There could be potential competitors to the cable and phone companies in your local town! This would be very good.... I'd guess the best thing would be to partner with the broadcast TV or satelite TV people to provide competing packages with cable.
At 150k/base station it's gotta be comparable to cable/DSL (if you can serve something in the 800 customers range).
In the one really big US demonstration I've been in that turned into a riot (~100k people) I saw some really dumb stuff being done - people standing around a burning police car watching it burn - no one even responded to my "are you crazy it's full of bullets"... well not exactly full but you get my drift.... I think that was when I decided it was time to head home before anything else happened.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not against civil disobediance (I was after all on my way back from of sitting on the Bay Bridge) - but there's smart and dumb ways to do that
I think there are a whole lot of different sorts of 'rubber bullets' by now I suspect it's a generic term meaning 'things shot out og guns not made of metal'. I've seen sample 'bullets' picked up after police use from various places around the world, some were cylindrical wooden blocks about an inch round and 3 long, others were rubber or a soft composite - about 2 inches in dia. 6 inches long and more bullet shaped - I was pretty amazed at those.
Apparently it's common practice to shoot them at the ground in front of the target(s) with the intent that they bounce (and I guess lose some of their momentum) into their legs - however as you might guess bouncing something that's not perfectly round means they sometimes fly blindly in somewhat random directions (including into people's faces).
anyone know what the muzzle velocity of a 'rubber bullet' is?
I've been in a lot of demonstrations over the years, both in the US and my home country. I've really noticed that US crowds do seem to sort of head off into that mob-mentality thing really easily - it's always been a few people who actually do it - most people stand and watch or try and get away and not associate themselves with what's going on.
I'm not writing this to bash the US - just to record my observations - I don't understand why this happens maybe it's because public protest happens so seldomly that when it does there's a lot of other anger/outrage that finds its way out. Then again maybe it's just because the cops and demonstators aren't allowed to carry guns at home and this means there's not the same fear on both sides that can escalate into madness.
On the other hand I've seen cops in the US over-react in ways that were both childish and dangerous - many of them definitely come to a demonstration with an attitude that is more harmfull than helpfull - again it's not the majority, they are professional and non-confontational - but there always seem to be a few that seem to be itching for trouble (which to me always seems like a really bad idea if you want to survive as a cop).
I'm actually in favor of MORE public protest - if the polititians piss you off - don't wait for the next election - peacefully take to the street - you're up against a world where those with the bucks get heard - there aren't a lot of other venues for getting your point across. Things like the M$ refund day protests are wonderfull examples of what we should be doing every day
yes they're doing it on purpose - basicly it's a cheap idea - you use something really simple with few things to break, ruggardize it up the wazoo and just depend on aeroshell braking to get it down. Last time I checked the electronics were really simple - just an 8051 [8-bit micro - Apple2 sized power] and not much more - that's toaster technology these days
Look at it another way... In the Intel system all CPU's share the 100/133Mhz system bus. In the EV6 Athlon system all CPU's get their own 200/266 (currently) connection to the system bus. Which is better? That is VERY obvious!!!
Well maybe not as obvious as you think given that the memory subsystem's also running on the same clock (or 1/2 of it) and is probably the bottle-neck. The solution - the ability to support bigger/wider/more concurrent memory subsystems
On Slot1 the memory transactions on the shared bus are snooped by all CPUs when the original transaction is launched, while on a P-P bus like SlotA I'd guess that snoops must be forwarded to the other bus before snooping can occur (on the other hand this can happen in parallel with the memory access so that's probably not a big deal).
The big problem with EV6 is that with a P-P bus the number of pins on memory controllers goes up linearly with the number of CPUs in an SMP system - there's a DEC paper somewhere on their web site showing how they get around this by making bit-slice datapath chips - but that's going to cost
SlotA still seems to get a 2x transfer rate over and above Slot1 and probably has slightly lower latencies (still largely governed by dram access times).
now they'll have to go back to building wooden planes....
And how will it be enforced ....?
on
License to Surf
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· Score: 2
think about it so 'someone' requires that all web accesses will be by people with 'drivers licenses'. It could happen in 3 places:
at the browser... but I'm gonna compile up my own browser and 'drive without a license'
at the ISP.... hell I'll start my own ISP, or we'll start using other protocols for access to web pages
at the server (probably more likely) servers will only serve pages to people with 'drivers licenses' - not my server buddy - when an e-commerce site starts only accepting people with 'licenses' people will go elsewhere.... it will be bad for business
In our international cross-national web no one country's going to be able to censor the whole web... and the sites that you want to controll access to (porn or gambling - or in the case of totalitarian countries like China political sites) are going to move off-shore - probably hoping from data-haven to data-haven - 'till we start moving servers into geostationary orbits:-)
It doesn't matter about the abstract and description sais - the claims are important - here there are 4 (plus dependants):
1. basic remote server
10. a prefered implmentation of it
16. the remote computer's operation
21. a 'method patent' for the idea (trying to make it apply to a wider range of stuff)
All of these basicly describe the same idea - used since there were first more than one piece of hardware hooked together - the reason they rewrite it 4 different is to give them more ways to defend it in court.
Note the 'predetermined times' clause, I think this seems to be what they think is different from prior art, though they seem to miss most of what's been done. Sadly the patent system only encourages the citing of prior patents - if someone did something and didn't patent it it's not likely to end up in the cites and the examiner will miss it
Here's prior art I can think of
I did a screen saver that ran verilog simulations on people desktops late at night in 1989 (my personal example)
any RJE batch system from the 60s that served more than 1 CPU - often some queues only opened at night
print servers serving multiple printers
Pixar's use of render farms - discussed in depth in the popular media long before this patent was implemented
I'm sure people can think of other examples - please follow up this post with any you can think of - that way anyone finding themselves in court with these bozos (ok these bozos have lawyers up the wazoo so be carefull) will have a resource to use in their defence
that's OK - just so long as they don't breed..... oh wait they keep going to those trade show/mating ritual thingies...... uurgh pretty soon the linux world will be knee deep in them:-(
trying all the combinations 'till something works is not a hack.... just like distributed.net's trying all the RC5 keys is not a hack..... (now on the other hand organizing all those people to run their distributed crack engine is a wonderfull hack)
I'd love to buy Mindstrorms for my kids (OK for me too.... but you see I'd have to 'buy it for the kids') but the big problem seems to be platforms - we're a Mac/Unix house, Windows was banished as neither kid or adult friendly
Is there a (younger 8-9ish) kid-friendly mindstorms development environment for the Mac? how about Linux? - the adult/hacker level stuff I can handle for Linux (hell I SELL an open-source microcontroller kit that does many of the same things, with my own OS/SDK/...), but the easy-start GUI thingy would still be fun toi have around.
Lego how about open-sourcing your GUI - let Linux people port it to their platform? - think of all the customers if Slashdot announced the Linux SDK....
The "the net treats censorship as a fault and routes around it" axiom applies here in spades - this is a 1st amendment issue - we need to mirror this in so many different places on-shore and off shore that the FBI or anyone can't shut it down.
Each time they shut down 1 bend, don't break, let them do it, but raise a stink on the net 5 more will spring in their place
PS: trolling the public is an honorable profession - Orson Wells would be proud:-)
So it got 3 up and 1 down - I'd guess that the/. script that chooses a comment ought to maybe vote the negative tags against the positive one and choose the highest of which group is larger (or 1 at random if there's no obvious winner)
OK... well last year I admit it last year I had this little penguin fetish.... I sort of had in mind maybe one of those plush ones..... so come xmas day when I came downstairs and there were a dozen real penguins trashing the xmas tree.... well you could have bowled me away... eventually they ate us out of house and home - the fridge is empty the larder a wasteland, someone keeps nibbling thru all the household ethernet, and the cat is AWOL under suspicious circumstances.... needless to say the penguin thing wore off fast.... in the end all I could do was toss them in the back of the truck, drive down to Linuxworld, push them out the door and drive away like a madman... last I heard they were making a comfortable living appearing in various booths.... it was a close call I think we got off pretty lightly.... it could have been far worse
Now I know you live at the South Pole and you probably have penguins coming out your ears and need to get rid of them - I bet they make a cheap gift - but please, please not this year...... mind you I hear that Bill Gates guy... he really likes penguins, trust me.... and he's got a real big house right on the water....
actually it may be a VERY smart move on their part - the patent belongs to the university - not them..... but guess what - they are now VERY HOT properties - if it's truely a big breakthrough big semi companies will be bidding for their services....
er... and what's to stop the NSA program lifting the same PGP key from the key server the same way and decrypting your mail...... then running it thru the scanner...... the only difference is THEY WILL KNOW IT REALLY WAS YOU:-)
well it only has to drive enough current to drive the gates on someother tranistors that tiny....
To a first approximation..... but it also has to drive the wires that connect them.... sadly we've reached an area where wire capacitance doesn't scale down as fast as everything else (because of edge effects are starting to dominate.... and the number of edges doesn't change no matter how small you make something. RC delays are now abig deal - that's why there's a big push for lower immpedance wires (Cu instead of Al for example - hell we'd use Au if it could be made to work) and lower capacitance insulators/dielectrics (but SiO is soooo easy to make on Si).
So it has to sink enough current to charge/discharge the capacitance on the wires and other gates connected to it, at the switching speed you want to run it at - you design to fit.
A company that definitely puts it's own interests above mine (it's responsible to shareholders, not me)
A government that claims it is responsible to me and in this case claims it's looking out for my interests (it's responsible to it's taxpayers, including me)
Of course nothing's perfect - the company's made up of people, some good, some bad so it's probably better to me than it could be - same with the govt. - so it probably doesn't succeed perfectly at what it does either.
Luckily for us companies are allowed to buy politicians, but can't vote. And we can vote, but can't afford the politicians (well Bill can but not the rest of us). At some level it's a bit of an impass (though I tend to think buying politicians does seem to have somewhat of an advantage).
Slashdot Mirror
At 150k/base station it's gotta be comparable to cable/DSL (if you can serve something in the 800 customers range).
definitely wierd, crazy, smart (as in you have to be to understand what's going on) - I give it 4 penguins
Don't get me wrong - I'm not against civil disobediance (I was after all on my way back from of sitting on the Bay Bridge) - but there's smart and dumb ways to do that
Apparently it's common practice to shoot them at the ground in front of the target(s) with the intent that they bounce (and I guess lose some of their momentum) into their legs - however as you might guess bouncing something that's not perfectly round means they sometimes fly blindly in somewhat random directions (including into people's faces).
anyone know what the muzzle velocity of a 'rubber bullet' is?
I'm not writing this to bash the US - just to record my observations - I don't understand why this happens maybe it's because public protest happens so seldomly that when it does there's a lot of other anger/outrage that finds its way out. Then again maybe it's just because the cops and demonstators aren't allowed to carry guns at home and this means there's not the same fear on both sides that can escalate into madness.
On the other hand I've seen cops in the US over-react in ways that were both childish and dangerous - many of them definitely come to a demonstration with an attitude that is more harmfull than helpfull - again it's not the majority, they are professional and non-confontational - but there always seem to be a few that seem to be itching for trouble (which to me always seems like a really bad idea if you want to survive as a cop).
I'm actually in favor of MORE public protest - if the polititians piss you off - don't wait for the next election - peacefully take to the street - you're up against a world where those with the bucks get heard - there aren't a lot of other venues for getting your point across. Things like the M$ refund day protests are wonderfull examples of what we should be doing every day
Check out http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds2/tech/tech.ht ml for more tech details.
Well maybe not as obvious as you think given that the memory subsystem's also running on the same clock (or 1/2 of it) and is probably the bottle-neck. The solution - the ability to support bigger/wider/more concurrent memory subsystems
On Slot1 the memory transactions on the shared bus are snooped by all CPUs when the original transaction is launched, while on a P-P bus like SlotA I'd guess that snoops must be forwarded to the other bus before snooping can occur (on the other hand this can happen in parallel with the memory access so that's probably not a big deal).
The big problem with EV6 is that with a P-P bus the number of pins on memory controllers goes up linearly with the number of CPUs in an SMP system - there's a DEC paper somewhere on their web site showing how they get around this by making bit-slice datapath chips - but that's going to cost
SlotA still seems to get a 2x transfer rate over and above Slot1 and probably has slightly lower latencies (still largely governed by dram access times).
yeah I realised I'd stuck my foot in my mouth after I'd posted - I wish slashdot let you moderate your own stuff down :-)
well you could attack during a hurricane ... but these days US planes seem to need perfrect weather just in order to sneeze
now they'll have to go back to building wooden planes ....
- at the browser
... but I'm gonna compile up my own browser and 'drive without a license' - at the ISP
.... hell I'll start my own ISP, or we'll start using other protocols for access to web pages - at the server (probably more likely) servers will only serve pages to people with 'drivers licenses' - not my server buddy - when an e-commerce site starts only accepting people with 'licenses' people will go elsewhere
.... it will be bad for business
In our international cross-national web no one country's going to be able to censor the whole webAnd I'd guess that AOL also provides that sort of community too.
The Well still exists last time I checked.
But I suspect that the local city BBS has probably been replaced by more global communities on the net.
It doesn't matter about the abstract and description sais - the claims are important - here there are 4 (plus dependants):
- 1. basic remote server
- 10. a prefered implmentation of it
- 16. the remote computer's operation
- 21. a 'method patent' for the idea (trying to make it apply to a wider range of stuff)
All of these basicly describe the same idea - used since there were first more than one piece of hardware hooked together - the reason they rewrite it 4 different is to give them more ways to defend it in court.Note the 'predetermined times' clause, I think this seems to be what they think is different from prior art, though they seem to miss most of what's been done. Sadly the patent system only encourages the citing of prior patents - if someone did something and didn't patent it it's not likely to end up in the cites and the examiner will miss it
Here's prior art I can think of
- I did a screen saver that ran verilog simulations on people desktops late at night in 1989 (my personal example)
- any RJE batch system from the 60s that served more than 1 CPU - often some queues only opened at night
- print servers serving multiple printers
- Pixar's use of render farms - discussed in depth in the popular media long before this patent was implemented
I'm sure people can think of other examples - please follow up this post with any you can think of - that way anyone finding themselves in court with these bozos (ok these bozos have lawyers up the wazoo so be carefull) will have a resource to use in their defencehey! - be carefull - 'goat urine' is a trademark of Coca Cola Inc :-)
that's OK - just so long as they don't breed ..... oh wait they keep going to those trade show/mating ritual thingies ...... uurgh pretty soon the linux world will be knee deep in them :-(
trying all the combinations 'till something works is not a hack .... just like distributed.net's trying all the RC5 keys is not a hack ..... (now on the other hand organizing all those people to run their distributed crack engine is a wonderfull hack)
Is there a (younger 8-9ish) kid-friendly mindstorms development environment for the Mac? how about Linux? - the adult/hacker level stuff I can handle for Linux (hell I SELL an open-source microcontroller kit that does many of the same things, with my own OS/SDK/...), but the easy-start GUI thingy would still be fun toi have around.
Lego how about open-sourcing your GUI - let Linux people port it to their platform? - think of all the customers if Slashdot announced the Linux SDK ....
Each time they shut down 1 bend, don't break, let them do it, but raise a stink on the net 5 more will spring in their place
PS: trolling the public is an honorable profession - Orson Wells would be proud :-)
Plus probably the 2 he/she started out with.
So it got 3 up and 1 down - I'd guess that the /. script that chooses a comment ought to maybe vote the negative tags against the positive one and choose the highest of which group is larger (or 1 at random if there's no obvious winner)
Now I know you live at the South Pole and you probably have penguins coming out your ears and need to get rid of them - I bet they make a cheap gift - but please, please not this year ...... mind you I hear that Bill Gates guy ... he really likes penguins, trust me .... and he's got a real big house right on the water ....
PS: we'd like another kitty
what was I thinking ..... all I can say was it was 2am ..... I'd been hacking all nite ....
actually it may be a VERY smart move on their part - the patent belongs to the university - not them ..... but guess what - they are now VERY HOT properties - if it's truely a big breakthrough big semi companies will be bidding for their services ....
er ... and what's to stop the NSA program lifting the same PGP key from the key server the same way and decrypting your mail ...... then running it thru the scanner ...... the only difference is THEY WILL KNOW IT REALLY WAS YOU :-)
To a first approximation ..... but it also has to drive the wires that connect them .... sadly we've reached an area where wire capacitance doesn't scale down as fast as everything else (because of edge effects are starting to dominate .... and the number of edges doesn't change no matter how small you make something. RC delays are now abig deal - that's why there's a big push for lower immpedance wires (Cu instead of Al for example - hell we'd use Au if it could be made to work) and lower capacitance insulators/dielectrics (but SiO is soooo easy to make on Si).
So it has to sink enough current to charge/discharge the capacitance on the wires and other gates connected to it, at the switching speed you want to run it at - you design to fit.
- A company that definitely puts it's own interests above mine (it's responsible to shareholders, not me)
- A government that claims it is responsible to me and in this case claims it's looking out for my interests (it's responsible to it's taxpayers, including me)
Of course nothing's perfect - the company's made up of people, some good, some bad so it's probably better to me than it could be - same with the govt. - so it probably doesn't succeed perfectly at what it does either.Luckily for us companies are allowed to buy politicians, but can't vote. And we can vote, but can't afford the politicians (well Bill can but not the rest of us). At some level it's a bit of an impass (though I tend to think buying politicians does seem to have somewhat of an advantage).