Notice how carefully they count how many people in each country had their data stolen and stored on this server. Also notice how many of those people these security folks notified of the data breach. Yup, exactly zero.
People may not have been contacted directly, but those in a good position to quickly mitigate damage were notified:
"Finjan Inc said it had notified the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, police in various countries and more than 40 financial institutions in the United States, Europe and India about the discovery of the so-called "crimeserver".
So they're not trying to help at all. What they're trying to do is sell their services and using this pseudo-news article to do it.
Do you actually have any evidence of this? What were they trying to sell to who? I would expect a press-release type of promotional piece to have more information about the services the company offers.
Think of a more efficient microwave oven. If it can scatter radar signals
Chances are that if it works for stealth applications it is absorbing signals instead of scattering them. In the presence of very strong signals it would heat up if that is the case. That could still have uses in a microwave oven though, more shielding for the door/cabinet, and perhaps coatings for containers where one would rather generate heat at the container level instead of in the food. Perhaps this could make it easier to cook eggs in a microwave without having them explode?
Reduced microwave radiation would lessen disruption to 801.11b wireless networks since they operate in the same band.
The radiation from a nuclear power plant is ionizing radiation, much different from microwave radiation.
If the paint is somewhat flexible, it might be a good coating or ingredient for the outer jacket of shielded cables. That would be a very good thing considering how much people skimp on copper. Aluminum foil shields in cables help, but the combination of aluminum and copper makes it unattractive to recyclers later. It is best to stick with one metal.
All that stressful military/terrorist stuff aside, that paint might just be good for silencing cell phones in movie theatres. It's generally illegal to jam any sort of licensed transmission, but creating an environment that weakens the signal is a good workaround.
Perhaps adding a layer of the paint to some consumer products, like PCs, might be a viable way of reducing the R.F. noise (and security issues that go with it?) leaking out.
If they mean passive components that function with voltage other than input signals, or devices with only two connections, shouldn't they count diodes? And what integrated circuit actually uses parasitic inductance (that from the bonding wires connecting the chip)? The only semi-real inductance-for-a-purpose I've seen in a monolithic chip isn't available without the chip being powered, and is essentially synthesized by use of capacitance in the feedback loop of an inverting amplifier.
And if we're cheating and using power to simulate inductors, haven't we already got memistors of sorts? Things like simple latching flip-flop behavior, or memory on the capacitance of stored gate charge? Or something that has memory with power off, as in flash-memory.
If they want to invent a new basic device with memory I've got one. Call it a fliptode. It's like a diode, but by applying a pulse above a specified voltage in the non-conducting direction it flips the anode and the cathode around. I suppose a third programming pin could be used instead.
Trivia bits - A long time ago Apple used various combinations of grounding three connector pins to identify the operating resolution of a monitor. Eventually they needed more combinations. They got more, and maintained backwards compatibility, by allowing diodes between the pins, with the polarity choices (diode direction) also adding combinations.
Isn't a fuse a write once memistor? That's more or less what field-programmmable ROMs contained.
For more fun do something with a chip full of tunnel diodes!
If this is all too complicated, bring back core memory
Well a machine running an AMD triple-core, loaded with PrOn and using 3-phase power should be really popular with trisexuals. Taking gaming to another level?
Even without the cooling, the 2.5" based core is still way too thick/hot for a laptop. At $1/gig it is still way cheaper than solid state drives, but expect those to get cheaper faster.
It's frustrating that the power benchmark they're using is measuring the whole computer. You'd think someone doing benchmarks would use a small separate supply for the drive(s) to do the measurement. If the standby consumption and efficiency under load were measured for a small separate supply (easily determined with resistive dummy-loads), one could then get pretty accurate numbers for the drive by measuring the input power to the supply and doing a few simple calculations.
If the power and connector locations were compatible it'd be fun to see one of these in a 24" Core 2 iMac. For those using the iMac as a 1080i PVR, it'd really speed things like extracting the commercial-free version of a tv recording.
...you're getting shows that cost a TON OF MONEY to create for FREE
No we're not. Even if we don't watch, we're covering those costs in most of our purchases. If we think of opportunity cost, poor programming costs us by contributing to damage to society. If if we don't watch the programming personally, bad programming alters the people around us and society as a whole. Whether it makes them more ignorant, fat, flatulent, violent, polluting or worse in any of many ways, the secondary effects come back to degrade life for all of us.
And we certainly have a right to complain if broadcasters - which are supposed to be trustees of the public interest - fail to serve their local communities well.
When the FCC degraded interference protection on the FM band allowing more stations to come on the air (docker 80-90 IIRC), Most of these stations licensed to smaller communities ended up being presented as being from nearby larger communities. Besides the signals being a bit marginal, that approach which caters more to wide-area advertisers, puts local businesses and the jobs that go with them at a disadvantage. Ads on programs distributed over larger areas or nationally do that even more. Are our communities better served by these big-box and national chains that rarely provide much in the way of jobs locally?
Lax regulations permitting infomercials, much more advertising per hour, drug and ambulance-chaser ads and more have given large corporate broadcast operations more profit while degrading what our communities are given.
The damage is deep and widespread. The phrase "you are what you eat" comes to mind. Part of what we and those around us becomes depends of what we watch, or didn't watch. Do you ever feel like you're surrounded by idiots? Ask yourself why.
Contrast the quality of foods and consumer products in the U.S. with the E.U. Ask why there isn't more outcry over what is happening.
"give the masses food and circus and they will not revolt" Seen any overweight or ignorant people lately? How much tv do they watch?
Network Readiness simply reflects the emotional state of male posters to Craigslist personals. Offers of BroadBandWith (BBW) and big pipes don't correlate as well with reality.
Good riddance to a slow, biased, anachronistic medium run by unethical America-hating propagandists. We'll find out how America is to blame for everything a lot faster from Slashdot and CNN.com from now on.
Bill Moyers and NOW on PBS has had several stories on the effects of media consolidation. Diversity is a good thing. For some stories it really helps to have news organizations that have the resources to send someone somewhere to be on the ground and spend a lot of time. Newspapers have generally gone into much greater depth than commercial television news operations do, so they are an important resource. Individuals bring many important things to light, but there are also a number of important stories here that link back to major newspapers. The newspapers are still important even if it is someone else reading them and then mentioning the stories.
(I meant to submit the one from the NYT about huge numbers of bats perishing mysteriously... first the bees, and now the bats, what's up with that?)
Something I'm surprised the article did not point out is its applications in lower frequency use. If you want to create a stable clock that counts seconds, you don't make an oscillator at 1hz (one beat per second), you create one that does much more, say 1000hz, and then divide that by 1000. So if you are off by a few cycles it doesn't matter much. The greater this multiplication the better. So a fairly stable 4.5ghz reference could be divided down to make an extremely accurate and stable say, 500mhz signal.
Wow, you're all over the spectrum mentioning 1 Hz and 4.5 GHz in the same discussion. They're really very different animals from a practical standpoint. Things like watches/clocks (in the traditional time keeping sense) generally use a pretty low frequencies as the reference. Since the simplest frequency division is using powers of 2 (chained flip-flops), something like 32.768 KHz is common. The lower you start, the less division you need. Also, with MOS/CMOS technologies where the bulk of the power consumption comes from charging/discharging gate capacitance during switching the power consumption is minimized by picking a low frequency.
Most things causing frequency errors tend to do so more as a percentage, so starting at a really high frequency and dividing down normally doesn't make things better. Resonators generally have to be physically larger for very low frequencies, so division is more common in that case. A combination of dividing down and multiplying up is seen in things like frequency synthesizers. That's what one uses to digitally tune an oscillator in a receiver for getting a bunch of different channels. That beats having a crystal for every channel.
For signals needed at a very high frequency it is simpler to have an on-frequency resonator than to use a lower frequency one with a multiplier (phase-locked loop, filter tuned to harmonic, etc).
As for frequency accuracy and stability a higher frequency resonator isn't inherently better or worse. That depends on the accuracy of manufacturing tolerances, temperature coefficient of the materials used, sensitivity of the resonator to changes in circuit capacitance, and the stability of the circuit capacitance with variations in temperature and voltage.
There are already plenty of quartz crystal and other resonators for use below a few hundred megahertz. While oscillators for clocks/transmitters etc may be the first thing to come to mind, filters are also a major application. SAW (Surface Acoustic Wave) filter dramatically simplified channel-width filtering in television receivers, and ceramic filters simplified things like F.M. radios. Those go beyond simple resonators since they are actually bandpass filters with carefully tailored rejection characteristics for signals adjacent to the pass band.
Many receiver designs shift an incoming signal to a lower frequency by mixing it with an internally generated signal. But that type of superhetrodyne conversion can shift signals the same distance above AND below the oscillator frequency down to the lower frequency for processing. Which ever one is undesired is called the image frequency. To avoid interference from signals near the image frequency, filtering is needed ahead of the conversion. It sounds like the resonators developed might be a simple and cost effective way of providing that sort of filtering. Besides cell phones, 802.11b (2.4 GHz) and future retired NTSC U.H.F. television spectrum data communications are obvious major applications for this.
It'll be interesting to see how good of filters come from this technology. Beyond accuracy of the resonate frequency, getting desired pass/reject frequency response curve shape and low insertion loss are very important characteristics for filter applications.
Granted 2.4 GHz is an efficient frequency for heating due to the resonance of the water molecule, but exposure from other sources is far more intense. Cell phones are close enough to the body to be worth looking at. And if anyone is paying any attention to raw power, some of those UHF TV stations have effective radiated power levels of as much as 5 million Watts!
That ought to be enough to make those infomercials sink in... (Of course if you feel that broadcasters are failing to serve local communities very well there is still time to file comments with the FCC.)
I know you're beiung funny, but in reality this doesn't matter. I built a PC back when I was in VA- my power provider was AEP, which is probably the worst polluter in the country- lots of old, dirty coal plants. I moved up to PA a month later- I'm in a electric co-op now, with 60% of the power being nuclear and 20% hydro, very little from coal.
Did the computer suddenly get more green just beacause I moved it north 200 miles?
No. It should make very little difference since things are interconnected. Unlike fossil-fuel plants, nukes don't cost much less to run when output is reduced. For that reason they tend to be run near full capacity. If a user getting power from the nuke uses less, the output of the fossil-fuel plants can be reduced. There are some other considerations such as the losses and maximum capacity of the transmission system. Issues with stability also become more significant with increasing distance when combining AC power from multiple generator sources.
I live near a coastal nuke plant, with warning sirens nearby and all that. An employee shared an interesting tidit with me when I asked him why we had regional outages so near the plant during statewide shortages. During times when my state has suffered power shortfalls, there were some "rotating" outages. What I didn't realize was that those of us near the plant were more likely to have power cut. Because most of us didn't need air conditioners and used the least lighting during summer, our use was generally below the baseline amount and billed at the lowest rates. Users in the hot inland areas were paying more per kwh due to being above baseline usage, so it was more profitable for their power to be kept on.
Since fossil-fuel power is generally used as a last resort, the percentage reduction in fossil fuel use (and carbon-dioxide/pollutants released) will be greater than the percentage reduction in total consumption. In other words, the efforts to reduce consumption actually help more than the raw numbers suggest.
The problem is that unless OEMs start including these drives in computers, they probably won't sell very well. Or more likely, the geek who does buy one will end up offsetting the savings by throwing it in his machine with a 750W power supply and monster graphics card(s).
Yes, the choice of GPU certainly is very significant. A while back I built up a PVR using GMA950 to keep initial and long term costs down. It'd be awful for demanding games, but works great for HD video. Total system power consumption (less display) 82 Watts (measured during video compression). That's with a slightly overclocked Core 2 Duo too. I'm sure an Apple-TV uses far less than 82 Watts, but for scaling 1080i to 720p I needed more CPU.
The raw power rating for the power supply does not tell you anything about how much power you'll consume. That is simply a maximum output rating. It's a bit like saying a 120 Volt outlet in your house is rated to deliver 2400 Watts when fed from a 20 Amp circuit with nothing else running. The actual consumption depends on the load current you draw. Power supplies do have conversion losses which are reflected by an efficiency rating. The rated numbers still don't tell you exactly what to expect since efficiency varies depending on how much of a load you have, and which outputs are doing the work. The more you're consuming, the more important the efficiency rating is. I found some really cheap 600 Watt power supplies on sale, shipping included, for $15. No efficiency rating was given, and I'd suspect something so cheap of having problems when actually being asked to deliver close to 600 Watts, but they've worked flawlessly at low power levels.
Actual consumption of components and whole systems is usually quite different from sticker/spec-sheet figures. Some of those reflect maximum capabilities, some reflect things like startup surge currents, all generally change with options and actual use. Even something like running displays at the lowest acceptable brightness makes a significant difference. It's very helpful to use a meter such as the Kill-A-Watt (set to Watts, not Volt*Amperes) to get a feel for these things.
Since power is fairly expensive where I am, I figure a cost of about $1 per month for every 10 Watts used continuously. Between torrents and recording at all hours, continuous applies for my PVR. Saving 10 Watts doesn't sound like much, but over 5 years that's about $60. If one likes to archive shows, it is quite likely that more than one drive will be used eventually multiplying the costs and savings. Of course if one keeps some archives on externals and powers them down, that would help even more. If OSes are not supporting drive sleep on a drive-by-drive basis, some changes there could save quite a bit too. Using energy saving drives, using fewer big drives instead of a larger number of older small ones, using an energy efficient CPU, and avoiding a power hungry GPU if it isn't needed all add up to much more substantial energy savings. And remember, it's not just about the cost of energy, there's the environmental impact as well.
I haven't actually made measurements to see how much the power consumption of GPUs varies with what they're doing. I would hope that designs now, or in the near future, will allow a major fallback in consumption when user needs are not very demanding.
When people brag about benchmarks, I'd like to see one more added - one generated by dividing the traditional benchmark by the power consumption.
If he mis-read the article, then I did as well. The statement above appears to indicate that they are suggesting you create hydrogen in your car while you're driving. To do this, you'll need electricity, and you'll end up losing out, because of the laws of thermodynamics.
In an electric car the motor is also used to recover energy when going downhill or braking, it acting as a generator. If these electrodes lower the losses storing this energy in a fuel cell (or going back to hydrogen to burn in a hybrid), it would help for several reasons.
The higher efficiency would make conversion (and thus storage) that much more efficient.
The higher efficiency means less heat generation. That would probably make it possible to safely use higher conversion (charging) currents. Very high currents must be handled to recover much energy from sudden braking. These electrodes with very large effective surface area would also lower the impedance, making it easier to actually get very large currents flowing.
Of course braking-generation only recovers some of the energy normally expended when driving. Improving energy conversion simply makes better use of the energy whatever the source: utility charging (when stopped), solar, combustion engine/generator action (hybrid), braking-recovered energy etc.
The article is really about better batteries or fuel cells. It isn't about producing hydrogen to burn. Speculation on cost versus fossil fuel is pretty meaningless without specifics. After all the present and future cost of utility (charging) power depends on what is used to generate it and varies greatly depending on where one lives.
The improved electrodes seem like a good thing as presented. I just wonder how much patents will drive up costs, and if electrodes made with cheaper materials will last as long as the platinum variety. With the cost of fuel cells or batteries making a large percentage of vehicle cost, the lifespan is as important as the efficiency.
"It's very frightening that IFPI can get through the courts with something like this. In Turkey and China its the state that decides what information the people can access and what should be censored. In Denmark its apparently the record industry,"
There probably are some phones that people got as gifts over the holidays but haven't activated yet due to waiting for the contract with a prior carrier to run out.
Another possible factor is that the numbers used may be an AT&T report of new customers, excluding people who were already using AT&T cell service before getting an iPhone.
How many times is this going to happen before corporations realize front organizations don't work on the Internet?
Although these things certainly can bring negative backlash when discovered, part of the problem is that these things do sometimes work. Perhaps we should be asking every website to provide a street address, phone number, and ownership report. That would be very difficult to enforce since some would simply host elsewhere. Perhaps a good start would be to require any site advertising on radio or television to provide that information in the ads. (The text size for ads that maybe be shown on secondary SD DTV channels needs to be bumped up too. Many of those channels seem blurrier than NTSC to me, although part of the problem is use of analog satellite sources)
With elections coming in many areas, I would not be surprised to find a number of front organizations providing misinformation online. I've already seen several of the "forward this to your friends" mudslinging emails around. The combination of semi-anonymous and dirt cheap makes these abuses too easy.
It is a bit surprising to see this sort of thing from a company that's doing pretty well with their product lineup. Perhaps it is more about fighting pressure on prices than about getting the business for low cost machines?
It seems the kids that watched shows like Get Smart, The Flintstones, Gumby, Lost in Space, and Bonanza didn't go around shooting up high schools and shopping malls. I wonder if it was because of the content of the shows, or just from having 9 minutes of commercials an hour instead of 18?
A new European project using plastic fiber and off-the-shelf components could make optical networking so cheap and simple that installation could be a DIY job for even a non-technical person.
The object of EU-funded POF-ALL project is to find a technical solution to the rising cost of taking optical fiber right into the home.
The project partners decided to focus on the cabling inside buildings, which would typically account for 30% of the cost of laying an optical fibre from the exchange into the home. This last hundred metres or so is known as the 'edge' network.
"We realised that we could lower the cost of this edge installation by using a simpler technology," Alessandro Nocivelli, the founder and CEO of Luceat SpA, one of the partners in the project, said. "If we could employ a technology which is so simple to use that anyone can install it, that would relieve telecom companies of 30% of the cost of the access network, which means up to several billion euro if you consider the European Union as a whole."
Plastic fibres use harmless green or red light that is easily visible to the eye, as opposed to glass fibres which use infrared laser light that could potentially cause eye damage.
"I have a two-year-old child," says Nocivelli, "and I would never install a glass optical fibre in my own home, even though I have been working with glass optical fibers for many years."
Plastic fibres are also much thicker than glass fibres, a millimetre or more, and can be handled without special tools or techniques.
"You don't need to be trained to handle and install it. You just cut it with scissors, plug it in and it works. It's as easy as that," Nocivelli adds.
On the downside, plastic fibres absorb light more than glass, which limits their useful length to a few hundred metres.
They also have a lower data capacity than glass fibres, but that is not an issue for the cable that runs from a conventional glass fibre in the street into a house, or even for laying a network within a block of flats.
The partners have built a system that uses green light to transmit 100 megabits a second over a distance of 300 metres, which is the speed telecom companies hope to offer their customers five to ten years from now, and 50 times as fast as a typical adsl broadband connection.
Their second achievement is to transmit ten times faster still - one gigabit per second - over a 30m fibre, using red light.
By the end of the project in June 2008, they expect to have extended that to 100m.
"Then, of course, we will try to focus on longer distances," says Nocivelli. "We have already demonstrated that plastic fibre would be future-proof not only for the next ten years but for the next 30 years. With that speed in your home you could download a full DVD in thirty seconds."
The POF-ALL members have not had to develop any novel technologies, as they have built their systems using the latest off-the-shelf components and the ingenuity and skill of the ten academic and industrial partners.
Two products are already coming to the market. Luceat is commercialising an optical Ethernet switch (a router) using plastic fiber technology and the Fraunhofer Institute is looking for partners to market an integrated optical transceiver to work at one gigabit a second with plastic fiber.
Home and office networks could be rewired with plastic optical fibre so simply and cheaply it could be a do-it-yourself job.
"It's future-proof," confirms Nocivelli. You run at 100 Mbit/s today, 1 Gbit/s tomorrow and maybe 10 Gbit/s in the future."
A follow-up project, POF-PLUS, is intended to further develop optoelectronic components for plastic fiber and is awaiting a final decision on EU funding.
A better question is why are people associating brightness (loss) with speed?
I would expect that the characteristics of the electrical/optical transceivers and modulation would set the speed, and the loss in the cable per unit length would limit how long it could be without some sort of repeaters.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice how carefully they count how many people in each country had their data stolen and stored on this server. Also notice how many of those people these security folks notified of the data breach. Yup, exactly zero.
People may not have been contacted directly, but those in a good position to quickly mitigate damage were notified:
"Finjan Inc said it had notified the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, police in various countries and more than 40 financial institutions in the United States, Europe and India about the discovery of the so-called "crimeserver".
So they're not trying to help at all. What they're trying to do is sell their services and using this pseudo-news article to do it.
Do you actually have any evidence of this? What were they trying to sell to who?
I would expect a press-release type of promotional piece to have more information about the services the company offers.
Think of a more efficient microwave oven. If it can scatter radar signals
Chances are that if it works for stealth applications it is absorbing signals instead of scattering them. In the presence of very strong signals it would heat up if that is the case.
That could still have uses in a microwave oven though, more shielding for the door/cabinet, and perhaps coatings for containers where one would rather generate heat at the container level instead of in the food.
Perhaps this could make it easier to cook eggs in a microwave without having them explode?
Reduced microwave radiation would lessen disruption to 801.11b wireless networks since they operate in the same band.
The radiation from a nuclear power plant is ionizing radiation, much different from microwave radiation.
If the paint is somewhat flexible, it might be a good coating or ingredient for the outer jacket of shielded cables. That would be a very good thing considering how much people skimp on copper. Aluminum foil shields in cables help, but the combination of aluminum and copper makes it unattractive to recyclers later. It is best to stick with one metal.
All that stressful military/terrorist stuff aside, that paint might just be good for silencing cell phones in movie theatres. It's generally illegal to jam any sort of licensed transmission, but creating an environment that weakens the signal is a good workaround.
Perhaps adding a layer of the paint to some consumer products, like PCs, might be a viable way of reducing the R.F. noise (and security issues that go with it?) leaking out.
OpenVPN appears to be for Windows, if that's the case, is there something else that'll work on OS X and Linux?
If they mean passive components that function with voltage other than input signals, or devices with only two connections, shouldn't they count diodes? And what integrated circuit actually uses parasitic inductance (that from the bonding wires connecting the chip)? The only semi-real inductance-for-a-purpose I've seen in a monolithic chip isn't available without the chip being powered, and is essentially synthesized by use of capacitance in the feedback loop of an inverting amplifier.
And if we're cheating and using power to simulate inductors, haven't we already got memistors of sorts? Things like simple latching flip-flop behavior, or memory on the capacitance of stored gate charge? Or something that has memory with power off, as in flash-memory.
If they want to invent a new basic device with memory I've got one. Call it a fliptode.
It's like a diode, but by applying a pulse above a specified voltage in the non-conducting direction it flips the anode and the cathode around. I suppose a third programming pin could be used instead.
Trivia bits - A long time ago Apple used various combinations of grounding three connector pins to identify the operating resolution of a monitor. Eventually they needed more combinations. They got more, and maintained backwards compatibility, by allowing diodes between the pins, with the polarity choices (diode direction) also adding combinations.
Isn't a fuse a write once memistor? That's more or less what field-programmmable ROMs contained.
For more fun do something with a chip full of tunnel diodes!
If this is all too complicated, bring back core memory
Ha ha. ;-) Well I drive a car with only 3 pistons
Well a machine running an AMD triple-core, loaded with PrOn and using 3-phase power should be really popular with trisexuals. Taking gaming to another level?
Even without the cooling, the 2.5" based core is still way too thick/hot for a laptop.
At $1/gig it is still way cheaper than solid state drives, but expect those to get cheaper faster.
It's frustrating that the power benchmark they're using is measuring the whole computer.
You'd think someone doing benchmarks would use a small separate supply for the drive(s) to do the measurement. If the standby consumption and efficiency under load were measured for a small separate supply (easily determined with resistive dummy-loads), one could then get pretty accurate numbers for the drive by measuring the input power to the supply and doing a few simple calculations.
If the power and connector locations were compatible it'd be fun to see one of these in a 24" Core 2 iMac. For those using the iMac as a 1080i PVR, it'd really speed things like extracting the commercial-free version of a tv recording.
...you're getting shows that cost a TON OF MONEY to create for FREE
No we're not. Even if we don't watch, we're covering those costs in most of our purchases.
If we think of opportunity cost, poor programming costs us by contributing to damage to society.
If if we don't watch the programming personally, bad programming alters the people around us and society as a whole. Whether it makes them more ignorant, fat, flatulent, violent, polluting or worse in any of many ways, the secondary effects come back to degrade life for all of us.
And we certainly have a right to complain if broadcasters - which are supposed to be trustees of the public interest - fail to serve their local communities well.
When the FCC degraded interference protection on the FM band allowing more stations to come on the air (docker 80-90 IIRC), Most of these stations licensed to smaller communities ended up being presented as being from nearby larger communities. Besides the signals being a bit marginal, that approach which caters more to wide-area advertisers, puts local businesses and the jobs that go with them at a disadvantage. Ads on programs distributed over larger areas or nationally do that even more. Are our communities better served by these big-box and national chains that rarely provide much in the way of jobs locally?
Lax regulations permitting infomercials, much more advertising per hour, drug and ambulance-chaser ads and more have given large corporate broadcast operations more profit while degrading what our communities are given.
The damage is deep and widespread. The phrase "you are what you eat" comes to mind.
Part of what we and those around us becomes depends of what we watch, or didn't watch.
Do you ever feel like you're surrounded by idiots? Ask yourself why.
Contrast the quality of foods and consumer products in the U.S. with the E.U.
Ask why there isn't more outcry over what is happening.
"give the masses food and circus and they will not revolt"
Seen any overweight or ignorant people lately? How much tv do they watch?
Network Readiness simply reflects the emotional state of male posters to Craigslist personals.
Offers of BroadBandWith (BBW) and big pipes don't correlate as well with reality.
Good riddance to a slow, biased, anachronistic medium run by unethical America-hating propagandists. We'll find out how America is to blame for everything a lot faster from Slashdot and CNN.com from now on.
Bill Moyers and NOW on PBS has had several stories on the effects of media consolidation.
Diversity is a good thing. For some stories it really helps to have news organizations that have the resources to send someone somewhere to be on the ground and spend a lot of time. Newspapers have generally gone into much greater depth than commercial television news operations do, so they are an important resource. Individuals bring many important things to light, but there are also a number of important stories here that link back to major newspapers. The newspapers are still important even if it is someone else reading them and then mentioning the stories.
(I meant to submit the one from the NYT about huge numbers of bats perishing mysteriously... first the bees, and now the bats, what's up with that?)
Something I'm surprised the article did not point out is its applications in lower frequency use. If you want to create a stable clock that counts seconds, you don't make an oscillator at 1hz (one beat per second), you create one that does much more, say 1000hz, and then divide that by 1000. So if you are off by a few cycles it doesn't matter much. The greater this multiplication the better. So a fairly stable 4.5ghz reference could be divided down to make an extremely accurate and stable say, 500mhz signal.
Wow, you're all over the spectrum mentioning 1 Hz and 4.5 GHz in the same discussion. They're really very different animals from a practical standpoint. Things like watches/clocks (in the traditional time keeping sense) generally use a pretty low frequencies as the reference. Since the simplest frequency division is using powers of 2 (chained flip-flops), something like 32.768 KHz is common. The lower you start, the less division you need. Also, with MOS/CMOS technologies where the bulk of the power consumption comes from charging/discharging gate capacitance during switching the power consumption is minimized by picking a low frequency.
Most things causing frequency errors tend to do so more as a percentage, so starting at a really high frequency and dividing down normally doesn't make things better. Resonators generally have to be physically larger for very low frequencies, so division is more common in that case.
A combination of dividing down and multiplying up is seen in things like frequency synthesizers. That's what one uses to digitally tune an oscillator in a receiver for getting a bunch of different channels. That beats having a crystal for every channel.
For signals needed at a very high frequency it is simpler to have an on-frequency resonator than to use a lower frequency one with a multiplier (phase-locked loop, filter tuned to harmonic, etc).
As for frequency accuracy and stability a higher frequency resonator isn't inherently better or worse. That depends on the accuracy of manufacturing tolerances, temperature coefficient of the materials used, sensitivity of the resonator to changes in circuit capacitance, and the stability of the circuit capacitance with variations in temperature and voltage.
There are already plenty of quartz crystal and other resonators for use below a few hundred megahertz. While oscillators for clocks/transmitters etc may be the first thing to come to mind, filters are also a major application. SAW (Surface Acoustic Wave) filter dramatically simplified channel-width filtering in television receivers, and ceramic filters simplified things like F.M. radios. Those go beyond simple resonators since they are actually bandpass filters with carefully tailored rejection characteristics for signals adjacent to the pass band.
Many receiver designs shift an incoming signal to a lower frequency by mixing it with an internally generated signal. But that type of superhetrodyne conversion can shift signals the same distance above AND below the oscillator frequency down to the lower frequency for processing. Which ever one is undesired is called the image frequency. To avoid interference from signals near the image frequency, filtering is needed ahead of the conversion. It sounds like the resonators developed might be a simple and cost effective way of providing that sort of filtering. Besides cell phones, 802.11b (2.4 GHz) and future retired NTSC U.H.F. television spectrum data communications are obvious major applications for this.
It'll be interesting to see how good of filters come from this technology. Beyond accuracy of the resonate frequency, getting desired pass/reject frequency response curve shape and low insertion loss are very important characteristics for filter applications.
I dunno, there are stories that when you hold up a tube lamp under a high-voltage-line, it will light up, anyone know anything 'bout that ?
Yes!
Granted 2.4 GHz is an efficient frequency for heating due to the resonance of the water molecule, but exposure from other sources is far more intense. Cell phones are close enough to the body to be worth looking at. And if anyone is paying any attention to raw power, some of those UHF TV stations have effective radiated power levels of as much as 5 million Watts!
That ought to be enough to make those infomercials sink in...
(Of course if you feel that broadcasters are failing to serve local communities very well there is still time to file comments with the FCC.)
I know you're beiung funny, but in reality this doesn't matter. I built a PC back when I was in VA- my power provider was AEP, which is probably the worst polluter in the country- lots of old, dirty coal plants. I moved up to PA a month later- I'm in a electric co-op now, with 60% of the power being nuclear and 20% hydro, very little from coal.
Did the computer suddenly get more green just beacause I moved it north 200 miles?
No. It should make very little difference since things are interconnected. Unlike fossil-fuel plants, nukes don't cost much less to run when output is reduced. For that reason they tend to be run near full capacity. If a user getting power from the nuke uses less, the output of the fossil-fuel plants can be reduced. There are some other considerations such as the losses and maximum capacity of the transmission system. Issues with stability also become more significant with increasing distance when combining AC power from multiple generator sources.
I live near a coastal nuke plant, with warning sirens nearby and all that. An employee shared an interesting tidit with me when I asked him why we had regional outages so near the plant during statewide shortages. During times when my state has suffered power shortfalls, there were some "rotating" outages. What I didn't realize was that those of us near the plant were more likely to have power cut. Because most of us didn't need air conditioners and used the least lighting during summer, our use was generally below the baseline amount and billed at the lowest rates. Users in the hot inland areas were paying more per kwh due to being above baseline usage, so it was more profitable for their power to be kept on.
Since fossil-fuel power is generally used as a last resort, the percentage reduction in fossil fuel use (and carbon-dioxide/pollutants released) will be greater than the percentage reduction in total consumption. In other words, the efforts to reduce consumption actually help more than the raw numbers suggest.
The problem is that unless OEMs start including these drives in computers, they probably won't sell very well. Or more likely, the geek who does buy one will end up offsetting the savings by throwing it in his machine with a 750W power supply and monster graphics card(s).
Yes, the choice of GPU certainly is very significant. A while back I built up a PVR using GMA950 to keep initial and long term costs down. It'd be awful for demanding games, but works great for HD video. Total system power consumption (less display) 82 Watts (measured during video compression). That's with a slightly overclocked Core 2 Duo too. I'm sure an Apple-TV uses far less than 82 Watts, but for scaling 1080i to 720p I needed more CPU.
The raw power rating for the power supply does not tell you anything about how much power you'll consume. That is simply a maximum output rating. It's a bit like saying a 120 Volt outlet in your house is rated to deliver 2400 Watts when fed from a 20 Amp circuit with nothing else running. The actual consumption depends on the load current you draw.
Power supplies do have conversion losses which are reflected by an efficiency rating. The rated numbers still don't tell you exactly what to expect since efficiency varies depending on how much of a load you have, and which outputs are doing the work.
The more you're consuming, the more important the efficiency rating is. I found some really cheap 600 Watt power supplies on sale, shipping included, for $15. No efficiency rating was given, and I'd suspect something so cheap of having problems when actually being asked to deliver close to 600 Watts, but they've worked flawlessly at low power levels.
Actual consumption of components and whole systems is usually quite different from sticker/spec-sheet figures. Some of those reflect maximum capabilities, some reflect things like startup surge currents, all generally change with options and actual use. Even something like running displays at the lowest acceptable brightness makes a significant difference. It's very helpful to use a meter such as the Kill-A-Watt (set to Watts, not Volt*Amperes) to get a feel for these things.
Since power is fairly expensive where I am, I figure a cost of about $1 per month for every 10 Watts used continuously. Between torrents and recording at all hours, continuous applies for my PVR. Saving 10 Watts doesn't sound like much, but over 5 years that's about $60. If one likes to archive shows, it is quite likely that more than one drive will be used eventually multiplying the costs and savings. Of course if one keeps some archives on externals and powers them down, that would help even more. If OSes are not supporting drive sleep on a drive-by-drive basis, some changes there could save quite a bit too.
Using energy saving drives, using fewer big drives instead of a larger number of older small ones, using an energy efficient CPU, and avoiding a power hungry GPU if it isn't needed all add up to much more substantial energy savings. And remember, it's not just about the cost of energy, there's the environmental impact as well.
I haven't actually made measurements to see how much the power consumption of GPUs varies with what they're doing. I would hope that designs now, or in the near future, will allow a major fallback in consumption when user needs are not very demanding.
When people brag about benchmarks, I'd like to see one more added - one generated by dividing the traditional benchmark by the power consumption.
If he mis-read the article, then I did as well. The statement above appears to indicate that they are suggesting you create hydrogen in your car while you're driving. To do this, you'll need electricity, and you'll end up losing out, because of the laws of thermodynamics.
In an electric car the motor is also used to recover energy when going downhill or braking, it acting as a generator. If these electrodes lower the losses storing this energy in a fuel cell (or going back to hydrogen to burn in a hybrid), it would help for several reasons.
The higher efficiency would make conversion (and thus storage) that much more efficient.
The higher efficiency means less heat generation. That would probably make it possible to safely use higher conversion (charging) currents. Very high currents must be handled to recover much energy from sudden braking. These electrodes with very large effective surface area would also lower the impedance, making it easier to actually get very large currents flowing.
Of course braking-generation only recovers some of the energy normally expended when driving. Improving energy conversion simply makes better use of the energy whatever the source: utility charging (when stopped), solar, combustion engine/generator action (hybrid), braking-recovered energy etc.
The article is really about better batteries or fuel cells. It isn't about producing hydrogen to burn.
Speculation on cost versus fossil fuel is pretty meaningless without specifics.
After all the present and future cost of utility (charging) power depends on what is used to generate it and varies greatly depending on where one lives.
The improved electrodes seem like a good thing as presented. I just wonder how much patents will drive up costs, and if electrodes made with cheaper materials will last as long as the platinum variety. With the cost of fuel cells or batteries making a large percentage of vehicle cost, the lifespan is as important as the efficiency.
We see saterrite, all your movie belong to us
"It's very frightening that IFPI can get through the courts with something like this. In Turkey and China its the state that decides what information the people can access and what should be censored. In Denmark its apparently the record industry,"
That kind of censorship is certainly disturbing, this is truely frightening
Obedient, huh? Get a job and bring home some cash!
There probably are some phones that people got as gifts over the holidays but haven't activated yet due to waiting for the contract with a prior carrier to run out.
Another possible factor is that the numbers used may be an AT&T report of new customers, excluding people who were already using AT&T cell service before getting an iPhone.
How many times is this going to happen before corporations realize front organizations don't work on the Internet?
Although these things certainly can bring negative backlash when discovered, part of the problem is that these things do sometimes work. Perhaps we should be asking every website to provide a street address, phone number, and ownership report. That would be very difficult to enforce since some would simply host elsewhere. Perhaps a good start would be to require any site advertising on radio or television to provide that information in the ads. (The text size for ads that maybe be shown on secondary SD DTV channels needs to be bumped up too. Many of those channels seem blurrier than NTSC to me, although part of the problem is use of analog satellite sources)
With elections coming in many areas, I would not be surprised to find a number of front organizations providing misinformation online. I've already seen several of the "forward this to your friends" mudslinging emails around. The combination of semi-anonymous and dirt cheap makes these abuses too easy.
It is a bit surprising to see this sort of thing from a company that's doing pretty well with their product lineup. Perhaps it is more about fighting pressure on prices than about getting the business for low cost machines?
Beware, this metamaterial could be the technology of flatulent terroristas! Silent and deadly...
Sadly the article is sorta light on details.
Aye captain, we'll knit ya a jockstrap of metamaterial and they'll never see ya coming.
Don't understand what that is do ya? Well write your own description.
The Cone of Silence was one of many fun toys on that old show...
It seems the kids that watched shows like Get Smart, The Flintstones, Gumby, Lost in Space, and Bonanza didn't go around shooting up high schools and shopping malls. I wonder if it was because of the content of the shows, or just from having 9 minutes of commercials an hour instead of 18?
Plastic fibre slashes optical network costs
Wed, 01/09/2008 - 19:49 - Wire Services
A new European project using plastic fiber and off-the-shelf components could make optical networking so cheap and simple that installation could be a DIY job for even a non-technical person.
The object of EU-funded POF-ALL project is to find a technical solution to the rising cost of taking optical fiber right into the home.
The project partners decided to focus on the cabling inside buildings, which would typically account for 30% of the cost of laying an optical fibre from the exchange into the home. This last hundred metres or so is known as the 'edge' network.
"We realised that we could lower the cost of this edge installation by using a simpler technology," Alessandro Nocivelli, the founder and CEO of Luceat SpA, one of the partners in the project, said. "If we could employ a technology which is so simple to use that anyone can install it, that would relieve telecom companies of 30% of the cost of the access network, which means up to several billion euro if you consider the European Union as a whole."
Plastic fibres use harmless green or red light that is easily visible to the eye, as opposed to glass fibres which use infrared laser light that could potentially cause eye damage.
"I have a two-year-old child," says Nocivelli, "and I would never install a glass optical fibre in my own home, even though I have been working with glass optical fibers for many years."
Plastic fibres are also much thicker than glass fibres, a millimetre or more, and can be handled without special tools or techniques.
"You don't need to be trained to handle and install it. You just cut it with scissors, plug it in and it works. It's as easy as that," Nocivelli adds.
On the downside, plastic fibres absorb light more than glass, which limits their useful length to a few hundred metres.
They also have a lower data capacity than glass fibres, but that is not an issue for the cable that runs from a conventional glass fibre in the street into a house, or even for laying a network within a block of flats.
The partners have built a system that uses green light to transmit 100 megabits a second over a distance of 300 metres, which is the speed telecom companies hope to offer their customers five to ten years from now, and 50 times as fast as a typical adsl broadband connection.
Their second achievement is to transmit ten times faster still - one gigabit per second - over a 30m fibre, using red light.
By the end of the project in June 2008, they expect to have extended that to 100m.
"Then, of course, we will try to focus on longer distances," says Nocivelli. "We have already demonstrated that plastic fibre would be future-proof not only for the next ten years but for the next 30 years. With that speed in your home you could download a full DVD in thirty seconds."
The POF-ALL members have not had to develop any novel technologies, as they have built their systems using the latest off-the-shelf components and the ingenuity and skill of the ten academic and industrial partners.
Two products are already coming to the market. Luceat is commercialising an optical Ethernet switch (a router) using plastic fiber technology and the Fraunhofer Institute is looking for partners to market an integrated optical transceiver to work at one gigabit a second with plastic fiber.
Home and office networks could be rewired with plastic optical fibre so simply and cheaply it could be a do-it-yourself job.
"It's future-proof," confirms Nocivelli. You run at 100 Mbit/s today, 1 Gbit/s tomorrow and maybe 10 Gbit/s in the future."
A follow-up project, POF-PLUS, is intended to further develop optoelectronic components for plastic fiber and is awaiting a final decision on EU funding.
A better question is why are people associating brightness (loss) with speed?
I would expect that the characteristics of the electrical/optical transceivers and modulation would set the speed, and the loss in the cable per unit length would limit how long it could be without some sort of repeaters.