Almost all these things are feasible with WiFi. (Except the moving part, and probably roaming, with a soft-handover)
The point is, all these things require an infrastructure, which most telcos already have. Billing, identification, certification, trust relationships, locationing (sp?), micropayment and the like.
Actually, in some countries, people have already adapted the mobile as a method of billing, for exactly those reasons.
For WiFi, companies have to agree upon several standards for those things. And I don't see this happen anytime soon. Especially, when they'll have to compete with a widely accepted system already in place.
Really? How do you do location based services with WiFi? How do you realise payment, how identification? How does roaming between different WiFi providers work? How do you connect to the mobile partner, considering that IPv6 is still not widely deployed? WiFi doesn't work when you move a little bit faster than walking. How do you achieve a good WiFi coverage, especially in more rural areas. (Without prohibitive costs) How many people are taking a notebook/laptop/pda with them and how many carry a mobile?
Once more, I'd say 3G and WiFi are orthogonal. They serve different needs.
I think there are some misunderstandings on your side.
Firstly, on my post, I said: >> Another point is, it is too generic and they are (surely) missing a working prototype. >> >> It's seldom the "what", more often it is the "how". So, I am well aware that the writer has no idea how to do it.
Secondly on the patent: They not patenting a chemical, physical, biological or nanotechnological mean (due to slashdotting, I have to refer you to this post this post). Remember, this is Apple, not Bayer or Fuji Photo. To quote: "The invention pertains to electronic devices capable of dynamically changing their ornamental or decorative appearance,..."
They are patenting all these possible future methods including current ones. The current possible lightning is just an example.
Lastly, on patents (at least U.S. patents, it seams): One can patent almost everything, the question is, will they able to enforce it? What should be patentable is the means to do the magic.
When they develop a coating, which makes it possible to realise this, I find the coating patent-worthy. But not the idea in itself, which is covered by named prior art from Sciffy writers.
the suite was compiled with the Intel Compiler 6, that means it makes no use of the 64bit mode, which probably won't affect the SPECfloat-mark, but due to a bunch of more general purpose registers should at least speed up the Integer part.
The Athlon-64 was running at 1.2GHz. Target release frequency: 2GHz. At the targeted frequency, it will have an estimated SpecFloat/Int mark of 1274/1274 (current P4 (3GHz?) 1085/1092)
Remember before drooling, that it is current P4 compared to future Athlon-64.
Centrifugal force does "exist". It is a byproduct of being situated in an accelerating system, where Newtons phyics doesn't apply. Prime requisit of Newtons law. You have to be in a inertial reference frame. Well, the laws of physics still apply, you just have to observe it from a stationary system and then transpose it into the accelerated system.
Calculating in an accelerated system gives you all the non-existant forces or pseudo-forces like centrifugal-force and Coriolis-force.
OTOH, those forces do not exists as they are only a byproduct of calculating in a rotating frame and not a real force which are the result of exchanging particles like photons, gravitons and the like.
Speaking of centrifugal force is inaccurate at worst. So, for educational reasons, one should speak of centrifual effect, or Coriolis effect.
> i mean whats stopping all dead cells coming back to life etc?
Second law of thermodynamics. AFAIK, the only phyical law with a temporal direction.
Speaking of cells is a little bit to generic. Let's reduce it the most simple form known to me: bacteria.
The DNA of bacteria does not age, due to their circular DNA. (Human cells have a linear DNA, which shortens at each mitosis, which limits the number of replications -> age) They split, so practically they are two identical bacteria (mutations aside) with the same age. How do they die? They become defective. It's not like they just stop working out of nothing.
Why don't they become living again? The same reason a broken glass doesn't get whole again.
Thinking of cryogenics: It (currently) doesn't work because in the processs of freezing and defreezing cells are destroyed, but there are creatures (IRC, some frogs), which due to the constitution (word?) of their cells, are able to survive this process.
Let's ignore that the parent was surely refering to the absurdity of SciFi in space in general.
Assuming that the force is uniform in all directions, there is no reason that the lower density material escapes in planar direction (what tells the material in which plane it has to escape, so to speak).
My totally uneducated guess is the following: Stars rotate around one axis. This angular momentum has to be preserved. If memory serves right a supernova occurs, when the equlibrium of gravitational contraction force and the thermonuclar repulsion force collapses, until a certain pressure is reached which leads to a final explosive fusion process. Now think of figure skating, rotating and a contracting diameter. The outmost material will be hurled back into space, the rest contributes to a white dwarf, neutron star, black hole, or whatever. But the critical part (for our question at hand) is that the star in it latest moments is not spherical, but eliptical. The material in the rotational plane has a higher momentum, so it will be more likely hurled back into space.
As I said, this is a fairly uneducated guess. The question is, does the centrifugal force matter anything, considering strength the gravitational force and the thermonuclear explosion?
> I believe the problem here... Well, I don't consider this as a problem:).
But to quote from the post you were replying to: >>> It chokes the flow of free information and turns pages (of information) into giant full-screen animated talking commercials. And your reply: >> I don't see how it chokes the flow,
Entertainment is a different story. I won't deny that Homestarrunner is entertaining and flash can generate pretty amusing pages and good looking ones.
Does it work on text-to-speech or braille. Is it adjustable for colour-blindness? Is it indexable/searchable? How do I set a bookmark at a certain point in Flash? (I'm aware that you wrote almost)
> It also brings us www.homestarrunner.com.
Yes, very informative.
So, what kind of information do you think one cannot convey through the internet by the means of text and pictures, but through Flash-media?
In contrast to the dedicated yro.slashdot.org, developers.slashdot.org, bsd.slashdot.org... addresses? You do know that every section has its own address?
>this certainly provides more fuel for the Sell-to-Apple hypothesis...
Certainly. Furthermore, Apple hasn't sued the hell out of OSDN for makeing the Apple section look like Aqua(TM)(C)(R).
>someone here on slashdot speculated that OSDN [...] This is ground-breaking news. Instead of posting a well-informed comment, purely based on facts, someone speculated.
Couldn't it just be that due to MacOs X and iPod and the like, some geeks got hooked up to Apple?
>Ah, but as pointed out here before by others[...]
Now, it gets interesting. In what context has this been pointed out? Mobile phones, which are another form of wireless access.
> This means that it is much easier and cheaper to reach a higher percentage of the population with fewer fiber runs.
The costs of fibre lies not in the length of the fibre, which cost next to nothing compared to the rest of the hardware or the costs to lay the cables, especially in countries, where they have to be run underground (Germany comes to mind).
But, AFAIK, most industrial countries have already fibre-to-the-hub, and some have partially fibre-to-the-curb. This is necessary for telcos providing DSLs, in order to carry the bandwidth without having to run several hundreds lines of copper.
How does the lesser population density affect the (assumed) bandwidth barrier of wireless access and the (assumed) constant increase of bandwidth need?
Note, that the year of Lilienthal's death is also (not coincidentally) the last of his more than 2,000 flights (or glides, if you prefer). Interestingly, in the same year he had completed the construction of a powered glider (compressed CO2).
Following in Lilienthal's footsteps, efforts to invent an airplane became commonplace in the 1890's. The majority of the efforts were in Europe, including Captain F. Ferber, Henri Robart, Solirene, Levavasseur, Clement Ader, Percy Pilcher, and Sir Hiram Maxim. In the U.S., prominent attempts were made by Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpont Langley.
Wilbur Wright wrote in 1912 that "no one else grasped the basics of human flight as clearly and throughly as he did". And I guess, they were not the only ones influenced by his writings.
Wireless has the inherent problem that it is a shared media. The bandwidth you can achieve is therefor divided by the users.
Next thing, bandwith is limited by the frequency you are using. Sadly, there is a practical upper limit for the frequency used, otherwise you'll need a line of sight.
How can one increase bandwidth? By covering smaller areas. But practically, there is a lower limit. Otherwise, in which ways does the provider differ from a home user with his NAP.
Then, there is the reglementation of the frequency spectra, which will most surely not vanish, which limits bandwith, too.
In contrast, increasing the bandwith on wired connections is fairly easy, because of its controllable enviroment. There are developments to deploy fibre-to-the-home already. My memory is a little vague here, but IRC, in Japan, there is a govermental plan to reach a certain coverage (20% ?) of fibre-to-the-home to a certain date (2005?).
I may be a little pessimistic, but to me Wireless seams not like a competitor against digital subscriber lines, bandwith wise.
At best, they complement each other. One providing lots of bandwith, the other high mobility and less hassle. Wireless expanding greatly on the cost of DSL seems unlikely to me.
> The true legacy of the Wrights wasn't the first flight. [...] The Wrights gave us the *field* of flight.
Their work was based on Lilienthal's work. Including the methology. Lilienthal reduced some problems into small self-contained experiments to devise several formulas for aerodynamics and published them. And he build small models and real glider out of this data and documented that, too.
In other words, he did scientific work on aerodynamics.
The Wright Brothers discovered (probably among other things), that one constant in Lilienthal's formulas was wrong.
From the The Wright Brothers Page (hardly a page underestimating the work of the Wright Brothers):
From statements and writings left by the Wright brothers, it is clear Lilienthal was an important source of inspiration for their efforts
So, attributing creating the field of flight to them seems to me a bit overestimated.
> GiTS [...] Virtual Light, Blade Runner [...] paint a world we want to live in [...]
It may be just me, but I considered the above creations (manga/books/films) as slightly distopian. Not in the "Orson Wells" sense, but more in a "grand-pa" sense. It is a future, where we probably are the grand-pas saying, "In the old times, everything was better", but everything is just different.
Or do you consider a future, where people are subject to the whim of large companies (Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheeps), surveillable by miniature implants (Stand Alone Complex), hackable like MS Brain '98 (GitS), or the total fragmentation of the US and commercialisation of the national and regional goverments (Virtual Light) as desirable futures?
They are trying to paint a more or less realistic image of the future (Well, maybe except "Virtual Light"), without judging it.
Bottom-up mergesort does. Theta(n log(n)) instead of Theta(n^2) like the (standard) Quicksort.
(Shellsort has Theta(n log(n)^2), IIRC)
Re:Forget about 3G! Take a look at SOMA Networks.
on
America's First WCDMA Call
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Interestingly FOMA is a 3G network. More specifically it is also a WCDMA network (NTT just had to do their own derivate), which someone claimed to be inpracictable or expensive at best.
>software has no redundancy Actually, the software in planes is redundant. AFAIK, it is written by 3 teams in 3 different countries in 3 different type of programming languages.
This should avoid introducing the same bugs by similar cultural background or programming models.
Software can be made redundant, when your willing to pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost all these things are feasible with WiFi.
(Except the moving part, and probably roaming, with a soft-handover)
The point is, all these things require an infrastructure, which most telcos already have.
Billing, identification, certification, trust relationships, locationing (sp?), micropayment and the like.
Actually, in some countries, people have already adapted the mobile as a method of billing, for exactly those reasons.
For WiFi, companies have to agree upon several standards for those things. And I don't see this happen anytime soon. Especially, when they'll have to compete with a widely accepted system already in place.
> IMO, Wi-fi has removed all the need for umts
Really?
How do you do location based services with WiFi?
How do you realise payment, how identification?
How does roaming between different WiFi providers work?
How do you connect to the mobile partner, considering that IPv6 is still not widely deployed?
WiFi doesn't work when you move a little bit faster than walking.
How do you achieve a good WiFi coverage, especially in more rural areas. (Without prohibitive costs)
How many people are taking a notebook/laptop/pda with them and how many carry a mobile?
Once more, I'd say 3G and WiFi are orthogonal. They serve different needs.
> because OpenOffice doesn't do something as fscking simple as a polynomial regression
:)
Grace would be a less drastic solution.
Not to mention Octave, which might be a little bit too complex for this matter. Here, the function for squares polynomial regression polyfit
s/lightning/illumination
:)
I dearly hope, there will be no lightning in my electronic devices
>You obviously do not understand Patents
I think there are some misunderstandings on your side.
Firstly, on my post,
I said:
>> Another point is, it is too generic and they are (surely) missing a working prototype.
>>
>> It's seldom the "what", more often it is the "how".
So, I am well aware that the writer has no idea how to do it.
Secondly on the patent:
They not patenting a chemical, physical, biological or nanotechnological mean (due to slashdotting, I have to refer you to this post this post).
Remember, this is Apple, not Bayer or Fuji Photo.
To quote: "The invention pertains to electronic devices capable of dynamically changing their ornamental or decorative appearance,..."
They are patenting all these possible future methods including current ones. The current possible lightning is just an example.
Lastly, on patents (at least U.S. patents, it seams): One can patent almost everything, the question is, will they able to enforce it?
What should be patentable is the means to do the magic.
When they develop a coating, which makes it possible to realise this, I find the coating patent-worthy. But not the idea in itself, which is covered by named prior art from Sciffy writers.
The point is, the idea is not new.
IRC, in Neal Stephensons "Diamond Age" John Hackworth implemented this for chop sticks. Little animations on them.
In Total Recall, the film, the secretary of Total Recall, the company, changed the colour of her finger nail electronically.
In William Gibsons "Virtual Light" a car was changing its painting (otherwise called animation).
Another point is, it is too generic and they are (surely) missing a working prototype.
It's seldom the "what", more often it is the "how".
Otherwise, I'll go and patent "an apparatus or method for creating products by the means of moluclar modifications".
It just has the minor problem beeing written in German, which might be as small problem for the current audience.
;).
For those people not interested in learning a new (human) language, I suggest the english version.
I suggest a article benchmark
In other words, smaller numbers are worse.
Note the following:
the suite was compiled with the Intel Compiler 6, that means it makes no use of the 64bit mode, which probably won't affect the SPECfloat-mark, but due to a bunch of more general purpose registers should at least speed up the Integer part.
The Athlon-64 was running at 1.2GHz. Target release frequency: 2GHz. At the targeted frequency, it will have an estimated SpecFloat/Int mark of 1274/1274 (current P4 (3GHz?) 1085/1092)
Remember before drooling, that it is current P4 compared to future Athlon-64.
> as the Okinawa suicides during the invasion proved.
The only thing that it proves is, that they feared the US soldiers. Unless, you provide some reference for civilians attacking with spikes.
> High School physics teacher
Centrifugal force does "exist". It is a byproduct of being situated in an accelerating system, where Newtons phyics doesn't apply. Prime requisit of Newtons law. You have to be in a inertial reference frame. Well, the laws of physics still apply, you just have to observe it from a stationary system and then transpose it into the accelerated system.
Calculating in an accelerated system gives you all the non-existant forces or pseudo-forces like centrifugal-force and Coriolis-force.
OTOH, those forces do not exists as they are only a byproduct of calculating in a rotating frame and not a real force which are the result of exchanging particles like photons, gravitons and the like.
Speaking of centrifugal force is inaccurate at worst. So, for educational reasons, one should speak of centrifual effect, or Coriolis effect.
Tell me, when we reach temperatures that will make Si melt :)
I thought the main advantage of diamond over Si is a better heat conductance.
> i mean whats stopping all dead cells coming back to life etc?
Second law of thermodynamics. AFAIK, the only phyical law with a temporal direction.
Speaking of cells is a little bit to generic. Let's reduce it the most simple form known to me: bacteria.
The DNA of bacteria does not age, due to their circular DNA.
(Human cells have a linear DNA, which shortens at each mitosis, which limits the number of replications -> age)
They split, so practically they are two identical bacteria (mutations aside) with the same age.
How do they die? They become defective. It's not like they just stop working out of nothing.
Why don't they become living again? The same reason a broken glass doesn't get whole again.
Thinking of cryogenics: It (currently) doesn't work because in the processs of freezing and defreezing cells are destroyed, but there are creatures (IRC, some frogs), which due to the constitution (word?) of their cells, are able to survive this process.
Let's ignore that the parent was surely refering to the absurdity of SciFi in space in general.
Assuming that the force is uniform in all directions, there is no reason that the lower density material escapes in planar direction (what tells the material in which plane it has to escape, so to speak).
My totally uneducated guess is the following:
Stars rotate around one axis. This angular momentum has to be preserved. If memory serves right a supernova occurs, when the equlibrium of gravitational contraction force and the thermonuclar repulsion force collapses, until a certain pressure is reached which leads to a final explosive fusion process. Now think of figure skating, rotating and a contracting diameter.
The outmost material will be hurled back into space, the rest contributes to a white dwarf, neutron star, black hole, or whatever.
But the critical part (for our question at hand) is that the star in it latest moments is not spherical, but eliptical. The material in the rotational plane has a higher momentum, so it will be more likely hurled back into space.
As I said, this is a fairly uneducated guess. The question is, does the centrifugal force matter anything, considering strength the gravitational force and the thermonuclear explosion?
> I believe the problem here ... :).
Well, I don't consider this as a problem
But to quote from the post you were replying to:
>>> It chokes the flow of free information and turns pages (of information) into giant full-screen animated talking commercials.
And your reply:
>> I don't see how it chokes the flow,
Entertainment is a different story.
I won't deny that Homestarrunner is entertaining and flash can generate pretty amusing pages and good looking ones.
> Besides flash works on almost any device.
Does it work on text-to-speech or braille.
Is it adjustable for colour-blindness?
Is it indexable/searchable?
How do I set a bookmark at a certain point in Flash?
(I'm aware that you wrote almost)
> It also brings us www.homestarrunner.com.
Yes, very informative.
So, what kind of information do you think one cannot convey through the internet by the means of text and pictures, but through Flash-media?
> plus the dedicated apple.slashdot.org address.
In contrast to the dedicated yro.slashdot.org, developers.slashdot.org, bsd.slashdot.org... addresses?
You do know that every section has its own address?
>this certainly provides more fuel for the Sell-to-Apple hypothesis...
Certainly. Furthermore, Apple hasn't sued the hell out of OSDN for makeing the Apple section look like Aqua(TM)(C)(R).
Maybe OSDN should consult NASA on these matters.
>someone here on slashdot speculated that OSDN [...]
This is ground-breaking news. Instead of posting a well-informed comment, purely based on facts, someone speculated.
Couldn't it just be that due to MacOs X and iPod and the like, some geeks got hooked up to Apple?
>Ah, but as pointed out here before by others[...]
Now, it gets interesting. In what context has this been pointed out? Mobile phones, which are another form of wireless access.
> This means that it is much easier and cheaper to reach a higher percentage of the population with fewer fiber runs.
The costs of fibre lies not in the length of the fibre, which cost next to nothing compared to the rest of the hardware or the costs to lay the cables, especially in countries, where they have to be run underground (Germany comes to mind).
But, AFAIK, most industrial countries have already fibre-to-the-hub, and some have partially fibre-to-the-curb. This is necessary for telcos providing DSLs, in order to carry the bandwidth without having to run several hundreds lines of copper.
How does the lesser population density affect the (assumed) bandwidth barrier of wireless access and the (assumed) constant increase of bandwidth need?
1783 Montgolfier Brothers France
1849 George Cayley England
1871 Louis P. Mouillard "L'Empire de l'Air"
1878 Alphonse Penaud "Recherches sur la Resistance de l'Air"
1889 Otto Lilienthal "Birdflight as the Basis for Aviation"
1896 Otto Lilienthal dies
1896 Samuel P. Langley USA
1902 Frost Ornithopter England
1903 Wright Brothers USA
1906 Santos Dumont France/Brazil
1908 Glenn H. Curtiss
1908 Samual F Cody England
source, another source
Note, that the year of Lilienthal's death is also (not coincidentally) the last of his more than 2,000 flights (or glides, if you prefer). Interestingly, in the same year he had completed the construction of a powered glider (compressed CO2).
To quote different source about the Wright Brothers
Wilbur Wright wrote in 1912 that "no one else grasped the basics of human flight as clearly and throughly as he did".
And I guess, they were not the only ones influenced by his writings.
Wireless has the inherent problem that it is a shared media. The bandwidth you can achieve is therefor divided by the users.
Next thing, bandwith is limited by the frequency you are using.
Sadly, there is a practical upper limit for the frequency used, otherwise you'll need a line of sight.
How can one increase bandwidth? By covering smaller areas. But practically, there is a lower limit. Otherwise, in which ways does the provider differ from a home user with his NAP.
Then, there is the reglementation of the frequency spectra, which will most surely not vanish, which limits bandwith, too.
In contrast, increasing the bandwith on wired connections is fairly easy, because of its controllable enviroment.
There are developments to deploy fibre-to-the-home already.
My memory is a little vague here, but IRC, in Japan, there is a govermental plan to reach a certain coverage (20% ?) of fibre-to-the-home to a certain date (2005?).
I may be a little pessimistic, but to me Wireless seams not like a competitor against digital subscriber lines, bandwith wise.
At best, they complement each other. One providing lots of bandwith, the other high mobility and less hassle. Wireless expanding greatly on the cost of DSL seems unlikely to me.
Their work was based on Lilienthal's work. Including the methology.
Lilienthal reduced some problems into small self-contained experiments to devise several formulas for aerodynamics and published them.
And he build small models and real glider out of this data and documented that, too.
In other words, he did scientific work on aerodynamics.
The Wright Brothers discovered (probably among other things), that one constant in Lilienthal's formulas was wrong.
From the The Wright Brothers Page (hardly a page underestimating the work of the Wright Brothers):
So, attributing creating the field of flight to them seems to me a bit overestimated.
> GiTS [...] Virtual Light, Blade Runner [...] paint a world we want to live in [...]
It may be just me, but I considered the above creations (manga/books/films) as slightly distopian. Not in the "Orson Wells" sense, but more in a "grand-pa" sense. It is a future, where we probably are the grand-pas saying, "In the old times, everything was better", but everything is just different.
Or do you consider a future, where people are subject to the whim of large companies (Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheeps), surveillable by miniature implants (Stand Alone Complex), hackable like MS Brain '98 (GitS),
or the total fragmentation of the US and commercialisation of the national and regional goverments (Virtual Light) as desirable futures?
They are trying to paint a more or less realistic image of the future (Well, maybe except "Virtual Light"), without judging it.
Bottom-up mergesort does.
Theta(n log(n)) instead of Theta(n^2) like the (standard) Quicksort.
(Shellsort has Theta(n log(n)^2), IIRC)
Interestingly FOMA is a 3G network. More specifically it is also a WCDMA network (NTT just had to do their own derivate), which
someone claimed to be inpracictable or expensive at best.
>software has no redundancy
Actually, the software in planes is redundant. AFAIK, it is written by 3 teams in 3 different countries in 3 different type of programming languages.
This should avoid introducing the same bugs by similar cultural background or programming models.
Software can be made redundant, when your willing to pay for it.
More something like half a gulf war, at least according The Boston Globe.