I'm not sure how many video professionals would actuall trade their current desktop video production environment for a linux-based one, but this kind of hardware may be very useful for unattended video work - you know, the box that is sitting there in the rack and encoding, decoding, switching, inserting, etc.
Drilling isn't really an option. Melting your way through with a small radiothermal heat source is relatively easy. But what about the datalink? While melting its way in it would need to leave a cable connected to a radio relay left on the surface. Unless the sub is going to be limited by the length of the cable there will need to be another relay at the bottom of the ice layer that translated the signals to either ultrasound or blue-green laser. Add to that another relay in orbit around Europa and just multiply the probabilities that all components in this chain will not fail...
This product is not about saving money. It's not for people who hate MS. It's for people who like Unix or a Unix-like environment for their everyday computing but also need to use the de-facto office suite.
Mars is a waste of time(radiation, gullies caused by CO2 not water, etc etc) The Space Station needs fiscal help Europa and Pluto missions are up in the air.
Well, other scientists claim that the IIS is the waste of time and that Mars is the shining jewel. Why should anyone believe one or the other, especially with billions of dollars on the line? Most people would be inclined to say "oh, fuck them both".
First spacewalk, although it nearly ended in disaster because the spacesuit was pretty primitive and, seriously limited Leonov's movements.
First near rendezvour - but this was only a publicity stunt. No real orbital maneouvers were performed, just timed launching of two spaceships to the same orbit.
The detachable monitor isn't a standalone machine - it's the display of your existing desktop PC.
When you buy a separate webpad to be able to read electronic text anywhere in the house you get a proprietary operating system and browser, no support for the latest web plugins and standards and not much choice in general.
With a detachable screen you get to reuse your operating system, software, hard disk, CDROM, broadband connection, local files, bookmarks, etc. And, of course, you don't pay twice for the LCD screen itself which is the most expensive component.
This means that there are a growing number of computers that have collections of signatures in their databases. It is only a matter of time until some unscrupulous corporation starts using these to forge signatures.
Corporations do pretty terrible things everyday, but they are mostly *legal* terrible things. What you suggest is fraud. They don't work that way.
I'm more worried about unscrupulous employees of these corporations that have access to such databases and might sell them to scammers. These digitized signatures can be easily inserted into faxes and used for identity theft.
The 250Hz sound is the 5th harmonic of the mains power (electricity in France is 50Hz). If you look carefully at the spectrum you will also see a small peak at the 3rd harmonic (150Hz). The glass vessel and/or the microwave oven itself act as a resonant cavity that emphasizes these frequencies. The fundamental frequency (50Hz) is so weak that it drowns in the noise. There are no even harmonics because the waveform is symmetrical.
I think the interesting part is this just shows with enough big dollar corporate investment, even sophisticated security schemes can be cracked.
Do you have any reliable information on the actual investment required for the crack other Vivendi's statement? The nature of the security business is that the crackers don't break systems the way their designers expect - they bypass mechanisms instead of attacking them directly, they cheat, they are creative.
The numbers cited by Vivendi represent the resources required for a group of well-funded but imagination-impaired engineers to break the system. I find it hard to believe that whoever did this (whether or not it was really NDS) actually spent that much money.
Magnetic stabilization only good for one axis?
on
Hack in Space
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You can couple to a planetary magnetic field, like these guys are doing. Again, only good for one axis
Not really. Full 3-axis stabilization can be implemented using the Earth's magnetic field. Unlike a passive pole the magnetotorquers are active elements and the magnetic field doesn't always point down so at different parts of an orbit it can be used to control all 3 axes.
But would it be the best approach for Apple? Probably not. It's not fun going head to head against a juggernaut. Those who tried in the past got one helluva headache as a result.
What kind of argument is this to try to convince Apple? "Give Microsoft a decent competition to bring them back into focus and back in touch with the market."
Apple are just fine in their niche of selling overpriced hardware using better software. Why would they leave this cosy little corner?
You can't hear *pure tones* above 20kHz, but many people can hear other effects up to 24 kHz or higher. The same goes for the brickwall antialiasing and reconstruction filters that tries to go from 0 to -80db in less than 3kHz: it creates ringing that does not affect pure tones but distorts the transients of percussion instruments. Sure, 96kHz is an overkill, but it lets you built a reconstruction filter with barely two cycles of the sin(x)/x function - no ringing.
50-60kHz would probably be enough, but just doubling from the standard processing rate of 48kHz was the simplest option. With the non-lossy compression of the DVD-audio standard it barely takes more storage capacity than 48kHz.
96kHz audio is not ridiculous. Sony's SACD is totally ridiculous. There is no way to perform any kind of processing on the Direct Digital Stream without destroying its alleged superior properties. I wonder how many of those SACDs were actually mixed on a digital console at 48 or 96 kHz...
DLP has quality advantages other than just not getting scratched. While the resolution is currently limited it has a better signal to noise ratio than 35mm. Look closely at a uniformly colored area of the screen and you will see the snow, even in brand-new prints. DLP can reach a blacker black and has a better contrast ratio. The brightness linearity is perfect because it uses pulse-width modulation. The colors of DLP are more saturated because it uses a rotating wheel of high-quality optical filters rather than some chemical concoctation on film.
DLP is already better in some areas and over time should probably match the quality of film. Even if it never reaches the resolution of film it can probably reach a resolution that is more than good enough. Improvements like 48 fps can easily be implemented in digital projectors, too.
Studios like digital projection, among other reasons, because the digital print can be encrypted. Projectors can be built as a tamper-resistant fortress that will be much more difficult to crack than a consumer product like DVD. This will save the studios from worrying about stolen prints used to create illegal videos. I can't say I'm against that - it has nothing to do with free speech or fair use issues and I have no sympathy for people who rob film distribution trucks at gunpoint or copy videos for a profit.
Screenplay - They'll say "No originality in LoTR" or something and give it to A Beautiful Mind.
Sure it's not original - it's an adapted screenplay. It was one of the most difficult adaptations of a book to movie form ever done and it was handled superbly. It is better than most people who love the book dared to hope.
Yes, Cringely doesn't understand 99% of the technology he writes about. That does not make the technology bullshit.
UWB is real. It's as close as it gets to a free lunch, and Claude need not turn in his grave.
you can build it, and it's all true... if there's only one such device
Not correct. UWB devices share the spectrum just fine. In fact, it's a far superior way to share the spectrum than narrowband frequency allocations.
The problems start when different devices use very different power levels: GPS uses extremely low levels, TV stations use very high levels and almost anything is at very high levels if you are close enough to the transmitter.
Spectrum sharing by frequency allocation provides very good separation between bands that use widely differing power levels. It's not too difficult to build filters that reject out-of-band interference by 100db or more. With ultrawideband, the rejection of unwanted signals cannot exceed 40-50db. UWB will work very well if all narrowband communications below 1GHz are shut down. Since that will never happen it will probably remain limited to very low power levels and certain niche applications.
Here's what might happen if all narrowband transmissions *are* shut down:
UWB cells for "last 10 miles" delivery, combined with long range fiber and satellite infrastructure could bring 100kbps to almost any person on earch and 10mbits/second to anyone living in a city. The terminals will use very little power and can have long battery life. Location tracking with 20 centimeter accuracy will be available anywhere in a city, including indoors.
How is all this possible with just 1GHz of bandwidth? The utilization efficiency of spectrum should not be measured in bps/Hz but rather in bps/Hz/square Km. Today's cellular infrastructure uses a very crude form of frequency reuse to optimize this capacity. IS-96 CDMA barely begins to utilize the real advantages of spread spectrum with a bandwidth of 1.25MHz. With 1GHz of spread spectrum things start to look different. And it's not just the bandwidth: 1GHz at a center frequency of 15GHz can only be use for line-of-sight communication. If the 1GHz band has a center frequency of 700MHz it has much better propagation and is immune to fading.
Of course, this will never happen. But not because it is mathematically or technologically impossible.
The antennas have to be specially designed for broadband. They may be larger than practical for handheld phones, but fractal antennas may reduce the size.
Not any wideband antenna is good for UWB. UWB uses time-hopping modulation. This requires a very short antenna ringing time. The antennas cannot be large and they cannot be complex. The UWB antennas I have seen look ridiculously simple - a short piece of wire or a square of metal. That does not mean that they are simple to design!
Fractal antennas may be good *wideband* antennas but they are probably bad for time-hopping.
There are other inaccuracies in the article: it's spectral power density is low, not it's power.
There are many errors in the article, but this one is not entirely incorrect: in practice, USB does use lower power than narrowband. UWB is not suceptible to fading so it does not need the large fading margin required by narrowband radio.
With narrowband communication the SNR fluctuates widely because of Raleigh fading - different reflection paths interfering either constructively or destructively. You need a large fading margin (extra power) to ensure robust communication.
With ultrawideband (i.e. bandwidth approaching center frequency) there is no Raleigh fading and the signal power does not fluctuate so much, even in environments with severe multipath reflections. This translates to as much as 20db savings of real transmission power.
Ultrawideband cannot be used to communicate from your car.
A pulse width of 1 nanosecond translates to about 1 foot. A car travels many times that distance in a second. In a free space environment such as ground-to-air communication it is possible to compensate for this, but in a typical urban environment with many reflections it is probably impractical to track so many different propagation paths that chance so rapidly.
Narrowband communication is less susceptible to this problem. Multiple paths that differ by less than one bit time do not affect the receiver too much (although they have a certain probability of fading).
The processing gain of UWB is very high, but not infinite. A cellular phone transmitting too close to a UWB receiver *will* jam it. Combining the two in a single device is probably not practical. Filtering this frequency range will not help either: the notch filter may look OK in the frequency domain but in the time domain it creates too much ringing for UWB to work correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
This "protection" mechanism violates the CDROM standards but is fully compliant with CDDA standars.
I'm not sure how many video professionals would actuall trade their current desktop video production environment for a linux-based one, but this kind of hardware may be very useful for unattended video work - you know, the box that is sitting there in the rack and encoding, decoding, switching, inserting, etc.
Drilling isn't really an option. Melting your way through with a small radiothermal heat source is relatively easy. But what about the datalink? While melting its way in it would need to leave a cable connected to a radio relay left on the surface. Unless the sub is going to be limited by the length of the cable there will need to be another relay at the bottom of the ice layer that translated the signals to either ultrasound or blue-green laser. Add to that another relay in orbit around Europa and just multiply the probabilities that all components in this chain will not fail...
This product is not about saving money. It's not for people who hate MS. It's for people who like Unix or a Unix-like environment for their everyday computing but also need to use the de-facto office suite.
Mars is a waste of time(radiation, gullies caused by CO2 not water, etc etc) The Space Station needs fiscal help Europa and Pluto missions are up in the air.
Well, other scientists claim that the IIS is the waste of time and that Mars is the shining jewel. Why should anyone believe one or the other, especially with billions of dollars on the line? Most people would be inclined to say "oh, fuck them both".
First spacewalk, although it nearly ended in disaster because the spacesuit was pretty primitive and, seriously limited Leonov's movements.
First near rendezvour - but this was only a publicity stunt. No real orbital maneouvers were performed, just timed launching of two spaceships to the same orbit.
The detachable monitor isn't a standalone machine - it's the display of your existing desktop PC.
When you buy a separate webpad to be able to read electronic text anywhere in the house you get a proprietary operating system and browser, no support for the latest web plugins and standards and not much choice in general.
With a detachable screen you get to reuse your operating system, software, hard disk, CDROM, broadband connection, local files, bookmarks, etc. And, of course, you don't pay twice for the LCD screen itself which is the most expensive component.
This means that there are a growing number of computers that have collections of signatures in their databases. It is only a matter of time until some unscrupulous corporation starts using these to forge signatures.
Corporations do pretty terrible things everyday, but they are mostly *legal* terrible things. What you suggest is fraud. They don't work that way.
I'm more worried about unscrupulous employees of these corporations that have access to such databases and might sell them to scammers. These digitized signatures can be easily inserted into faxes and used for identity theft.
The flame of a match is just hot gas, not plasma. The flame's light comes from incandescent particles of carbon, not ionized atoms.
The 250Hz sound is the 5th harmonic of the mains power (electricity in France is 50Hz). If you look carefully at the spectrum you will also see a small peak at the 3rd harmonic (150Hz). The glass vessel and/or the microwave oven itself act as a resonant cavity that emphasizes these frequencies. The fundamental frequency (50Hz) is so weak that it drowns in the noise. There are no even harmonics because the waveform is symmetrical.
1) Which is more important, satillite radio or wireless internet access?
Which is more important, spectrum auctioned off for use by Big Business or unlicenced bands for use by The People(TM)?
Currently, less than 5% of the spectrum below 3GHz is available for unlicensed use.
I think the interesting part is this just shows with enough big dollar corporate investment, even sophisticated security schemes can be cracked.
Do you have any reliable information on the actual investment required for the crack other Vivendi's statement? The nature of the security business is that the crackers don't break systems the way their designers expect - they bypass mechanisms instead of attacking them directly, they cheat, they are creative.
The numbers cited by Vivendi represent the resources required for a group of well-funded but imagination-impaired engineers to break the system. I find it hard to believe that whoever did this (whether or not it was really NDS) actually spent that much money.
You can couple to a planetary magnetic field, like these guys are doing. Again, only good for one axis
Not really. Full 3-axis stabilization can be implemented using the Earth's magnetic field. Unlike a passive pole the magnetotorquers are active elements and the magnetic field doesn't always point down so at different parts of an orbit it can be used to control all 3 axes.
Design and Experimental Test of Magnetic-Torquer-Based 3-Axis Satellite Attitude Controllers
Helps bring a little stability to the consulting career.
But would it be the best approach for Apple? Probably not. It's not fun going head to head against a juggernaut. Those who tried in the past got one helluva headache as a result.
What kind of argument is this to try to convince Apple? "Give Microsoft a decent competition to bring them back into focus and back in touch with the market."
Apple are just fine in their niche of selling overpriced hardware using better software. Why would they leave this cosy little corner?
You can't hear *pure tones* above 20kHz, but many people can hear other effects up to 24 kHz or higher. The same goes for the brickwall antialiasing and reconstruction filters that tries to go from 0 to -80db in less than 3kHz: it creates ringing that does not affect pure tones but distorts the transients of percussion instruments. Sure, 96kHz is an overkill, but it lets you built a reconstruction filter with barely two cycles of the sin(x)/x function - no ringing.
50-60kHz would probably be enough, but just doubling from the standard processing rate of 48kHz was the simplest option. With the non-lossy compression of the DVD-audio standard it barely takes more storage capacity than 48kHz.
96kHz audio is not ridiculous. Sony's SACD is totally ridiculous. There is no way to perform any kind of processing on the Direct Digital Stream without destroying its alleged superior properties. I wonder how many of those SACDs were actually mixed on a digital console at 48 or 96 kHz...
DLP has quality advantages other than just not getting scratched. While the resolution is currently limited it has a better signal to noise ratio than 35mm. Look closely at a uniformly colored area of the screen and you will see the snow, even in brand-new prints. DLP can reach a blacker black and has a better contrast ratio. The brightness linearity is perfect because it uses pulse-width modulation. The colors of DLP are more saturated because it uses a rotating wheel of high-quality optical filters rather than some chemical concoctation on film.
DLP is already better in some areas and over time should probably match the quality of film. Even if it never reaches the resolution of film it can probably reach a resolution that is more than good enough. Improvements like 48 fps can easily be implemented in digital projectors, too.
Studios like digital projection, among other reasons, because the digital print can be encrypted. Projectors can be built as a tamper-resistant fortress that will be much more difficult to crack than a consumer product like DVD. This will save the studios from worrying about stolen prints used to create illegal videos. I can't say I'm against that - it has nothing to do with free speech or fair use issues and I have no sympathy for people who rob film distribution trucks at gunpoint or copy videos for a profit.
Screenplay - They'll say "No originality in LoTR" or something and give it to A Beautiful Mind.
Sure it's not original - it's an adapted screenplay. It was one of the most difficult adaptations of a book to movie form ever done and it was handled superbly. It is better than most people who love the book dared to hope.
that 99% of these 54% are using Microsoft products to access the Internet.
I run the audiogalaxy satellite inside a chroot jail.
Yes, Cringely doesn't understand 99% of the technology he writes about. That does not make the technology bullshit.
UWB is real. It's as close as it gets to a free lunch, and Claude need not turn in his grave.
you can build it, and it's all true... if there's only one such device
Not correct. UWB devices share the spectrum just fine. In fact, it's a far superior way to share the spectrum than narrowband frequency allocations.
The problems start when different devices use very different power levels: GPS uses extremely low levels, TV stations use very high levels and almost anything is at very high levels if you are close enough to the transmitter.
Spectrum sharing by frequency allocation provides very good separation between bands that use widely differing power levels. It's not too difficult to build filters that reject out-of-band interference by 100db or more. With ultrawideband, the rejection of unwanted signals cannot exceed 40-50db. UWB will work very well if all narrowband communications below 1GHz are shut down. Since that will never happen it will probably remain limited to very low power levels and certain niche applications.
Here's what might happen if all narrowband transmissions *are* shut down:
UWB cells for "last 10 miles" delivery, combined with long range fiber and satellite infrastructure could bring 100kbps to almost any person on earch and 10mbits/second to anyone living in a city. The terminals will use very little power and can have long battery life. Location tracking with 20 centimeter accuracy will be available anywhere in a city, including indoors.
How is all this possible with just 1GHz of bandwidth? The utilization efficiency of spectrum should not be measured in bps/Hz but rather in bps/Hz/square Km. Today's cellular infrastructure uses a very crude form of frequency reuse to optimize this capacity. IS-96 CDMA barely begins to utilize the real advantages of spread spectrum with a bandwidth of 1.25MHz. With 1GHz of spread spectrum things start to look different. And it's not just the bandwidth: 1GHz at a center frequency of 15GHz can only be use for line-of-sight communication. If the 1GHz band has a center frequency of 700MHz it has much better propagation and is immune to fading.
Of course, this will never happen. But not because it is mathematically or technologically impossible.
The antennas have to be specially designed for broadband. They may be larger than practical for handheld phones, but fractal antennas may reduce the size.
Not any wideband antenna is good for UWB. UWB uses time-hopping modulation. This requires a very short antenna ringing time. The antennas cannot be large and they cannot be complex. The UWB antennas I have seen look ridiculously simple - a short piece of wire or a square of metal. That does not mean that they are simple to design!
Fractal antennas may be good *wideband* antennas but they are probably bad for time-hopping.
There are other inaccuracies in the article: it's spectral power density is low, not it's power.
There are many errors in the article, but this one is not entirely incorrect: in practice, USB does use lower power than narrowband. UWB is not suceptible to fading so it does not need the large fading margin required by narrowband radio.
With narrowband communication the SNR fluctuates widely because of Raleigh fading - different reflection paths interfering either constructively or destructively. You need a large fading margin (extra power) to ensure robust communication.
With ultrawideband (i.e. bandwidth approaching center frequency) there is no Raleigh fading and the signal power does not fluctuate so much, even in environments with severe multipath reflections. This translates to as much as 20db savings of real transmission power.
Ultrawideband cannot be used to communicate from your car.
A pulse width of 1 nanosecond translates to about 1 foot. A car travels many times that distance in a second. In a free space environment such as ground-to-air communication it is possible to compensate for this, but in a typical urban environment with many reflections it is probably impractical to track so many different propagation paths that chance so rapidly.
Narrowband communication is less susceptible to this problem. Multiple paths that differ by less than one bit time do not affect the receiver too much (although they have a certain probability of fading).
The processing gain of UWB is very high, but not infinite. A cellular phone transmitting too close to a UWB receiver *will* jam it. Combining the two in a single device is probably not practical. Filtering this frequency range will not help either: the notch filter may look OK in the frequency domain but in the time domain it creates too much ringing for UWB to work correctly.
Not Flipper. Flypper