I've been at my first "real" job for about a month and a half (just finished grad school) and I already hate the word "solution" when used as marketingspeak.
While theoretically UWB can support an incredible data rate, in practice it's not possible. In my graduate research group (mprg.org) a whole group of people are studying UWB propagation, receiver structures, etc. To actually get the theoretical throughput, you need an incredible amount of power - because W/Hz is part of Shannon's capacity theorem. Even though the signal power spectral density is low and can hopefully blend in with the noise floor of any other receiver, the transmitter has to have a very powerful amplifier because it's power is going to be spread over a huge bandwidth.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just wanted to bring up something a few of us discussed on a boring night at the lab this summer.
People who have actually built transceivers so far can't get anywhere near the rates originally predicted (at least not without a shitload of errors). One very cool application of UWB is for radar/ranging/mapping. A friend of mine set up a UWB system that can determine the breathing rate & heart beat of a motionless person - even through a wall. I've also seen through the wall radar boxes for police applications (to scan inside a room before the cops break in to figure out where everybody is).
Oh and for that whole noise floor thing, you don't want to be near one of those transmitters if you have equipment running. Their damn pulser would overwhelm my software radio's RF front end every time they turned it on - and I was transmitting across a room from a directional antenna (log-periodic) to my antenna array!
----
Now onto the whole cell phone systems being overwhelmed - the systems were not designed to handle thousands of people all using their phones at the same time. It's never going to happen.
This bears repeating from the above post: If you don't want to do that yourself, pay a third party to do it, but *do not* and I mean *do not* ask the government to do it for you because you are too lazy to keep an eye on your children's Internet viewing. The rest of us do not give a shit about your desire to not pay attention to those in your family but we do care when you step into *our* personal space.
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From TFA: After ICANN's vote to approve.xxx, conservative groups in the United States called on their supporters to ask the Commerce Department to block the new suffix. The Family Research Council, for instance, warned that "pornographers will be given even more opportunities to flood our homes, libraries and society with pornography through the.xxx domain."
I'm not sure that I understand the complaint here. There's already porn everywhere on the internet. It is faster and easier to search for porn than almost anything else. But using the.xxx suffix will instantly unleash the floodgates of porn and force everybody to look at it?!? I thought it would make it easier for responsible parents, schools, libraries, etc. to block it on their children's computers. Is there something I don't understand here?
I read a security thing the other day that said spies in the government contractor arena are most likely to be white, heterosexual males (yes, they actually did have stats on the hetero/homo thing), and I just had to think, "which demographic would the majority of engineers in defense related industries fall into?" I would assume that it is a field primarily dominated by straight white guys.
The letter also mentioned manual hacks. Aren't a lot of Windows hacks/trojans/whatever completely automated scripts that can exploit the same vulnerabilities in the same way every time? I will admit (to my everlasting shame) that I don't know much about Linux but I'd assume that for most knowledgeable peoples' setups are unique, updated, and hard to simply send bots & such out to hack into.
Also, wouldn't Linux people be more likely to report their hacks to get information from the community on how to fix it or to warn the community that a fix is in order? I thought that was a benefit of the whole model....
In a study conducted only seven months ago they found that overall, the most vulnerable operating system for manual hacker attacks was Linux, accounting for 65.64% of all hacker breaches reported.
That just makes me wonder if Linux users will, in general, be more inclined to report such incidents. Since it developed by a community, it would make sense that any problems are reported to the community. Who do you talk to about being hacked in Windows? Where would I report it and who'd care? MS doesn't seem to.
Also, does that study say how many of the reported breaches were dealt with?
That reminds me of a segment on Dr. Katz a long time ago (I can't remember the comic, but I think it was Mark Maron):
comic: When we were in bed the other night, my wife accused me of being immature. Dr. K: What did you do? comic: I made faces at her. Dr. K: Do you think that was the appropriate response? comic: Well, she couldn't see me, she was on the bottom bunk.
This reminds me of the Beta vs. VHS competition. The one quesiton it always brought to my mind: if Beta truly was better than VHS, why did VHS win? Beta might have been the technically superior product, but there were many other factors that led to the success of VHS. Linux is definitely the superior OS, but Windows does have more going for it in terms of an overall product.
Ignorance of the law is not a defense in a courtroom, so how can "responsible" parents use that as an excuse when it comes to raising their own children?
When I was young, my parents let me watch whatever I wanted (within reason) and play whatever I wanted (then again, I grew up with NES, so that's probably a bit of a stretch). BUT they did explain to me the difference between right and wrong and gave me a good clue about how to conduct myself as a member of a civilized society.
Why don't we start protesting the protest group by giving them a list of demands? I'll start one:
raise your own kids and let us raise ours
stop making it harder for responsible adults to buy violent games
start a fund to pay for the migraine medicine for the headaches you cause reasonable, intelligent people
if these demands aren't met within 5 days of receipt, we'll know you have no sense of humor either
The rational response from those in the evolutionary camp is to poke around at the holes and see if they can't be resolved.
And there's a reason for that - scientists investigate the holes in their theories using the scientific method to either strengthen or destroy the theory. They don't attack it using unsubstantiated, nonfalsifiable claims.
I have not read the paper, so I can't be sure of this, but I know that in the papers I've written on my master's research that have been published there is an "Acknowledgements" section where I thank the company that sponsored the research, even naming some specific engineers at that company that gave me help. If anyone asks me who's behind the paper, all I have to say is RTFP.
Absolutely right on all points. The only area in which the PSP is "better" than the Game Boy is in the tech specs - better resolution, faster processor. I've never played a PSP, and after seeing the games out for it I don't care to. My GBA-SP rocks.
Their re-releases of old NES games was what cause me to buy it. I've played The Legend of Zelda (original NES) for the first time in many years and it was fun. I sitll have the ancient Tetris cartridge that I got with a Game Boy for Christmas the year it came out, and not only does it still work, but I use it on absolutely every plane trip I go on. Super Mario 3, the SNES Zelda game, they are all fun and they all fit in my pocket....unlike the PSP.
Sorry, I got on a rant, but in conclusion: there is NO way that Nintendo is gonig down. I play PS2 more, but I have some great Gamecube games that are just fun to relax and play (smash brothers, super monkey ball...). And the GBA is too entrenched for the PSP to simply wipe it out.
This reminds me of a comment brought up about HTML standards not being followed which led to flaws in some program, maybe the Google cache toolbar (I can't remember). The point is: improper use of HTML (i.e. not following the standards) by web designers caused flaws in other software, the latter of which was blamed although it followed the standards. It is the exact same principle with any language. If you do not follow the conventions then it is your fault if the person with whom you are trying to communicate does not understand. If they do, I guess it doesn't matter in that instant but can hardly be used as a case for generalization.
Actually, all communications is technically analog. Any "real" signal is an analog signal. The underlying transmitted information is what makes the system digital or analog.
Agreed. All of the universities and companies I've been a part of treat it the same way: you invent it, they get the patent (but they'll probably let you put yr name on it too). If you don't want the university to take a part of it, don't develop your product at the university. Don't use their computers, lab equipment, etc. Do it at home on your own time and it will be wholly yours. Does the submitter expect a job to pay him to develop products that will only benefit him? That's why people start their own companies.
As for GPL stuff, it can't be that hard to set up a project where the code is liscensed with it. In fact, my research group last year at Virginia Tech released a whole open source project for software radios under the GPL and I don't think they had too many problems. (if anyone is interested http://ossie.mprg.org/)
That's exactly what I've come to realize. I was watching the originals (I still have the VHS version) with my girlfriend who had never seen them before and they didn't really match the movies I remember from my childhood.
One thing that could have helped ep. 1-3 is a different writer or director. Lucas was not in total control of Empire and Jedi and they were pretty good. Maybe he should have loosened his grip a little bit and let someone else help.
Oh, and I'd be pissed if I were the director of Empire or Jedi because of all of Lucas' meddling with them for the special editions - I know the contract might have given Lucas special powers, but the director is supposed to be the primary creative voice behind any movie. Lucas basically added stuff into someone else's movie.
I am an electrical engineer, and *do* know tha the signal strenght in free space is proportional to the inverse of the distance squared - meaning that it drops off a lot pretty fast (this is what makes cell phones and radio stations able to reuse frequencies). It is also dependent on wavelength - shorter wavelength, shorter propagation (the environment acts as a natural lowpass filter).
Explicitly, the received power of a signal is given by:
P_r = P_t*G_t*G_r*L^2/(4*pi*d)^2
where P_t = transmitted power, G_t = transmitter antenna gain, G_r = receive antenna gain, L = wavelength, d = distance. Antenna gains are based on the antenna pattern - for a isotropic radiator (omnidirectional antenna, like on yr cell phone) it is a pretty wide pattern. A radio telescope should be pointed UP, which would make the gain at any angle at some acceptable deviation from UP much smaller than straight UP.
Also, are radio telescopes omnidirectional? Any telescope that doesn't gather the vast majority of its received energy from pointing a the sky would seem to me to be a pretty poor design - which is exactly why the soviet GPS causes problems with radio telescopes! If satellites point down and shoot most of their energy at the planet, telescopes looking straight at them are going to be significantly interfered with by those satellites.
Furthermore, if a radio telescope can pick up EMF from a cell phone's internal circuitry the EMF produced by the computers used to run the telescope would cause even bigger problems. Did you know that the clock speed of processors is in the RF range and has been for over a decade and that many aspects of processor design are similar to RF circuitry design with crosstalk, coupling, and shielding concerns? A 3GHz processor operates at a clock frequency much higher than a lot of cell phones. Even stronomers with cell phones in their pockets would screw with the data because they're standing right near the things!
Good point. The article could mention some signal levels that it receives from space and compare it to the levels that are possible from cell phones. They were also talking about the 2nd harmonic of the cell phone signals, which is not going to be as strong as the original signal and attenuated a lot more over distance anyway. I can't see this as being that big of a problem - unless planes are flying within (maybe) 20 miles of a telescope.
GLONASS, the Soviet version of GPS, throws out a large amount of power directly in the band reserved for radio telescopes but there are algorithms that can detect and remove it since the power spectral density of the signal is known. It's not a perfect solution, but it works pretty darn good.
Even though it would eventually be passed down to the consumers, they probably wouldn't notice if it was in the purchase price. It's probably more likely to get them to use the recycling programs if you don't charge them when they go to recycle the computer. People would rather chuck it in the trash than pay someone to recycle it as they already pay the garbage man anyway.
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Oh no, it was definitely on my radar. It's just that I'd rather watch paint dry than that movie. Even the trailers made me cringe.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Nice one.
I've been at my first "real" job for about a month and a half (just finished grad school) and I already hate the word "solution" when used as marketingspeak.
While theoretically UWB can support an incredible data rate, in practice it's not possible. In my graduate research group (mprg.org) a whole group of people are studying UWB propagation, receiver structures, etc. To actually get the theoretical throughput, you need an incredible amount of power - because W/Hz is part of Shannon's capacity theorem. Even though the signal power spectral density is low and can hopefully blend in with the noise floor of any other receiver, the transmitter has to have a very powerful amplifier because it's power is going to be spread over a huge bandwidth. I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just wanted to bring up something a few of us discussed on a boring night at the lab this summer. People who have actually built transceivers so far can't get anywhere near the rates originally predicted (at least not without a shitload of errors). One very cool application of UWB is for radar/ranging/mapping. A friend of mine set up a UWB system that can determine the breathing rate & heart beat of a motionless person - even through a wall. I've also seen through the wall radar boxes for police applications (to scan inside a room before the cops break in to figure out where everybody is). Oh and for that whole noise floor thing, you don't want to be near one of those transmitters if you have equipment running. Their damn pulser would overwhelm my software radio's RF front end every time they turned it on - and I was transmitting across a room from a directional antenna (log-periodic) to my antenna array! ---- Now onto the whole cell phone systems being overwhelmed - the systems were not designed to handle thousands of people all using their phones at the same time. It's never going to happen.
I wonder how pathetically nerdy the victims feel for getting beaten up and their stuff stolen in a wrold that isn't even real!
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From TFA: After ICANN's vote to approve .xxx, conservative groups in the United States called on their supporters to ask the Commerce Department to block the new suffix. The Family Research Council, for instance, warned that "pornographers will be given even more opportunities to flood our homes, libraries and society with pornography through the .xxx domain."
I'm not sure that I understand the complaint here. There's already porn everywhere on the internet. It is faster and easier to search for porn than almost anything else. But using the .xxx suffix will instantly unleash the floodgates of porn and force everybody to look at it?!? I thought it would make it easier for responsible parents, schools, libraries, etc. to block it on their children's computers. Is there something I don't understand here?
The letter also mentioned manual hacks. Aren't a lot of Windows hacks/trojans/whatever completely automated scripts that can exploit the same vulnerabilities in the same way every time? I will admit (to my everlasting shame) that I don't know much about Linux but I'd assume that for most knowledgeable peoples' setups are unique, updated, and hard to simply send bots & such out to hack into.
Also, wouldn't Linux people be more likely to report their hacks to get information from the community on how to fix it or to warn the community that a fix is in order? I thought that was a benefit of the whole model....
That just makes me wonder if Linux users will, in general, be more inclined to report such incidents. Since it developed by a community, it would make sense that any problems are reported to the community. Who do you talk to about being hacked in Windows? Where would I report it and who'd care? MS doesn't seem to.
Also, does that study say how many of the reported breaches were dealt with?
That reminds me of a segment on Dr. Katz a long time ago (I can't remember the comic, but I think it was Mark Maron):
comic: When we were in bed the other night, my wife accused me of being immature.
Dr. K: What did you do?
comic: I made faces at her.
Dr. K: Do you think that was the appropriate response?
comic: Well, she couldn't see me, she was on the bottom bunk.
This reminds me of the Beta vs. VHS competition. The one quesiton it always brought to my mind: if Beta truly was better than VHS, why did VHS win? Beta might have been the technically superior product, but there were many other factors that led to the success of VHS. Linux is definitely the superior OS, but Windows does have more going for it in terms of an overall product.
Ignorance of the law is not a defense in a courtroom, so how can "responsible" parents use that as an excuse when it comes to raising their own children?
When I was young, my parents let me watch whatever I wanted (within reason) and play whatever I wanted (then again, I grew up with NES, so that's probably a bit of a stretch). BUT they did explain to me the difference between right and wrong and gave me a good clue about how to conduct myself as a member of a civilized society.
Why don't we start protesting the protest group by giving them a list of demands? I'll start one:
And there's a reason for that - scientists investigate the holes in their theories using the scientific method to either strengthen or destroy the theory. They don't attack it using unsubstantiated, nonfalsifiable claims.
Abso-fucking-lutely! I love GTA:SA but would have to be brain damaged to let little kids play it. Whatever happened to parental responsibility?
I have not read the paper, so I can't be sure of this, but I know that in the papers I've written on my master's research that have been published there is an "Acknowledgements" section where I thank the company that sponsored the research, even naming some specific engineers at that company that gave me help. If anyone asks me who's behind the paper, all I have to say is RTFP.
Their re-releases of old NES games was what cause me to buy it. I've played The Legend of Zelda (original NES) for the first time in many years and it was fun. I sitll have the ancient Tetris cartridge that I got with a Game Boy for Christmas the year it came out, and not only does it still work, but I use it on absolutely every plane trip I go on. Super Mario 3, the SNES Zelda game, they are all fun and they all fit in my pocket....unlike the PSP.
Sorry, I got on a rant, but in conclusion: there is NO way that Nintendo is gonig down. I play PS2 more, but I have some great Gamecube games that are just fun to relax and play (smash brothers, super monkey ball...). And the GBA is too entrenched for the PSP to simply wipe it out.
This reminds me of a comment brought up about HTML standards not being followed which led to flaws in some program, maybe the Google cache toolbar (I can't remember). The point is: improper use of HTML (i.e. not following the standards) by web designers caused flaws in other software, the latter of which was blamed although it followed the standards. It is the exact same principle with any language. If you do not follow the conventions then it is your fault if the person with whom you are trying to communicate does not understand. If they do, I guess it doesn't matter in that instant but can hardly be used as a case for generalization.
Actually, all communications is technically analog. Any "real" signal is an analog signal. The underlying transmitted information is what makes the system digital or analog.
I remember going to Mapquest right after 9/11 - the aerial photos they had at that time showed smoking rubble when I search for the WTC.
(I know this is somewhat offtopic but I found it interesting)
Agreed. All of the universities and companies I've been a part of treat it the same way: you invent it, they get the patent (but they'll probably let you put yr name on it too). If you don't want the university to take a part of it, don't develop your product at the university. Don't use their computers, lab equipment, etc. Do it at home on your own time and it will be wholly yours. Does the submitter expect a job to pay him to develop products that will only benefit him? That's why people start their own companies.
As for GPL stuff, it can't be that hard to set up a project where the code is liscensed with it. In fact, my research group last year at Virginia Tech released a whole open source project for software radios under the GPL and I don't think they had too many problems. (if anyone is interested http://ossie.mprg.org/)
I think maybe it should be restated "The Industry needs more girls".
How do you tell an extrovert engineer from an invtrovert? And extrovert engineer will look at your shoes when he talks to you.
That's exactly what I've come to realize. I was watching the originals (I still have the VHS version) with my girlfriend who had never seen them before and they didn't really match the movies I remember from my childhood. One thing that could have helped ep. 1-3 is a different writer or director. Lucas was not in total control of Empire and Jedi and they were pretty good. Maybe he should have loosened his grip a little bit and let someone else help. Oh, and I'd be pissed if I were the director of Empire or Jedi because of all of Lucas' meddling with them for the special editions - I know the contract might have given Lucas special powers, but the director is supposed to be the primary creative voice behind any movie. Lucas basically added stuff into someone else's movie.
I am an electrical engineer, and *do* know tha the signal strenght in free space is proportional to the inverse of the distance squared - meaning that it drops off a lot pretty fast (this is what makes cell phones and radio stations able to reuse frequencies). It is also dependent on wavelength - shorter wavelength, shorter propagation (the environment acts as a natural lowpass filter). Explicitly, the received power of a signal is given by: P_r = P_t*G_t*G_r*L^2/(4*pi*d)^2 where P_t = transmitted power, G_t = transmitter antenna gain, G_r = receive antenna gain, L = wavelength, d = distance. Antenna gains are based on the antenna pattern - for a isotropic radiator (omnidirectional antenna, like on yr cell phone) it is a pretty wide pattern. A radio telescope should be pointed UP, which would make the gain at any angle at some acceptable deviation from UP much smaller than straight UP. Also, are radio telescopes omnidirectional? Any telescope that doesn't gather the vast majority of its received energy from pointing a the sky would seem to me to be a pretty poor design - which is exactly why the soviet GPS causes problems with radio telescopes! If satellites point down and shoot most of their energy at the planet, telescopes looking straight at them are going to be significantly interfered with by those satellites. Furthermore, if a radio telescope can pick up EMF from a cell phone's internal circuitry the EMF produced by the computers used to run the telescope would cause even bigger problems. Did you know that the clock speed of processors is in the RF range and has been for over a decade and that many aspects of processor design are similar to RF circuitry design with crosstalk, coupling, and shielding concerns? A 3GHz processor operates at a clock frequency much higher than a lot of cell phones. Even stronomers with cell phones in their pockets would screw with the data because they're standing right near the things!
Good point. The article could mention some signal levels that it receives from space and compare it to the levels that are possible from cell phones. They were also talking about the 2nd harmonic of the cell phone signals, which is not going to be as strong as the original signal and attenuated a lot more over distance anyway. I can't see this as being that big of a problem - unless planes are flying within (maybe) 20 miles of a telescope. GLONASS, the Soviet version of GPS, throws out a large amount of power directly in the band reserved for radio telescopes but there are algorithms that can detect and remove it since the power spectral density of the signal is known. It's not a perfect solution, but it works pretty darn good.
Even though it would eventually be passed down to the consumers, they probably wouldn't notice if it was in the purchase price. It's probably more likely to get them to use the recycling programs if you don't charge them when they go to recycle the computer. People would rather chuck it in the trash than pay someone to recycle it as they already pay the garbage man anyway.