...but the review sounds like written by a complete clueless moron.
"The new computer has more gigabytes than the old computer and thanks to these all additional megabytes it's faster. The bits get computered in the additional gigabytes and each gigabyte can work separately so more bits can be computered at the same time resulting in faster computering by the computer."
The primary problem with the magnet is the -uniform- field. The feature of the drive is the differences between field of "0" and "1" bits. Say, "1"s are N-S, "0"s are S-N. Now if you apply a strong field to the whole disk, the "1"s may go more towards no magnetic orientation at all, "0"s towards way stronger "S-N" and as result they are still distinguishable. A narrow beam of very noisy even if not very strong magnetic field will do much more damage than a very strong magnet.
My reaction? "OMG YAY GOOGLE IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD" I, for one, welcome our Google overlords. I'd like to remind them as a trusted IT personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their undercover computational centres.
Whole body acceleration sustained for seconds is lethal above 8g. But this thing reaches top speed in 0.1s with maximum allowed acceleration, meaning the whole acceleration rating is moot. It just means about as much that the mouse will survive a fall from the table. Since it's an optical mouse, there's no mechanical elements that could impact registering of acceleration, it registers just separate static images and compares them.
My keyboard registers keypresses of keys accelerated by 15g too.
- 1200 actions per minute Optimized for Real-Time Strategy (RTS) / Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG).
20 actions per second. Hummm... Lemme imagine pulling this kind of stunt. Most vigorious masturbation is less than 10 actions per second.
- Infrared engine powered by Razer Precision
Doesn't ring a bell.
- 1600 DPI, twice that of conventional high performance sensors
How many pixels (of pointer travel on screen) per point of movement? I mean, if I have a screen of 1600x1200, moving the mouse an inch would send the pointer across the whole screen width with 1:1 mapping. Pretty much unplayable, aim at a 16x16px icon with that, you need 0.01 inch hand movement precision. Of course the points get downsampled, and as result the extra resolution - wasted. Useless.
- Ultra large non-slip mouse buttons, tactile response design
Didn't happen to me to slip on a mouse button or any problems with finding it. But clicking accidentially by resting my palm on the mouse - yes. The bigger the buttons the better the chance for unwanted click.
- Award winning Razer drivers featuring On-the-Fly sensitivity adjustment
Drivers could support on-the-fly sensitivity adjustment. For any mouse.
- Frame rate over 6400 frames per second (5.8 megapixels per second)
That means about 100 frames per screen display frame. Your character can turn 3 times around before the screen updates to show it, thanks to this mouse. More frames per second than the screen can show is useless.
- 16 bit data path, as compared to 8 bit and 12 bit data paths used by other conventional mice
transferring data of what? Usually mouse sends relative movement distances. At 6400 frames per second, relative distance between two frames can't be more than 3-4 bits long number.
- Always-On(TM) Mode - the optical sensor never powers down - provides instantaneous response at all times during gameplay
I didn't know "Always-On" was a trademark. Anyway, seems like removal of a feature...
- High speed motion detection, up to 40ips and 15g
I'd like to see your hand after having it accelerated by 15g. All bones powdered. Meantime, 4.6km/hour isn't all that much, normal walk speed is 6km/h.
- Buttons - 3 physical buttons optimized for gaming response and independently programmable
I see 2 buttons and clickable wheel. Wanna bet how often clicking the wheel results in "rotate wheel" event?
- Non-slip side rails and new ergonomic ambidextrous design
Sounds so '80s
- Zero acoustic Teflon feet for smooth motion over any surface
Means lower friction = always getting too far, need extra force to stop.
- Gold plated USB connector for maximum conductivity
For maximum $$$ conductivity that is.
- Size: 5.04" length x 2.5" width x 1.54" height
Pretty unwieldy. If you use a mousepad, more often than not it will stick off one side of it.
- 7 foot, lightweight, non-tangle cord
I get that with a $3 mouse. Cheap and easy to break.
4 serial terminals plugged into a SGI Challenge running IRIX. 4 guys with root access. The task: Stay logged on and kill (-9) the others. The most ultimate deathmatch. Log in. Use 'ps', try to figure out which login is yours. Kill -9 the other processes kicking the others. Watch "ps" list for new logons. More than once you'll kill -9 yourself. More than once they will kill your logon process before you do. Spawn extra shells as decoys. Attempt to append another line to your "ultimate weapon" script. Try to read manpage to find what option on IRIX version of 'ps' displays terminal you're connected from. Remember login process number of the opponent who kicked you before you managed to finish typing the PID and use it immediately after the last login.
That was about the most fun multiplayer game I ever played:D
Won't that memory-leak the system? I'm not a DOS guru but on UNIX this would hog the memory in matter of moments - the script never quits after calling another instance of itself.
Also insert a nice pause/delay so that you don't hog your -own- system. 1s is enough.
...which makes a great opportunity to ridicule these who support education as a sport. Not that it would change anything, but at least will piss the bozos off.
In sports it's about competing, deciding who is better. Drugs unballance it. The aim is not to be even faster, even stronger, but to be faster, stronger than the others. In education the aim is to teach. Doesn't matter if you're best in class or just average, what matters is if you know, understand. Stats like "in top 10 of the exam" twist the idea. The exam is not a competition, it's a test of efficiency of teaching, system feedback to decide "proceed", "improve" or "try again". If you can solve all the tasks using drugs, fine, you can solve all the tasks. If you can't, should you be punished because you might get higher score than a kid who doesn't take drugs, and that would feel unfair, or should you be allowed because you DID learn this all, and you DO understand it - while the drug works.
Education is not a sports discipline. It's not about "who is better" but "who is good enough". Health concerns aside, if you feel -others- would be harmed by -my- advantage from taking drugs, you misunderstand the idea of education.
One more problem. I often encounter websites that use CSS where tables would produce about the same results, and with CSS the site runs like a snail. It downloads faster, less markup overhead etc, but if I open 5 pages at once (my habit, see a list of links, middle-click them all to load in tabs, continue reading), Firefox freezes for, like, 30 seconds to render them. MSIE does even worse.
CSS is awfully computationally heavy. Full CSS support would be a hell for handhelds and such. It defines how things should look like, but not what the browser is to do to make them look like that. Computers hate this kind of approach - you demand results but you don't tell how to achieve them. SQL thanks to limited reach, works. Prolog failed a big time. AI is to appear "in 5 years" for last 50 years. And now you tell the computer a set of sometimes contradictory rules and "place this stuff any way you want, not violating these rules".
Writing a full HTML-only, CSS-Free browser for a handheld, one that can render tables and all HTML elements properly but ignores CSS is easier than writing one that reasonably follows the specs of CSS beyond the simple "@mobile" style. CSS pretty much closed doors to fully-featured webbrowsers on handhelds. They will be stuck with crude "@mobile" stylesheets for a long, long time yet, because "@screen" became too complex.
Lock the handicapped in a ghetto, because this way you'll have it easier to provide them with all they need. Don't let them out, because there's a dangerous, handicapped-unfriendly world out there.
Radio is wireless signal with barely enough power to drive minimal, very sensitive part of a circuit through relatively big antenna. It NEEDS local power and amplifiers to work. A radio that does not require external power, able to power up small, weak earphones using only the broadcast waver and at barely audible volume will require 5-10 meters of antenna length. No working unpowered pocket radios, sorry.
RFID tag 5 milimeters long needs to be powered up with the pulse from the transmitter and use the received power to power up its own transmitter, logic circuits, memory with the data to be sent, clock/loop to generate frequency for carrier and values for binary data - that's a lot of circuits and not entirely power-friendly ones running from power from a single minimal size antenna. Great care must be taken that the power broadcast doesn't jam the receiver. There's definitely no power and time for the receiver to analyse the source of the power, or any data that might get carried together with the power, to listen to other RFIDs and try not to interrupt them, no room to store the power for later use for any significant reply delay and so on.
This IS a rocket science. You're trying to reach the orbit with black gunpowder and a fuse, because you got a sniff how the rockets fly, but you don't understand why they need to use such inconvenient hydrogen-oxygen mix for fuel and you assumed "more powder=fly higher". Wireless power as in POWER, not DATA CARRIER is still a secret. Wireless power to power up radio transmitters until recently was a taboo. Directional EMP pulse is pretty much capable of powering up devices, but it is much better suited for frying them, and that's about what you're facing here.
Wireless Power is. Tesla tried this. He screwed up a big time, it worked but created far more problems than solved. Few tried it with any success. Only relatively recently TI came up with RFID which works... sometimes. The "radio" part is least of concern. If you could place a fixed transmitter sending a chosen signal continuously, no biggie. That's not even undergraduate project. The problem is RFID is to radio what submarine is to rowboat. And you still try to navigate using the stars.
>>If you have only another walkie-talkie and no directional antenna, you won't find me.
>So, I will provide myself with one.
Good luck. In the middle of the jungle. Patents, industrial secrets, regulations, lack of documentation...
>> The signal from the scanners is not directional. . .
>It is if I have constructed them to be. I don't get this argument at all. It's doofey.
So you want to construct directional RFID scanners. Get sued for constructing RFID scanners and reverse-engineering them. And if you avoid that somehow, you still need to understand how they work and send a narrow beam of VERY strong signal. Quite a bit of advanced electronics. Oh, and how are you going to scan the area? Tilting the antenna mechanically? Then either the beam is quite thick (and catches many RFIDs at once, plus precision of location sucks) or time grows enormously as a narrow beam scans lots and lots of area.
> Like you can tell where one walkie-talkie is while 15 of them broadcast on the same frequency simultaneously.
> If each one is broadcasting a unique digital pulse code and I filter on the code, not the carrier, yes.
You can't filter on the code. You broadcast "breath of life", strong pulse that powers them all up but provides no data. Once woken up, they broadcast ID without care if anything else broadcasts in the meantime. So before you can filter by ID, you have to fish the data out of ether, and the moment you ping a box of RFIDs, they all reply. You can't broadcast "everything except #nnn keep quiet, #nnn report." You broadcast "Everything in range report" and that's the only thing you can do.
> The information I am seeking is not the code. I know the code a priori. Think about it.
The information you're seeking is distance/direction of item with a code you know a priori. If you get 100 code replies, you need to seek this particular code in these replies. Directional antenna could limit the number of replies from scarcely distributed items but still a box of tagged items will create enough noise to kill any single signal.
And as for measuring the speed:
Half-meter distance measurement precision to make it nearly useful is resolution of about 0.1 nanoseconds. Give me off-the-shelf timer providing such resolution. That's equivalent of 30GHZ CPU performing 3 cycles long loop, or some VERY clean analog circuit with every milimeter of tracks on the PCB calculated carefully. Add to that probably about 10 microseconds tollerance in rise times and general response time of the RFID and you have your signal (distance delay) 5 orders of magnitude weaker than the noise (other delays).
You found a pet project and you're blinded by "how cool it is" neglecting some obvious difficulties. I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying 10 years is a good deadline for such a project.
> A walkie-talkie doesn't provide position either, but if you're using one my hit team will find you.
If you have only another walkie-talkie and no directional antenna, you won't find me. Readers can't detect the direction the signal is coming from. No indication of direction, strength, time etc. Cell phones can "ping" the station and triangulate their position because they have means to measure the delay of answer, and the stations are in reasonable distance. Here, ping sent at light speed will return with too many delays from sources other than distance and and with the distance delay too short to be of any use.
> Like your walkie-talkie crashes from all the signals at once?
Like you can tell where one walkie-talkie is while 15 of them broadcast on the same frequency simultaneously. RFID signal reply is very weak and requires pretty sensitive reader. If you have 100 items in your house tagged, all 100 will reply to the ping at the same time. Even though each of them has an unique ID, they will simply jam each other, the reader won't be able to pick a single reply from the noise created.
> You can't find your car keys? Go to the computer, ask it where they are. The scanners sweep the room pinging the car keys. Only the car keys will respond.
Everything will respond. The signal from the scanners is not directional and all tags within range reply. The only thing you may attempt to measure is the signal "roundtrip" for one given tag, but this is encumbered with too many errors.
> Sounds like a one week hack to me.
As soon as you start to measure time it takes the radio waves to get to the tag and back, it will grow into a yearly project for a corporation. Unless you try to build a directional, beam-area RFID reader. That sounds like a yearly project for a single individual or a weekly project for a corporation.
RFID doesn't provide position (other than "present within range") and the readers would crash DDoS'd from more than a few signals at once anyway. The idea isn't bad but nowadays RFID is too crude for that.
If you place two wires in paralell next to each other, you get some capacitance between them. Place lots of such pairs to increase total capacitance. Bundle them together into a thick multi-wire cable (isolated), and connect roughly half (randomly chosen or specifically every second or such) to "+", the other half to "-" and you get such a capacitor, with capacitance depending on number and length of wires. Of course not too long, not to make it into a coil as well. Reduce everything in size, using nanotubes instead of wires and you get this thing. Instead of creating large lengths of the wires=nanotunes, they increase their number (thickness of the multi-wire cable) taking only a thin slice of very very thick cable.
Old:
x + x | x ======== x | x -
New:
x + x | x ----------- x | | | | | | x|||||||||||| x|||||||||||| x|||||||||||| x| | | | | | x----------- x | x -
Like the old tunable "air capacitors" just using needles instead of fins.
Slashdot Mirror
...but the review sounds like written by a complete clueless moron.
"The new computer has more gigabytes than the old computer and thanks to these all additional megabytes it's faster. The bits get computered in the additional gigabytes and each gigabyte can work separately so more bits can be computered at the same time resulting in faster computering by the computer."
...and nuke all the sand-niggers into oblivion at the same time. Just profits!
The primary problem with the magnet is the -uniform- field. The feature of the drive is the differences between field of "0" and "1" bits. Say, "1"s are N-S, "0"s are S-N. Now if you apply a strong field to the whole disk, the "1"s may go more towards no magnetic orientation at all, "0"s towards way stronger "S-N" and as result they are still distinguishable. A narrow beam of very noisy even if not very strong magnetic field will do much more damage than a very strong magnet.
My reaction?
"OMG YAY GOOGLE IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD"
I, for one, welcome our Google overlords. I'd like to remind them as a trusted IT personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their undercover computational centres.
Whole body acceleration sustained for seconds is lethal above 8g.
But this thing reaches top speed in 0.1s with maximum allowed acceleration, meaning the whole acceleration rating is moot. It just means about as much that the mouse will survive a fall from the table. Since it's an optical mouse, there's no mechanical elements that could impact registering of acceleration, it registers just separate static images and compares them.
My keyboard registers keypresses of keys accelerated by 15g too.
- 1200 actions per minute Optimized for Real-Time Strategy (RTS) / Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG).
20 actions per second. Hummm... Lemme imagine pulling this kind of stunt. Most vigorious masturbation is less than 10 actions per second.
- Infrared engine powered by Razer Precision
Doesn't ring a bell.
- 1600 DPI, twice that of conventional high performance sensors
How many pixels (of pointer travel on screen) per point of movement? I mean, if I have a screen of 1600x1200, moving the mouse an inch would send the pointer across the whole screen width with 1:1 mapping. Pretty much unplayable, aim at a 16x16px icon with that, you need 0.01 inch hand movement precision. Of course the points get downsampled, and as result the extra resolution - wasted. Useless.
- Ultra large non-slip mouse buttons, tactile response design
Didn't happen to me to slip on a mouse button or any problems with finding it. But clicking accidentially by resting my palm on the mouse - yes. The bigger the buttons the better the chance for unwanted click.
- Award winning Razer drivers featuring On-the-Fly sensitivity adjustment
Drivers could support on-the-fly sensitivity adjustment. For any mouse.
- Frame rate over 6400 frames per second (5.8 megapixels per second)
That means about 100 frames per screen display frame. Your character can turn 3 times around before the screen updates to show it, thanks to this mouse. More frames per second than the screen can show is useless.
- 16 bit data path, as compared to 8 bit and 12 bit data paths
used by other conventional mice
transferring data of what? Usually mouse sends relative movement distances. At 6400 frames per second, relative distance between two frames can't be more than 3-4 bits long number.
- Always-On(TM) Mode - the optical sensor never powers down -
provides instantaneous response at all times during gameplay
I didn't know "Always-On" was a trademark. Anyway, seems like removal of a feature...
- High speed motion detection, up to 40ips and 15g
I'd like to see your hand after having it accelerated by 15g. All bones powdered. Meantime, 4.6km/hour isn't all that much, normal walk speed is 6km/h.
- Buttons - 3 physical buttons optimized for gaming response and independently programmable
I see 2 buttons and clickable wheel. Wanna bet how often clicking the wheel results in "rotate wheel" event?
- Non-slip side rails and new ergonomic ambidextrous design
Sounds so '80s
- Zero acoustic Teflon feet for smooth motion over any surface
Means lower friction = always getting too far, need extra force to stop.
- Gold plated USB connector for maximum conductivity
For maximum $$$ conductivity that is.
- Size: 5.04" length x 2.5" width x 1.54" height
Pretty unwieldy. If you use a mousepad, more often than not it will stick off one side of it.
- 7 foot, lightweight, non-tangle cord
I get that with a $3 mouse. Cheap and easy to break.
Ever tried "UNIX DOOM"?
:D
4 serial terminals plugged into a SGI Challenge running IRIX. 4 guys with root access. The task: Stay logged on and kill (-9) the others. The most ultimate deathmatch.
Log in.
Use 'ps', try to figure out which login is yours. Kill -9 the other processes kicking the others. Watch "ps" list for new logons. More than once you'll kill -9 yourself. More than once they will kill your logon process before you do. Spawn extra shells as decoys. Attempt to append another line to your "ultimate weapon" script. Try to read manpage to find what option on IRIX version of 'ps' displays terminal you're connected from. Remember login process number of the opponent who kicked you before you managed to finish typing the PID and use it immediately after the last login.
That was about the most fun multiplayer game I ever played
The hack seems really simple:
"Please try again by clicking the Refresh button in your web browser."
I did, but I don't feel more refreshed really. What am I doing wrong?
Hijack the address of the WGA server.
Make a spoof/fake WGA server run under the hijacked address.
Remotely take over all the systems that connect.
Brick a billion of computers in one night.
While the Police of the whole world would be on your neck, it would be worth seeing Microsoft getting out of this.
Won't that memory-leak the system? I'm not a DOS guru but on UNIX this would hog the memory in matter of moments - the script never quits after calling another instance of itself.
Also insert a nice pause/delay so that you don't hog your -own- system. 1s is enough.
Unplug all the plugs.
Open the window (the one in the wall, not on the screen)
Pick up the computer.
Throw through the window.
Mac uninstalled.
...which makes a great opportunity to ridicule these who support education as a sport. Not that it would change anything, but at least will piss the bozos off.
In sports it's about competing, deciding who is better. Drugs unballance it. The aim is not to be even faster, even stronger, but to be faster, stronger than the others.
In education the aim is to teach. Doesn't matter if you're best in class or just average, what matters is if you know, understand. Stats like "in top 10 of the exam" twist the idea. The exam is not a competition, it's a test of efficiency of teaching, system feedback to decide "proceed", "improve" or "try again". If you can solve all the tasks using drugs, fine, you can solve all the tasks. If you can't, should you be punished because you might get higher score than a kid who doesn't take drugs, and that would feel unfair, or should you be allowed because you DID learn this all, and you DO understand it - while the drug works.
Education is not a sports discipline. It's not about "who is better" but "who is good enough". Health concerns aside, if you feel -others- would be harmed by -my- advantage from taking drugs, you misunderstand the idea of education.
Something like that... I really don't write media-specific css styles often enough to remember the syntax without reference.
One more problem. I often encounter websites that use CSS where tables would produce about the same results, and with CSS the site runs like a snail. It downloads faster, less markup overhead etc, but if I open 5 pages at once (my habit, see a list of links, middle-click them all to load in tabs, continue reading), Firefox freezes for, like, 30 seconds to render them. MSIE does even worse.
CSS is awfully computationally heavy. Full CSS support would be a hell for handhelds and such. It defines how things should look like, but not what the browser is to do to make them look like that. Computers hate this kind of approach - you demand results but you don't tell how to achieve them. SQL thanks to limited reach, works. Prolog failed a big time. AI is to appear "in 5 years" for last 50 years. And now you tell the computer a set of sometimes contradictory rules and "place this stuff any way you want, not violating these rules".
Writing a full HTML-only, CSS-Free browser for a handheld, one that can render tables and all HTML elements properly but ignores CSS is easier than writing one that reasonably follows the specs of CSS beyond the simple "@mobile" style. CSS pretty much closed doors to fully-featured webbrowsers on handhelds. They will be stuck with crude "@mobile" stylesheets for a long, long time yet, because "@screen" became too complex.
Lock the handicapped in a ghetto, because this way you'll have it easier to provide them with all they need. Don't let them out, because there's a dangerous, handicapped-unfriendly world out there.
You understood?
radio is wireless.
kfg is clueless.
Radio is wireless signal with barely enough power to drive minimal, very sensitive part of a circuit through relatively big antenna. It NEEDS local power and amplifiers to work. A radio that does not require external power, able to power up small, weak earphones using only the broadcast waver and at barely audible volume will require 5-10 meters of antenna length. No working unpowered pocket radios, sorry.
RFID tag 5 milimeters long needs to be powered up with the pulse from the transmitter and use the received power to power up its own transmitter, logic circuits, memory with the data to be sent, clock/loop to generate frequency for carrier and values for binary data - that's a lot of circuits and not entirely power-friendly ones running from power from a single minimal size antenna. Great care must be taken that the power broadcast doesn't jam the receiver. There's definitely no power and time for the receiver to analyse the source of the power, or any data that might get carried together with the power, to listen to other RFIDs and try not to interrupt them, no room to store the power for later use for any significant reply delay and so on.
This IS a rocket science. You're trying to reach the orbit with black gunpowder and a fuse, because you got a sniff how the rockets fly, but you don't understand why they need to use such inconvenient hydrogen-oxygen mix for fuel and you assumed "more powder=fly higher". Wireless power as in POWER, not DATA CARRIER is still a secret. Wireless power to power up radio transmitters until recently was a taboo. Directional EMP pulse is pretty much capable of powering up devices, but it is much better suited for frying them, and that's about what you're facing here.
>Radio isn't a secret anymo'.
Wireless Power is.
Tesla tried this. He screwed up a big time, it worked but created far more problems than solved. Few tried it with any success. Only relatively recently TI came up with RFID which works... sometimes.
The "radio" part is least of concern. If you could place a fixed transmitter sending a chosen signal continuously, no biggie. That's not even undergraduate project. The problem is RFID is to radio what submarine is to rowboat. And you still try to navigate using the stars.
"prompting (...) to demand the resignation of the head of the NNSA"
Demand resignation of the remaining 1499 employees on the list, and the list will become useless. Problem solved.
If you know the enemy captured the plans of your attack, change the plans.
>>If you have only another walkie-talkie and no directional antenna, you won't find me.
>So, I will provide myself with one.
Good luck. In the middle of the jungle.
Patents, industrial secrets, regulations, lack of documentation...
>> The signal from the scanners is not directional. . .
>It is if I have constructed them to be. I don't get this argument at all. It's doofey.
So you want to construct directional RFID scanners. Get sued for constructing RFID scanners and reverse-engineering them. And if you avoid that somehow, you still need to understand how they work and send a narrow beam of VERY strong signal. Quite a bit of advanced electronics. Oh, and how are you going to scan the area? Tilting the antenna mechanically? Then either the beam is quite thick (and catches many RFIDs at once, plus precision of location sucks) or time grows enormously as a narrow beam scans lots and lots of area.
> Like you can tell where one walkie-talkie is while 15 of them broadcast on the same frequency simultaneously.
> If each one is broadcasting a unique digital pulse code and I filter on the code, not the carrier, yes.
You can't filter on the code.
You broadcast "breath of life", strong pulse that powers them all up but provides no data. Once woken up, they broadcast ID without care if anything else broadcasts in the meantime. So before you can filter by ID, you have to fish the data out of ether, and the moment you ping a box of RFIDs, they all reply. You can't broadcast "everything except #nnn keep quiet, #nnn report." You broadcast "Everything in range report" and that's the only thing you can do.
> The information I am seeking is not the code. I know the code a priori. Think about it.
The information you're seeking is distance/direction of item with a code you know a priori. If you get 100 code replies, you need to seek this particular code in these replies. Directional antenna could limit the number of replies from scarcely distributed items but still a box of tagged items will create enough noise to kill any single signal.
And as for measuring the speed:
Half-meter distance measurement precision to make it nearly useful is resolution of about 0.1 nanoseconds. Give me off-the-shelf timer providing such resolution. That's equivalent of 30GHZ CPU performing 3 cycles long loop, or some VERY clean analog circuit with every milimeter of tracks on the PCB calculated carefully. Add to that probably about 10 microseconds tollerance in rise times and general response time of the RFID and you have your signal (distance delay) 5 orders of magnitude weaker than the noise (other delays).
You found a pet project and you're blinded by "how cool it is" neglecting some obvious difficulties. I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying 10 years is a good deadline for such a project.
> A walkie-talkie doesn't provide position either, but if you're using one my hit team will find you.
If you have only another walkie-talkie and no directional antenna, you won't find me. Readers can't detect the direction the signal is coming from. No indication of direction, strength, time etc. Cell phones can "ping" the station and triangulate their position because they have means to measure the delay of answer, and the stations are in reasonable distance. Here, ping sent at light speed will return with too many delays from sources other than distance and and with the distance delay too short to be of any use.
> Like your walkie-talkie crashes from all the signals at once?
Like you can tell where one walkie-talkie is while 15 of them broadcast on the same frequency simultaneously. RFID signal reply is very weak and requires pretty sensitive reader. If you have 100 items in your house tagged, all 100 will reply to the ping at the same time. Even though each of them has an unique ID, they will simply jam each other, the reader won't be able to pick a single reply from the noise created.
> You can't find your car keys? Go to the computer, ask it where they are. The scanners sweep the room pinging the car keys. Only the car keys will respond.
Everything will respond. The signal from the scanners is not directional and all tags within range reply. The only thing you may attempt to measure is the signal "roundtrip" for one given tag, but this is encumbered with too many errors.
> Sounds like a one week hack to me.
As soon as you start to measure time it takes the radio waves to get to the tag and back, it will grow into a yearly project for a corporation. Unless you try to build a directional, beam-area RFID reader. That sounds like a yearly project for a single individual or a weekly project for a corporation.
Yep. The trick is to dig it under the executioner's feet.
Sure, "Train" the support. In such a way that they will BEG you to come back.
4 letters define how the training should be conducted:
B. O. F. H.
RFID doesn't provide position (other than "present within range") and the readers would crash DDoS'd from more than a few signals at once anyway. The idea isn't bad but nowadays RFID is too crude for that.