My experience was that OSMAnd~ had the same limitations as free OSMAnd from the Play Store. (I believe they did this out of respect for the developer.)
It's possible to build an unrestricted version of OSMAnd from source, but I'm lazy.:)
skifta is open source??? The OP is not looking for "free as in beer"
That said, it's an excellent app but doesn't meet the OP's needs.
OSMAnd is a bit of an oddball - if you want precompiled auto-updatable APKs, you need to pay a few dollars for OSMAnd+
However, you can grab the source and compile the free unrestricted version on your own if you want. Personally, I paid due to laziness.;)
RetroArch is a new (as in released 2-3 days ago) emulator that is mostly opensource. Some of the specific emulator cores have binary blobs within them.
This is why CyanogenMod didn't implement Cornerstone. It's also why Samsung's multiwindow isn't worth all the hype it has been given:
It only supports Samsung-customized Google Apps, a bunch of Samsung's own apps, and 1-2 third-party apps. Anything not in the multiwindow whitelist is blocked from multiwindow.
Why? Because multiwindow fundamentally breaks the Android CTS and thus any app that is enabled for it must be "opt-in" at the discretion of the developer. If Samsung were to do this for all applications without a whitelist or apps "opting in" via a manifest entry, they would be blocked from the Play Store. Google treats devices breaking apps in the Play Store VERY seriously - When CyanogenMod was considering Cornerstone, they were effectively told that if some sort of "opt-in" mechanism weren't present, Google would be forced to blacklist CM. It's the same reason CM never merged in Paranoid Android's per-app DPI stuff... Google was VERY unhappy about that.
The reason being: If an app developer gets 1-star reviews due to a device behaving badly, that device is probably going to be blacklisted from the Play Store if the app runs fine on any device the passes Google's CTS.
Obviously the CEO is using reliability via redundancy. If he has 10 fast Italian cars, he's got a decent chance that at least one works at any given time.
Correct. HOWEVER, keep in mind that the Hardkernel U2 is marketed as a "development board" but comes with source code that is vastly outdated (more than a year behind what is found in Exynos 4412 handsets) despite being released in late 2012.
The current major release of Android is 4.2. TI and Qualcomm released reference source for their platforms within weeks of 4.2's release. Reference source for Exynos4 dates back to Gingerbread (2.3). They have minimal hacks to allow them to function with ICS (4.0), but it is at its core a Gingerbread BSP. (Exynos4 hasn't used a FIMC1 memory pool for video buffers since Gingerbread, except for in Hardkernel and Insignal's outdated reference source - All ICS implementations for Exynos4 except for Hardkernel and Insignal's source use ION memory for all video buffers.)
Dev boards don't have to deal with carrier approvals or any sort of wireless certification (hell none of them even have a cellular baseband), so there's no excuse for them being a year BEHIND handsets in terms of software support.
It's hard to find good in-ear buds with foam tips instead of the annoying rubber ones.
I have hated EVERY bud I've ever used with rubber tips - however Comply ( http://www.complyfoam.com/ ) sells replacement tips that fit on a wide variety of buds. When used with Comply tips, buds are a TOTALLY different experience.
I have a pair of Skullcandy Titans with Comply tips - they deliver amazing bang for the buck. (I know some people have very negative opinions of Skullcandy, but you have to admit, they do offer a good price/performance ratio, especially when you retrofit Complys onto them.)
If anything, buds may help prevent tinnitus. If listening to music in a loud environment (like an airplane), the isolation provided by in-ear buds allows you to listen at MUCH lower volume levels than you might with non-isolating headphones.
I think it's telling that even counting Chernobyl, the deaths per terawatt hour for nuclear is the lowest there is.
If you look at civilian nuclear power, it's a good sign that it took 40+ years of civilian nuclear power for there to be a plant that released anything more than a few bananas' worth of contamination outside the plant boundary. (Yes, you'd receive more radiation eating a banana a day for a year than you would have at the TMI plant boundary.) Even then, for the first significant civilian contamination incident to happen, it required a massive natural disaster that killed *25,000 people within days*.
(As to why I say 40+ years - While the Soviets claim that Chernobyl was a "civilian" reactor, in my opinion a graphite-moderated water-cooled reactor can't be considered civilian. Its safety was fundamentally compromised by its weapons-friendly design.)
Chernobyl was not an accident - it was an act of gross negligence compounded with compromises in safety done to allow the reactor to be used for weapons production if desired. (Reactors with a positive void coefficient have never been legal in the USA to my knowledge.)
Light Armored Vehicle maybe, but not a tank... Tanks have a heavy caliber main gun with machine gun as backups. A vehicle with only a machine gun isn't a tank... Probably well within the category of LAV though.
Separate the Pa chemically Wait 2 weeks or so Now you have around 1/2048 the amount of Pa232 as nearly all of it has decayed to U232 (half-life of 1.3 days), but have well over 50% of your Pa233 (half life 26.9 days) Separate the Pa from U chemically again - you'll waste a bit of U233 here, but it's still likely far easier than doing centrifuge enrichment or anything like that You now have almost pure Pa233, which will then decay to nearly pure U233.
Most U-233 that comes out of a reactor is formed by protactinium-233 decay.
While U-232 and U-233 are nearly impossible to separate (which is why Thorium has been considered to be proliferation-resistant), protactinium-233 is very easy to separate chemically, and leads to nearly pure U-233.
A cantenna is NOT a Yagi. It's a waveguide antenna.
And a cantenna at 700 MHz is barely feasible. Anything with acceptable gain is going to be absolutely gigantic. You would need a proper Yagi at this point.
His initial attempt to extort $10k from CM. He didn't agree to transfer the domain for free until AFTER he had been outed. His posing as Steve when contacting N2ACards. His alteration of the CM website to point to N2ACards without any discussion with anyone else in the organization. His routing of all money coming from N2ACards to his personal account.
Yup. I'm 90% positive about who it is, but I'm not going to ask or discuss it with the rest of the team to ensure noninterference with legal proceedings.
I am, however, planning on talking with some lawyer friends on advice for setting up a 501(c)(3) organization.
One key thing - these minimums increases were in response to Colgain Air 3407, as mentioned previously.
Captain had 3263 hours (only 110 on type though) - I'm fairly certain the new regs don't affect time-on-type... A minimum of 1500 on-type means you'll never have anyone. FO had 2200 hours, 770 on type
Assuming the new regs are for total hours and not on-type, the new regs solve a problem that didn't exist in the first crash. Safety theatre, kind of like the post-9/11 security theater, where the first new regulations passed nationally were ones that were PROVEN TO HAVE FAILED AS A MEASURE by 9/11. (Most of the 9/11 flights were out of Newark, which had only allowed ticketed passengers at the gate for at least a few years at that point.)
There are massive architectural differences between Android's graphics subsystem and X.
Same reason Samsung's "open source friendliness" in terms of claiming "Hey we have a DRI driver" is kind of pointless when 99% of their Exynos4 chips are in Android devices. (Exynos5 is a bit more even thanks to Chromebook.)
Not necessarily. There are ways to protect a device even when an attacker has physical access. HOWEVER these ways involve techniques that are unacceptable to a consumer end-user, and so are never used in consumer devices.
And the Sony PS3 took over a year to get compromised.
Zero crossings and low output amplitudes with outphasing techniques are a bitch. If you use a hybrid combiner, nearly all of the energy goes into a dummy load on the difference port. If you use a "lossless" combiner such as a matching network, the VSWR seen by the amp elements skyrockets and - best case, efficiency is crap. Worst case, you fry the output stages of the amp.
Around a decade ago I worked on an outphasing system - I fried a LOT of hardware by accidentally feeding the system a low or zero amplitude, which effectively caused two amps to fight each other 180 degrees out of phase. http://www.google.com/patents/US6930547
What they seem to be doing here is reducing the voltage provided to the amp elements, reducing the power output, which allows them to reduce total output power efficiently while keeping the two amp elements relatively in-phase, and also allowing them to "fight" each other without frying themselves like they would if running at full power.
E.g. it's probably something like outphasing for 70-100% envelope levels, and power supply modulation below that. Likely not a "hard" threshold - they probably transition from one approach to the other somewhere in the 30-70% operating region.
The basic concept of modulating the supply voltage is obvious... Getting it to actually WORK properly without excessive distortion of the output signal is *not*.
You might be able to build what they're talking about with chips from DK or Mouser - but the actual techniques for using those ICs in concert with each other without making the output signal garbage are not obvious.
Seriously - you're going to need a $80k-120k spectrum analyzer and a $30-50k signal generator just to be able to properly test the system. Cheaper stuff won't even be able to meet your output Adjacent Channel Power Ratio (ACPR) requirements coming out of the signal generator, and cheaper spectrum analyzers will have too high of a noise floor to properly measure the ACPR.
A typical FM station's power amplifier is Class C and can achieve 70-90% efficiency. BTW, the new digital "HD Radio" is a nightmare for these guys, as while the OFDM signal used only needs 1-10% of the RF transmit power to achieve the same range, with typical amp technology back in 2003 or so, that meant 15-20% efficiency at best.
For UMTS signals, which have a pretty high peak-to-average ratio, if a PA achieved 17-20% efficiency, that was REALLY good back then. There were a few tricks that had hope of pushing into the 20s around 2003, such as Doherty architecture amps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doherty_amplifier).
Another trick is outphasing (which sounds like it is part of what is being described here). With outphasing, you have two Class C amplifiers running full tilt, and their phases are varied so that they either add together or cancel out to achieve amplitude modulation of the output signal. It's also known as LINC - LInear amplification with Nonlinear Components.
The problem is how to combine these signals - with a traditional hybrid combiner, you have sum and difference outputs. Sum goes to antenna, difference has to go to a dummy load as wasted power. So you don't gain much efficiency over a Class A, B, or AB amp. However your power dissipation is now in a dummy load at the end of a coax cable instead of at the amplifier's transistor, so you do have a heat management benefit.
You can just connect the outputs together, but then you have VSWR mismatches when the amps are out of phase. If you construct a matching network right, you can have maximum efficiency at maybe 80% power, and good efficiency from 60-100% output power. This worked well for the aforementioned digital radio systems - if you combined the OFDM signal in the guardbands and a legacy FM signal, the signal envelope would never drop to zero, and would vary from 60-100% amplitude. You could get good efficiency with these signals and the lossless approach, but needed to compensate for distortion. Predistortion would do the trick - http://www.google.com/patents/US6930547 - This didn't work well for raw OFDM signals or CDMA signals such as UMTS back then. The zero crossings presented too much strain on the amps. Best case you had horrible efficiency, worst case you fried the output stages of the amps.
I haven't worked in that industry for nearly a decade, but it looks like this new approach combines another known trick with outphasing/LINC (TFA mentions both modulating the power supply voltage AND outphasing) - vary the amplifier voltage depending on the signal envelope, to increase efficiency at lower signal envelope operating regions (and keep the amplifier from blowing itself up).
Slashdot Mirror
My experience was that OSMAnd~ had the same limitations as free OSMAnd from the Play Store. (I believe they did this out of respect for the developer.)
It's possible to build an unrestricted version of OSMAnd from source, but I'm lazy. :)
skifta is open source??? The OP is not looking for "free as in beer"
That said, it's an excellent app but doesn't meet the OP's needs.
OSMAnd is a bit of an oddball - if you want precompiled auto-updatable APKs, you need to pay a few dollars for OSMAnd+
However, you can grab the source and compile the free unrestricted version on your own if you want. Personally, I paid due to laziness. ;)
RetroArch is a new (as in released 2-3 days ago) emulator that is mostly opensource. Some of the specific emulator cores have binary blobs within them.
XBMC is open source.
Why do you think Doctor Who is so popular?
Well there are plenty of reasons why... But time travel is a common theme.
This is why CyanogenMod didn't implement Cornerstone. It's also why Samsung's multiwindow isn't worth all the hype it has been given:
It only supports Samsung-customized Google Apps, a bunch of Samsung's own apps, and 1-2 third-party apps. Anything not in the multiwindow whitelist is blocked from multiwindow.
Why? Because multiwindow fundamentally breaks the Android CTS and thus any app that is enabled for it must be "opt-in" at the discretion of the developer. If Samsung were to do this for all applications without a whitelist or apps "opting in" via a manifest entry, they would be blocked from the Play Store. Google treats devices breaking apps in the Play Store VERY seriously - When CyanogenMod was considering Cornerstone, they were effectively told that if some sort of "opt-in" mechanism weren't present, Google would be forced to blacklist CM. It's the same reason CM never merged in Paranoid Android's per-app DPI stuff... Google was VERY unhappy about that.
The reason being: If an app developer gets 1-star reviews due to a device behaving badly, that device is probably going to be blacklisted from the Play Store if the app runs fine on any device the passes Google's CTS.
Obviously the CEO is using reliability via redundancy. If he has 10 fast Italian cars, he's got a decent chance that at least one works at any given time.
Correct. HOWEVER, keep in mind that the Hardkernel U2 is marketed as a "development board" but comes with source code that is vastly outdated (more than a year behind what is found in Exynos 4412 handsets) despite being released in late 2012.
The current major release of Android is 4.2. TI and Qualcomm released reference source for their platforms within weeks of 4.2's release. Reference source for Exynos4 dates back to Gingerbread (2.3). They have minimal hacks to allow them to function with ICS (4.0), but it is at its core a Gingerbread BSP. (Exynos4 hasn't used a FIMC1 memory pool for video buffers since Gingerbread, except for in Hardkernel and Insignal's outdated reference source - All ICS implementations for Exynos4 except for Hardkernel and Insignal's source use ION memory for all video buffers.)
Dev boards don't have to deal with carrier approvals or any sort of wireless certification (hell none of them even have a cellular baseband), so there's no excuse for them being a year BEHIND handsets in terms of software support.
Officially I think they say something like 3 months... I think I've been getting 6-9 months per pair. Depends on how clean your ears are. ;)
It's hard to find good in-ear buds with foam tips instead of the annoying rubber ones.
I have hated EVERY bud I've ever used with rubber tips - however Comply ( http://www.complyfoam.com/ ) sells replacement tips that fit on a wide variety of buds. When used with Comply tips, buds are a TOTALLY different experience.
I have a pair of Skullcandy Titans with Comply tips - they deliver amazing bang for the buck. (I know some people have very negative opinions of Skullcandy, but you have to admit, they do offer a good price/performance ratio, especially when you retrofit Complys onto them.)
If anything, buds may help prevent tinnitus. If listening to music in a loud environment (like an airplane), the isolation provided by in-ear buds allows you to listen at MUCH lower volume levels than you might with non-isolating headphones.
I think it's telling that even counting Chernobyl, the deaths per terawatt hour for nuclear is the lowest there is.
If you look at civilian nuclear power, it's a good sign that it took 40+ years of civilian nuclear power for there to be a plant that released anything more than a few bananas' worth of contamination outside the plant boundary. (Yes, you'd receive more radiation eating a banana a day for a year than you would have at the TMI plant boundary.) Even then, for the first significant civilian contamination incident to happen, it required a massive natural disaster that killed *25,000 people within days*.
(As to why I say 40+ years - While the Soviets claim that Chernobyl was a "civilian" reactor, in my opinion a graphite-moderated water-cooled reactor can't be considered civilian. Its safety was fundamentally compromised by its weapons-friendly design.)
Chernobyl was not an accident - it was an act of gross negligence compounded with compromises in safety done to allow the reactor to be used for weapons production if desired. (Reactors with a positive void coefficient have never been legal in the USA to my knowledge.)
Light Armored Vehicle maybe, but not a tank... Tanks have a heavy caliber main gun with machine gun as backups. A vehicle with only a machine gun isn't a tank... Probably well within the category of LAV though.
Sure it's easier.
Separate the Pa chemically
Wait 2 weeks or so
Now you have around 1/2048 the amount of Pa232 as nearly all of it has decayed to U232 (half-life of 1.3 days), but have well over 50% of your Pa233 (half life 26.9 days)
Separate the Pa from U chemically again - you'll waste a bit of U233 here, but it's still likely far easier than doing centrifuge enrichment or anything like that
You now have almost pure Pa233, which will then decay to nearly pure U233.
Read TFA.
Most U-233 that comes out of a reactor is formed by protactinium-233 decay.
While U-232 and U-233 are nearly impossible to separate (which is why Thorium has been considered to be proliferation-resistant), protactinium-233 is very easy to separate chemically, and leads to nearly pure U-233.
A cantenna is NOT a Yagi. It's a waveguide antenna.
And a cantenna at 700 MHz is barely feasible. Anything with acceptable gain is going to be absolutely gigantic. You would need a proper Yagi at this point.
Conspiciously missing any discussion of:
His initial attempt to extort $10k from CM. He didn't agree to transfer the domain for free until AFTER he had been outed.
His posing as Steve when contacting N2ACards.
His alteration of the CM website to point to N2ACards without any discussion with anyone else in the organization.
His routing of all money coming from N2ACards to his personal account.
Whoa... Whoops, turns out I was wrong. https://plus.google.com/u/0/103583939320326217147/posts/A8mtUUpdEH8
Yup. I'm 90% positive about who it is, but I'm not going to ask or discuss it with the rest of the team to ensure noninterference with legal proceedings.
I am, however, planning on talking with some lawyer friends on advice for setting up a 501(c)(3) organization.
One key thing - these minimums increases were in response to Colgain Air 3407, as mentioned previously.
Captain had 3263 hours (only 110 on type though) - I'm fairly certain the new regs don't affect time-on-type... A minimum of 1500 on-type means you'll never have anyone.
FO had 2200 hours, 770 on type
Assuming the new regs are for total hours and not on-type, the new regs solve a problem that didn't exist in the first crash. Safety theatre, kind of like the post-9/11 security theater, where the first new regulations passed nationally were ones that were PROVEN TO HAVE FAILED AS A MEASURE by 9/11. (Most of the 9/11 flights were out of Newark, which had only allowed ticketed passengers at the gate for at least a few years at that point.)
There are massive architectural differences between Android's graphics subsystem and X.
Same reason Samsung's "open source friendliness" in terms of claiming "Hey we have a DRI driver" is kind of pointless when 99% of their Exynos4 chips are in Android devices. (Exynos5 is a bit more even thanks to Chromebook.)
Huh? Samsung doesn't make money off of the GS3? Then why are the most profitable Android device manufacturer?
Not necessarily. There are ways to protect a device even when an attacker has physical access. HOWEVER these ways involve techniques that are unacceptable to a consumer end-user, and so are never used in consumer devices.
And the Sony PS3 took over a year to get compromised.
Actually, CDMA-based technologies like UMTS require strict power control to handle the near/far handset problem.
Unfortunately, many amplifier topologies are inefficient when operating at reduced power unless you rebias them for the new operating point.
Zero crossings and low output amplitudes with outphasing techniques are a bitch. If you use a hybrid combiner, nearly all of the energy goes into a dummy load on the difference port. If you use a "lossless" combiner such as a matching network, the VSWR seen by the amp elements skyrockets and - best case, efficiency is crap. Worst case, you fry the output stages of the amp.
Around a decade ago I worked on an outphasing system - I fried a LOT of hardware by accidentally feeding the system a low or zero amplitude, which effectively caused two amps to fight each other 180 degrees out of phase. http://www.google.com/patents/US6930547
What they seem to be doing here is reducing the voltage provided to the amp elements, reducing the power output, which allows them to reduce total output power efficiently while keeping the two amp elements relatively in-phase, and also allowing them to "fight" each other without frying themselves like they would if running at full power.
E.g. it's probably something like outphasing for 70-100% envelope levels, and power supply modulation below that. Likely not a "hard" threshold - they probably transition from one approach to the other somewhere in the 30-70% operating region.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3222705&cid=41842229 for some more details.
The basic concept of modulating the supply voltage is obvious... Getting it to actually WORK properly without excessive distortion of the output signal is *not*.
You might be able to build what they're talking about with chips from DK or Mouser - but the actual techniques for using those ICs in concert with each other without making the output signal garbage are not obvious.
Seriously - you're going to need a $80k-120k spectrum analyzer and a $30-50k signal generator just to be able to properly test the system. Cheaper stuff won't even be able to meet your output Adjacent Channel Power Ratio (ACPR) requirements coming out of the signal generator, and cheaper spectrum analyzers will have too high of a noise floor to properly measure the ACPR.
Yup. As a point of reference:
A typical FM station's power amplifier is Class C and can achieve 70-90% efficiency. BTW, the new digital "HD Radio" is a nightmare for these guys, as while the OFDM signal used only needs 1-10% of the RF transmit power to achieve the same range, with typical amp technology back in 2003 or so, that meant 15-20% efficiency at best.
For UMTS signals, which have a pretty high peak-to-average ratio, if a PA achieved 17-20% efficiency, that was REALLY good back then. There were a few tricks that had hope of pushing into the 20s around 2003, such as Doherty architecture amps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doherty_amplifier).
Another trick is outphasing (which sounds like it is part of what is being described here). With outphasing, you have two Class C amplifiers running full tilt, and their phases are varied so that they either add together or cancel out to achieve amplitude modulation of the output signal. It's also known as LINC - LInear amplification with Nonlinear Components.
The problem is how to combine these signals - with a traditional hybrid combiner, you have sum and difference outputs. Sum goes to antenna, difference has to go to a dummy load as wasted power. So you don't gain much efficiency over a Class A, B, or AB amp. However your power dissipation is now in a dummy load at the end of a coax cable instead of at the amplifier's transistor, so you do have a heat management benefit.
You can just connect the outputs together, but then you have VSWR mismatches when the amps are out of phase. If you construct a matching network right, you can have maximum efficiency at maybe 80% power, and good efficiency from 60-100% output power. This worked well for the aforementioned digital radio systems - if you combined the OFDM signal in the guardbands and a legacy FM signal, the signal envelope would never drop to zero, and would vary from 60-100% amplitude. You could get good efficiency with these signals and the lossless approach, but needed to compensate for distortion. Predistortion would do the trick - http://www.google.com/patents/US6930547 - This didn't work well for raw OFDM signals or CDMA signals such as UMTS back then. The zero crossings presented too much strain on the amps. Best case you had horrible efficiency, worst case you fried the output stages of the amps.
I haven't worked in that industry for nearly a decade, but it looks like this new approach combines another known trick with outphasing/LINC (TFA mentions both modulating the power supply voltage AND outphasing) - vary the amplifier voltage depending on the signal envelope, to increase efficiency at lower signal envelope operating regions (and keep the amplifier from blowing itself up).