?
Is this modelled after Ma Bell breaking up into Baby Bells?
Got to ask these questions, after all they are a company traded (sort of...) on the stock exchange..
Yahoo!
More useless laws that can not be enforced.
Just like attempts to make P2P filesharing illegal, it will be virtually impossible to regulate or control.
Hmmm - There are a good many "niche publications" out there that it is no longer possible to find the author for... Less so in mainsteam works however.
Lots of specialized technical documents are in this category. However, people generally don't challenge the copyright of something obscure like that.
I ask the question what is this group looking for? What motivates this case? SInce it is a legal group, they are motivated by money, so I would want to know more about why they are truly doiong this before I would support this effort.
Can anyone "follow the money" and find why this is being done?
IMHO it is important that there be multiple venues for publication. Technical journals and magazines that specialize in an area seem to complement each other.
Some of my stuff has published in IEEE journals, other items in Electronic Design and EDN magazines. The writing style is totally different, and how you present things is totally different.
Also, what a journal rejects, frequently the magazine loves to have.
In both cases, the concept of "peer review" is important. (Although not perfect...) Out of control internet publishing means that the readers have to seperate the good and the bad themselves, and some of the readers are not qualified to do so. Peer review prior to publication at least gives some validation of content.
This is also known as JBOD, or
"Just a Bunch Of Disks"
Last time I checked, RAID still stood for
"Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks"
So where is the spinning magnetic media?
This seems to show some of the microsoft influence, where every storage medium plugged into the PC is defined as a disk drive.