..been extremely rocky. His experience with TVT, especially, was pretty terrible - to the point where he worked with one of the mastering engineers to sneak two 'secret' tracks onto the original release of Broken, since the album's producer said 'no' to them. It's been said before: the fact that he's made enough money to continue producing his own music (and the music of artists he respects), then distributing it himself, is the reason this works. Same with Radiohead. He can make his own publicity due to his fanbase (full disclosure: I'm a member of that fanbase). On top of that, he's got good instincts for marketing and hype.
I will third the recommendation that you download the first 9 tracks; they will convince you to immediately surrender $5 for the other 27. It is very, very good stuff.
-Matt
Actually, increasing the transmit power *can* buy you greater data rates, as long as your data rate is limited by signal-to-noise ratio.
For example, let us build (in our minds) a transmitter/receiver pair which can encode/decode one symbol every second. OK? Every second we send one symbol (effectively a magic combination of waves which means something to a demodulator) from the transmitter, and every second we decode one symbol at the receiver.
If we have lousy SNR, we might only be able to differentiate between the most distinct two states of the transmitter (one bit per symbol: either 1 or 0), since all the noise impinging on our signal looks an awful lot like the more subtle states (or even worse, completely obstructs all states, making decoding impossible). This gives us a data rate of 1bps.
If we can increase the signal level at the receiver, thus increasing SNR (assuming we're not distorting the living hell out of our transmission, natch) but increasing our transmitter's output, we might be able to encode *two* bits per symbol (00, 01, 10 or 11) by adding two more symbols to the constellation. By doing this, we haven't increased our symbol rate (still only one symbol every second), but we *have* doubled our throughput.
"xMax is unconventional," said Stuart Schwartz, professor of electrical engineering at Princeton Universithy, who has scrutinised xG's demonstration set-up, speaking at the xMax demonstration. "It is clever and innovative, but it is not magic. It uses single cycle modulation, and needs much less power than other technologies."
Single-cycle modulation is the invention of xG's chief technology officer Joe Bobier, with backing from Mooers Branton, a merchant bank, whose founder Rick Mooers also serves as xG's chief executive. The modulation scheme alters the frequency of individual cycles of the carrier wave, which has the effect of introducing very low power side-bands to the signal.
My take is that they're using the difference in frequency between the carrier frequency and the generated sideband frequency to represent a value (ie. +10kHz = 0001; +15kHz = 0010; etc.). This seems awfully similar to the SSB modulation commonly used in shortwave radiocommunications to me.
Since they're operating in the license-free 900mHz ISM band, it also *must* implement some sort of frequency-hopping (or direct sequence, I suppose) spread spectrum stuff in order to be legal. Could be kind of an interesting technology. I'd like to play with a couple of the radios and a good spectrum analyzer to see what it looks like.
In the interests of full disclosure, IANARE (but I played one at a job once for awhile).
"Doctor, your patient has shuffled off this mortal coil." and "Ouch! Stop poking me!" are two phrases that will be forever with me thanks to that game. I probably killed, like the GP, thousands of patients before finally successfully removing an appendix. I played with a mouse, though, and when I got frustruated, I somewhat enjoyed carving intricate patterns into my patients.
Ah, yes. I've often wondered why they haven't come out with a new version Life and Death. It was a great game.
I use Outlook 2003 with the FranklinCovey tools ("Seven Habits of Highly Effective People") installed. Being able to organize tasks across a 3x3 matrix of "importance" vs. "urgency", having master and daily task lists, etc. seems like it will be very useful for me with respect to getting organized, ensuring that I deliver what I commit to, etc. An additional nifty feature is associating notes that you take in a meeting with the meeting, and giving you a master list of the notes you've taken... ahhh.
If you have Outlook, you can download Plan Plus for a 30 day trial here.
I'm not an agent or representative of the company either, I just think it's a pretty good tool.
-Matt
Supermicro servers can be had in just about any configuration you like with up to 16 slots for RAM on the dual Xeon boards. Populate a single Xeon and a bunch of RAM and call it a RAM server.
We've had good luck with Supermicro machines and Linux. The peripherals all have drivers, the sensors are all supported, etc.
Good luck!
Heh, we didn't have such great luck with it. There are a few bugs surrounding using a single Barracuda to deal with mail for multiple domains, and found that it was randomly just dropping all mail for a given domain every now and again.
Worked very well for a single domain though.
-Matt
Kodak actually prototyped 17" and 19" OLED displays as well (passive matrix both), and were looking into putting OLED matrices on a flexible polymer base (yes, this means exactly what you think it does).
One of the OEL display's greatest assets, imho, is the fact that each pixel emits its own light - no induced eyestrain from your brain trying to determine if it should be focusing on the glass surface or the light behind it.
-Matt
..3Com used to make all kinds of high-end networking gear (those of you in the cable industry will be familiar with 3Com CMTSes). Their kit never adhered to standards ("DOCSIS? What's DOCSIS?" - as if DOCSIS equipment needed any help being incompatible and/or unpredictable with other DOCSIS gear), never worked properly, and their support was always terrible.
One of our customers bought about $50k worth of 3Com broadband over cable equipment, called a few days later to ask about a firmware upgrade, and were informed that 3Com had never made such a piece of equipment.
Classy.
-Matt
As per topic: it seems to me that centralization is a good thing when no copyright violations are taking place. It allows easy sorting/searching/etc. based on data that is easy to find (the central server) - I think this is a great thing for indy/garage/etc artists looking for another place to promote themselves.
-Matt
..is the DMCA basically legislation saying "the US government will kill you and your children if you should choose to attempt to learn more about the consumer electronics for which you have paid so much of your hard-earned money"? I remember a little while back they detained that Russian programmer under the DMCA. It sounds scary.
Somebody call my mommy!:(
-Matt
Right, because PHP and JSP aren't interpreted languages that require a binary layer below them in order to do anything. Those binary layers also don't need to be ported from platform to platform, and introducing new features that work fine on one platform and don't work fine on the others *never* happens.
Once again - initial knee-jerk thoughts were Apache/Web-centric, naturally there are a thousand million other applications that could benefit from such a library.
Trolls... dunno why I bother responding.
-Matt
..with the new support for C++ mods, you might just be able to code GameSpy support yourself. An intermediate map with a graphical representation of the available games from GameSpy, perhaps? Use your imagination.:)
-Matt
Wow, that's an unwarranted response. Given that it's an Apache project, my immediate thoughts for its use were Apache-centric.
I didn't suggest that it was a virtual machine. In fact, in my post, I clearly identified it as a 'compatibility layer', which is exactly what it is.
Doesn't anybody read anything on Slashdot before posting? Are the Slashdot forums just a bunch of people trying to post/mod/etc. as quickly as possible in a ridiculous attempt to collect karma?
*sigh*
-Matt
Hooray for compatibility layers! ...I wonder what the performance of this stuff is like as compared to Java. My knee-jerk reaction is "wow, it should be much faster!", but I suppose time will tell. Could make for some interesting new PHP/JSP/etc. type things, or wider compatibility for them.
Of course, it may also remain relatively obscure and unused. Given the attention they've paid to detail on it, that would be a shame, imho.
-Matt
My understanding of one of the primary issues surrounding cellphone use in aircraft (that the picocell would address) is that lack of ground-based signal obstruction gave cellphones fairly long range in the air, and that range confused towers, made hand-offs nearly impossible to co-ordinate, and caused a huge headache for billing (eg: what cell was he actually in, which carrier was he roaming to, etc).
-Matt
Bluetooth has been a money-losing proposition for Ericsson for a long while. Also, I had a change to play with one of their early developer kits, and I hated it. The interface was terrible, the software was buggy, and even the hardware was unstable. IBM's kit was much better. Ah, it just wouldn't be Slashdot if *somebody* didn't slag their technology.
-Matt
Slashdot Mirror
..been extremely rocky. His experience with TVT, especially, was pretty terrible - to the point where he worked with one of the mastering engineers to sneak two 'secret' tracks onto the original release of Broken, since the album's producer said 'no' to them. It's been said before: the fact that he's made enough money to continue producing his own music (and the music of artists he respects), then distributing it himself, is the reason this works. Same with Radiohead. He can make his own publicity due to his fanbase (full disclosure: I'm a member of that fanbase). On top of that, he's got good instincts for marketing and hype. I will third the recommendation that you download the first 9 tracks; they will convince you to immediately surrender $5 for the other 27. It is very, very good stuff. -Matt
Actually, increasing the transmit power *can* buy you greater data rates, as long as your data rate is limited by signal-to-noise ratio.
For example, let us build (in our minds) a transmitter/receiver pair which can encode/decode one symbol every second. OK? Every second we send one symbol (effectively a magic combination of waves which means something to a demodulator) from the transmitter, and every second we decode one symbol at the receiver.
If we have lousy SNR, we might only be able to differentiate between the most distinct two states of the transmitter (one bit per symbol: either 1 or 0), since all the noise impinging on our signal looks an awful lot like the more subtle states (or even worse, completely obstructs all states, making decoding impossible). This gives us a data rate of 1bps.
If we can increase the signal level at the receiver, thus increasing SNR (assuming we're not distorting the living hell out of our transmission, natch) but increasing our transmitter's output, we might be able to encode *two* bits per symbol (00, 01, 10 or 11) by adding two more symbols to the constellation. By doing this, we haven't increased our symbol rate (still only one symbol every second), but we *have* doubled our throughput.
Make sense?
-Matt
My take is that they're using the difference in frequency between the carrier frequency and the generated sideband frequency to represent a value (ie. +10kHz = 0001; +15kHz = 0010; etc.). This seems awfully similar to the SSB modulation commonly used in shortwave radiocommunications to me.
Since they're operating in the license-free 900mHz ISM band, it also *must* implement some sort of frequency-hopping (or direct sequence, I suppose) spread spectrum stuff in order to be legal. Could be kind of an interesting technology. I'd like to play with a couple of the radios and a good spectrum analyzer to see what it looks like.
In the interests of full disclosure, IANARE (but I played one at a job once for awhile).
-Matt
"Doctor, your patient has shuffled off this mortal coil." and "Ouch! Stop poking me!" are two phrases that will be forever with me thanks to that game. I probably killed, like the GP, thousands of patients before finally successfully removing an appendix. I played with a mouse, though, and when I got frustruated, I somewhat enjoyed carving intricate patterns into my patients. Ah, yes. I've often wondered why they haven't come out with a new version Life and Death. It was a great game.
I use Outlook 2003 with the FranklinCovey tools ("Seven Habits of Highly Effective People") installed. Being able to organize tasks across a 3x3 matrix of "importance" vs. "urgency", having master and daily task lists, etc. seems like it will be very useful for me with respect to getting organized, ensuring that I deliver what I commit to, etc. An additional nifty feature is associating notes that you take in a meeting with the meeting, and giving you a master list of the notes you've taken... ahhh.
If you have Outlook, you can download Plan Plus for a 30 day trial here.
I'm not an agent or representative of the company either, I just think it's a pretty good tool.
-Matt
Supermicro servers can be had in just about any configuration you like with up to 16 slots for RAM on the dual Xeon boards. Populate a single Xeon and a bunch of RAM and call it a RAM server. We've had good luck with Supermicro machines and Linux. The peripherals all have drivers, the sensors are all supported, etc. Good luck!
Heh, we didn't have such great luck with it. There are a few bugs surrounding using a single Barracuda to deal with mail for multiple domains, and found that it was randomly just dropping all mail for a given domain every now and again.
Worked very well for a single domain though.
-Matt
Yes, the Big Blue building - IBM would be pleased indeed! "You named a building after us? Why?" *chuckle*
-Matt
Kodak actually prototyped 17" and 19" OLED displays as well (passive matrix both), and were looking into putting OLED matrices on a flexible polymer base (yes, this means exactly what you think it does).
One of the OEL display's greatest assets, imho, is the fact that each pixel emits its own light - no induced eyestrain from your brain trying to determine if it should be focusing on the glass surface or the light behind it.
-Matt
..3Com used to make all kinds of high-end networking gear (those of you in the cable industry will be familiar with 3Com CMTSes). Their kit never adhered to standards ("DOCSIS? What's DOCSIS?" - as if DOCSIS equipment needed any help being incompatible and/or unpredictable with other DOCSIS gear), never worked properly, and their support was always terrible.
One of our customers bought about $50k worth of 3Com broadband over cable equipment, called a few days later to ask about a firmware upgrade, and were informed that 3Com had never made such a piece of equipment.
Classy.
-Matt
As per topic: it seems to me that centralization is a good thing when no copyright violations are taking place. It allows easy sorting/searching/etc. based on data that is easy to find (the central server) - I think this is a great thing for indy/garage/etc artists looking for another place to promote themselves.
-Matt
..is the DMCA basically legislation saying "the US government will kill you and your children if you should choose to attempt to learn more about the consumer electronics for which you have paid so much of your hard-earned money"? I remember a little while back they detained that Russian programmer under the DMCA. It sounds scary. :(
Somebody call my mommy!
-Matt
Right, because PHP and JSP aren't interpreted languages that require a binary layer below them in order to do anything. Those binary layers also don't need to be ported from platform to platform, and introducing new features that work fine on one platform and don't work fine on the others *never* happens.
Once again - initial knee-jerk thoughts were Apache/Web-centric, naturally there are a thousand million other applications that could benefit from such a library.
Trolls... dunno why I bother responding.
-Matt
..with the new support for C++ mods, you might just be able to code GameSpy support yourself. An intermediate map with a graphical representation of the available games from GameSpy, perhaps? Use your imagination. :)
-Matt
Wow, that's an unwarranted response. Given that it's an Apache project, my immediate thoughts for its use were Apache-centric.
I didn't suggest that it was a virtual machine. In fact, in my post, I clearly identified it as a 'compatibility layer', which is exactly what it is.
Doesn't anybody read anything on Slashdot before posting? Are the Slashdot forums just a bunch of people trying to post/mod/etc. as quickly as possible in a ridiculous attempt to collect karma?
*sigh*
-Matt
Hooray for compatibility layers!
...I wonder what the performance of this stuff is like as compared to Java. My knee-jerk reaction is "wow, it should be much faster!", but I suppose time will tell. Could make for some interesting new PHP/JSP/etc. type things, or wider compatibility for them.
Of course, it may also remain relatively obscure and unused. Given the attention they've paid to detail on it, that would be a shame, imho.
-Matt
..since I tend to drive sanely.
...if they put one on my motorcycle, on the other hand, I'm screwed.
-Matt
My understanding of one of the primary issues surrounding cellphone use in aircraft (that the picocell would address) is that lack of ground-based signal obstruction gave cellphones fairly long range in the air, and that range confused towers, made hand-offs nearly impossible to co-ordinate, and caused a huge headache for billing (eg: what cell was he actually in, which carrier was he roaming to, etc).
-Matt
...how's it feel to live in a totalitarian, fascist state, America? :D
-Matt
Bluetooth has been a money-losing proposition for Ericsson for a long while. Also, I had a change to play with one of their early developer kits, and I hated it. The interface was terrible, the software was buggy, and even the hardware was unstable. IBM's kit was much better. Ah, it just wouldn't be Slashdot if *somebody* didn't slag their technology.
-Matt
Hear, hear.
My thoughts exactly. Somebody mod that man straight into office.
Or wait... he might be too intelligent for politics.
-Matt