Like I said, most of the software is available completely free, just not directly from Enthought; they are responsible for much of SciPy, which is 100% FOSS. MayaVi 1.x is completely free. NumPy is completely free. Documentation for these is completely free.
The Enthought package that they put together, which includes MayaVi 2.x, is not free. But the parent poster wanted paid-for support, so I recommended the Enthought package. For another good free bundled package, check out python(x,y).
Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying "Yes, NumPy and Matlab work the same way, so no advantage to Matlab," or are you saying "the comparison isn't fair because compiled-C/Fortran routines being called by Numpy are being compared to compiled-C/Fortran routines being called by Matlab?"
If you're saying the latter, you need to know that the two software packages pretty much work the same way, you write a quick script and the array (vector) data is passed into a compiled routine to munch on and only when the routine is done operating over all of the data does the result get passed back up to the script (hence both use the "vectorized" coding style). In this sense, Matlab and NumPy are THE SAME.
And lest you be confused, Matlab used Atlas-compiled BLAS routines as of a few releases ago, and as of late they were using the Intel-compiled Netlib-like routines (BLAS, LAPACK, LINPACK, etc.). There is no Mathworks special sauce that makes these fast. Mathworks just passes data down to these routines like NumPy does.
Oh, and I think you meant to say "interpreted," not "interpretive."
Check out Enthought's Python package, it includes amazing 3D visualization (on par with Matlab or superior, I think), the IDE you like from Matlab, good support, good documentation, etc. I don't think that Matlab has much advantage except for certain application-specific software that has just happened to be designed to interoperate with Matlab.
The Enthought pricing page: http://www.enthought.com/products/epd_sublevels.php (But note that you can get most of the functionality of the software for free, just you mentioned paying for support as an advantage of Matlab.)
1) Near-compiled speed with a scripting front-end? Try NumPy out, it works the SAME WAY as Matlab (vectorize your code and it runs at near-compiled speed). There isn't any secret to how Matlab does things, it's just what they've put together into one package and the loyal userbase that keeps them going.
2) UI's: iPython or Spyder are user interfaces achieving similar goals to that of Matlab (I prefer the former as I'm a command-line junkie, but the latter will make you believe you're in Matlab: lint and debugger are integrated).
3) Bugs: maybe somebody codes like their job depended on it, but the bugs I've seen got fixed with their 6-month release cycle. That didn't help me a damn bit.
4) Price "up-front": hahahaha, you're joking, right? So if you want your bugs fixed, like I said, most get fixed in their semi-yearly releases, but you only get THOSE if you have an active (a recurring cost) support contract. And then you find that one of your toolboxes or another sw requires the Matlab version that still has the bug in it. Now you're SOL. Commercial software ain't all roses, especially if you aren't a fortune 100 company or a big research institution. I update my Python, NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib whenever they have a release OR bugfix/patch, for free, now until doomsday.
Look into the libraries that Sage Math uses for near-Mathematica symbolic manipulation. Or just use Sage (which is built on top of Python).
Simulink I haven't found a great replacement for within Python, but graphical programming is often more of an impediment than a help for me. For layout of one-off control systems, it was nice, but I've just gotten too efficient with text editing (and I'm to the point that I can visualize what's going on) to want to worry about connecting wires, double-clicking, changing properties, etc. (To wit, last time I used Simulink, I auto-generated all of the block diagrams and set all block properties with an m-file script.)
There are 4 kinds of devices, I believe, that make any sense for the FCC to care about:
1. Passive antennas
2. Radios intended to transmit (which do not include an antenna)
3. Radios intended to transmit (which include an antenna)
4. Electronic devices not intended to transmit but that, nonetheless, do radiate (EMI)
Passive antennas are the only category where what you said makes sense. But I think all the FCC cares about passive antennas is what the FAA cares about passive antennas: that they aren't so tall as to knock an airplane out of the sky. An antenna receives as well (that is, with equal gain) as it transmits, so characterizing their gain is important when matching an antenna to device type (2). Typically the FCC wants to approve the entire system (devices in the third category), because it is virtually impossible to know the consequences (including increases in EMI and harmonics that suddenly pop up) of attaching, for example, a 6 dBi antenna to a 100 mW 2.4 GHz WiFi card. But the FCC also must approve the radio (category 2 above) if it is sold separately and then put together by somebody else. A radio will get an advisory that it should only be coupled with antennas equal to or below a certain gain.
Otherwise, a radio in receive mode essentially falls into category (4), which, in other words, needs to pass the same requirements as the computer sitting on your desk does. But the FCC doesn't care if you put a 60 dBi antenna, sensitive to a restricted band, with a receive-only radio.
The PURPOSE of the FCC regs is to keep people playing well together. And it isn't like you listening on a frequency causes somebody else to NOT be able to listen in on that frequency.
That isn't how the process works. First, you can measure phase error (timing error) or frequency error of an oscillator continuously. So it needn't be a discrete-in-time measurement, and you can certainly measure errors of much less than one second on a 1 Hz signal. And your corrections certainly do not need to be discrete-in-time updates or, more importantly, corrections needn't come in multiples of 1 second.
Updating physical clocks or correcting for their drift doesn't have to happen like leap seconds do for UTC (which tracks TAI on the sub-second level but tracks astronomical time as far as which second it is, to within 0.9 seconds.)
So if you have an oscillator that should be running at 1 Hz, and it started out that way, but it is slowing down at PRECISELY the rate of 1 Hz per hour, you could theoretically apply a constant 1 Hz per hour correction to the oscillator (after bringing the oscillator back to 1 Hz), and then the oscillator would be perfect at all times.
There is no inherent advantage to performing this process with a 4.5 GHz oscillator as opposed to a 1 Hz oscillator.
A manual is a GREAT idea. Really good documentation is something I've paid for in an open source project, since it seems that many projects lack great (or good or ANY) documentation or the people willing to do such documentation.
The original developer of the code is in a great position to do so.
You can perfectly well have an amount of something but refer to the amount of its unit: four inches, for example, where the amount is four and the unit is inches. In this case, one might not have a respectable amount of inches.
You can refer to http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=amount for the definition of amount. Just think: one potato is a small amount (or number, see discussion at dictionary.com) of potatoes. The amount is one, the unit is potatoes. A farm can have a respectable amount of acres, though "acreage" might be more acceptable to the prescriptivist crowd. Not so weird though, at least to me.
But what do I know; I am just one speaker of yet another amalgam of regional English dialects.
Are they really "triangulating" using cell towers? Or are they doing something like finding a rough area for the phone by which the cell the phone is associated with and which towers can see the phone? So if towers X, Y,and Z can see your phone, but X has strongest signal, you are probably in a certain area and closest to tower X.
Triangulation, technically, is using the angles to a target from two known locations to determine the target's location. I don't know if the base stations have the ability to tell what the angle to a cell phone is; I thought they only had signal strength information.
You think there are two things here, Matlab and Octave. Matlab is proprietary, and Octave followed it. It's as simple as that to you.
But wait, where does much of the meat in Matlab come from? Netlib. OPEN SOURCE! HAHAHAHA (Some of the Netlib code has license restrictions, some does not.)
The really important thing for me is that now that Octave is out there (actually, Octave has been around since about 1994), the explorations that I made in undergrad in Matlab can be done entirely in Octave now and forever. A good tool doesn't get worse as it gets old, it just gets used more.
If there was once a patent on hammers, there is no less usefulness in (but much lower prices on) hammers after the patent expires. Now we get much of Matlab's functionality completely free. Congratulations John Eaton, et al., for giving all who follow another tool to use freely to build bigger and better tools.
And as others have mentioned, if you don't like Matlab/Octave, use another tool that tried to accomplish the task of a high-level numerical tool in a different way. To me, however, I can code up an algorithm, test out concepts, and produce incredibly helpful visualizations in a matter of minutes using Matlab or Octave. Any tool this powerful has a learning curve to get over before it is so efficient, and I climbed that learning curve with Matlab, but I was able to use Octave immediately because I had already gone through that process using Matlab.
If you made a completely innovative new tool, it likely wouldn't be worth it for me to use for a while because I am so fast at coding Matlab/Octave, and the whole point in these tools is to make the programmer's job easy (if I wanted fast code execution, C or Fortran could be used).
I call bullshit. Check out the price list, which I have only picked items that make sense for tasks that I do regularly (and hence this is not too broad of a scope):
The bare minimum for signal processing stuff: MATLAB: $1900 Simulink: $3000 Signal Processing: $800 Signal Processing Blockset: $1000 Subtotal: $6,700
A few more helpful tools that almost every engineer can make use of, not very extravagant:
Control System Toolbox: $1000 Filter Design Toolbox: $1000 Subtotal now: $8,700
I do a lot of RF comms stuff, so the following are very useful for me:
In fact, if you look at the MathWorks product listing for each category:
MATLAB CATEGORIES: Math & Optimization: $4,100 Statistics & Data Analysis: $9,800 Control System Design and Analysis: $6,700 Signal Processing and Communications: $7,800 Image Processing: $2,900 Test & Measurement: $4,900 Computational Biology: $4,000 Financial Modeling and Analysis: $5,500 Application Deployment: $5,200 Application Deployment Targets: $12,000 (.NET, Excel, and Java each are $4k) Database Connectivity and Reporting: $1,500
SIMULINK CATEGORIES: Fixed-point Modeling: $1,000 Event-based Modeling: $5,800 Physical Modeling: $11,000 Simulation Graphics: $1,700 Control System Design and Analysis: $4,000 Signal Processing and Communications: $5,000 Code Generation: $30,300 PC-Based Rapid Control Prototyping and HIL: $10,000 Embedded Targets: $12,000 (Each processor is $3k apiece) Verification, Validation, and Testing: $9,000
They have recommendations for other fields of R&D also if you want to look.
Wow, I can't see how ANYONE could POSSIBLY rack up a $15k MathWorks bill. My educated guess is that you are not a moron, but that you are uninformed about more than just the moron status of this guy's "math guy." Maybe you got a very nice academic discount. Maybe you just got Matlab and a couple of toolboxes. But that's not the situation a lot of folks face when they actually want to accomplish something with Matlab/Simulink.
So at least by the 1920s scientists knew that something man-made could break the sound barrier:
In the early 1900s, some scientists wondered whether a whip's crack came from a sonic boom. That is, perhaps part of the whip moves faster than the speed of sound, around 750 miles an hour, and the clap of noise comes as the sound barrier is broken. Presumably the cracker creates the crack. By the 1920s, high-speed photography revealed that a whip's cracker can indeed break the sound barrier.
A statement like "[VIM] just makes the entire system seem antiquated and stupid" is foppish and itself ignorant. If text (and keyboard input) is antiquated, then I guess we should all get out of the programming game. Maybe do a little LabVIEW and then commit mass suicide.
In a way, [G]VI[M] and EMACS each represent a club. Clubs of people who took the temporary productivity hit to learn a difficult tool (and possibly put in extra hours to still make the deadline) with some promise of greater productivity in the end.
Is it a false promise? Maybe. There may be a little elitist ego in there, too, but I'd like to think that many who have learned those tools are people willing to put in effort for overall efficiency, and it seems to me to have been beneficial.
Each time I've coded a different "language" (Verilog, C, C++, javascript, Python, Magic VLSI text files, shell, SVG, POV-Ray, bill-of-materials files, SPICE models, config files, etc.) VIM has been there for me, equally handy and powerful. But it didn't look as pretty as Visual Studio, so I guess I shouldn't bother to tell anyone about it. And remember, these are not necessarily tools for a first-time programmer, but for a first-time Linux programmer.
I'll post this again: The news is not that they've built an oscillator at the highest frequency ever (think: LASER is much higher frequency); the news is that it's the highest-frequency CMOS oscillator built to date. (Which I can't confirm, but it sounds right to me.)
Yes, people have achieved higher frequencies, and controlled them very precisely, as you point out; however, such oscillators aren't CMOS oscillators. That's the news, that they've built a CMOS oscillator at such a frequency, not that they have achieved the highest frequency ever to be controlled (which would be a joke). Not exactly what the/. headline implies, though.
Well, I would be interested in the source you site, and I would tend to agree... but for a smaller business than the ones we're talking, not for businesses with monopolies or a very large % of the market share of their core business.
If you look at Google as a search engine business (which another poster appropriately points out is probably not quite accurate), they already have a good-sized portion of the market (64% and growing, according to one source).
If Google goes for the last 36% of the search market (because they are a good business by your standards and only focus on their core), then at best Google can only increase its value by just over 56%. That means that, with a lot of assumptions thrown in, if it takes 10 years for Google to monopolize search, you get 4.6% increase in stock value each year. That isn't going to even beat inflation. (Of course if they monopolize, then not only can they drive prices up, but they can also get some government regulators interested.)
Now you own stock for a second company, MS, whose core business is operating systems. MS has 94% of the market share, based upon Wikipedia. But close enough. Say they just focus on their core business, and it takes them 5 years to totally monopolize their market. That yields about 1.2% per year. Wow.
So now you have two stocks, both for companies who focus only on their core business. But you'd have a better investment with a money market or CD at your local bank. Do you see my point now about these big businesses dabbling in other things (never too far from the core, but definitely not in the core) to see if something else pans out?
The problem with the "core business" model is when people invest in your business (which covers a lot of businesses out there). Dividends from a company's profits are okay every year, but people want to see their stock triple in value.
And that doesn't happen if a business that dominates a market sticks to their "core business." Stock doesn't increase much if you go for the last 10% (or whatever) of the OS market share. Can you define their core business? Once you ID that, can you identify a clear path they can take to double the value of their company by pursuing that core business further? There are some obvious answers, and smart-ass answers. But I think they need to find new paths in order to grow further.
So Microsoft may look confused to you, but if you have billions of $$ in your war chest, you can afford to put many irons in many fires. If somebody else in any given realm gets successful, you at least have a beachhead from which to expand into the new, profitable territory. That's smart, although maybe less romantic than sticking tight to Windows until both Windows and MS die together.
Well, more so, a teacher's lesson would be taught by literally dictating keystroke combinations to the students for the TI calculators. I used HP and had to figure out *what* was being done to do it myself (though learning involved a lot more than just translating the teacher's poor lesson onto my calculator, of course). But all the other kids just dutifully re-typed what the teacher said. Wow, what a poor learning environment.
So to me TI calculators symbolize the cattle-and-parrot education system, and hence why I have always shied away from them. There are some absolutely great TI calculators, but I feel dirty if I touch them after how they were used in school.
And bless RPN / stack manipulation for making introductory assembly language in college a good bit easier!
But to be fair, I did become a bit dependent upon my HP, although I was dependent in the sense that I would program everything I learned (from scratch) but then I needed those programs to repeat what I had done. In a sense it was a study mechanism because I had to figure the concept out in order to program it, but then I would forget it shortly after that. So in the end my HP didn't save me from my own (perceived) cleverness.
My comment addresses yours, but wanders, so apologies in advance.
I use POVRay for explaining engineering concepts to co-workers, in papers for external viewing, and for use by the marketing folks. Word on the street is that its renders find their way into publications such as Nature and Science.
You talk of "production," which sounds like "movie," but it isn't a chump app just because movies don't use it for their render engine. It's a free, not-too-restricted-source-code app that yields stunning results. (Side-note: PRMan is ~$1k, and I couldn't find a price on Mental Ray, but my attitude towards Autodesk is that of the indentured slave to his master. But I digress.)
It is the single most time-consuming task I do, doing a render, and about everything else runs "fast enough" for me on my three-year-old mid-grade P4 system. Sometimes I wish for greater performance with an Octave/Matlab script when I am playing around. But that's hard to benchmark & compare on systems and only rarely does it take the same order of magnitude of time that POVRay can take.
So in response to another, I am one (and likely not the only) person who would lean towards a system based upon its POVRay performance. I have just been overjoyed that this has started to be used for benchmarks. I personally find the frames-per-second on Doom4 benchmarks useless, but what it comes down to is one thing:
The more apps people benchmark (accurately), the more people benefit and can make informed decisions that address their specific situations.
So I would like to see the apps you mention benchmarked, too. CompUSA never let me install photoshop and run my personal tests on it back when Photoshop was important to me. And now the greatest computer selection is from online retailers; how will you compare the value of a computer for you? $3000 for a Core2Duo Extreme Quad SSE2 from Dell, $2800 for an AMD Dual Quad HyperTransport blah, blah, from HP, and a bare-bones system from somebody else? What is each worth to you? And performance, obviously, gets far more complicated when you move beyond the processor isolated in a system. Is it worth the extra $100 for me to get another 1GB of memory? Will I ever really know how that will effect my apps, or does it just come down to whether or not I am willing to hand over another $100 just in case it might help?
I guess that is it: What are people's expectations for spending their money? Those who look at benchmarks might just find the "best" and drop their cash (or credit) on that one. Those who don't look at benchmarks might hit a price point, and just grab the best-looking system or find something from a specific brand. People like myself who want to optimize on a personally-important criteria are mostly left to guess and always be uncomfortable with any choice they make. And this situation might only change when spending the $1000 (or whatever) is worth caring a great deal about.
My apologies for the apparent personal insult (although I don't find being a dependent to be anything demeaning, just a reason why someone wouldn't know that a tax preparer is held accountable). And apologies for the "Honestly?" comment, which was an unnecessary gibe. And yes, you are correct that the individual is held accountable. That was your point, that nothing alleviates the taxpayer of accountability, so the "NO GUARANTEES" text shouldn't be shocking, and is no different from a CPA or any other tax preparation method (Jack next door, turbotax, etc.). I misinterpreted your post as one of the posts that was saying the CPA has no responsibility for getting your taxes right, just like this software. I apologize for that, too, because that wasn't what you were saying.
I was frustrated that no one was seeming to acknowledge that tax preparers ARE held accountable for what they do; that seems to be a larger issue of trust at play here since, as you pointed out, the tax payer is on the line any way he/she goes.
So since the CPA can go to jail, too, if he/she signs on the line of a fraudulent return, the CPA may have more reason to do a good job than the software, if that is one's perception of the situation. Personally, I've both prepared my own taxes and had others do it, and I would likely use this software because I can assess its accuracy by checking the tax guides (which I do regardless of who prepares my taxes) and I end up writing my own software (a fairly complex set of spreadsheets) when I do my own taxes anyway. This would save me the hassle and the more people who use it, likely the better the quality for everyone, so as far as using a piece of software, this open source package seems to be good to me.
"Honestly"? who is being honest? Who hasn't checked the 1040 form recently? The tax preparer gets his/her OWN line on the tax form that he/she signs. So there IS accountability for the preparer, if he/she does things incorrectly. There is no guarantee that you get all the best loopholes (though some DO guarantee this) with an accountant, but the IRS likely has never convicted anyone of paying too much in taxes.
I have posted this comment to other posters who don't know how taxes work (are you still a dependent?). Not sure about TurboTax or whatnot. But if someone prepares your taxes for you, they will be held responsible in some manner by the government, whether or not they want to be held responsible, once they sign on the line. Check out the 1040 form on the IRS.gov website if you want to see for yourself.
The tax preparer gets his/her OWN line on the tax form that he/she signs. So there IS some accountability. Not sure about TurboTax or whatnot. But if someone prepares your taxes for you, they will be held responsible in some manner by the government, whether or not they want to be held responsible, once they sign on the line. Check out the 1040 form on the IRS.gov website if you want to see for yourself.
Amen! Understanding goes so much further than memorizing. Understanding allows people to USE mathematics, for whatever they like. Otherwise, if they haven't memorized the formula for X, then the student can't do X.
The parent to your post, I believe, was confusing two things: THEORY with "stuffing it down their throats." The latter sounds more like wrote memorization, NOT understanding, and not necessarily theory. Theory is intriguing and fun and leads to a student's ability to apply math in many ways; memorization is what gets stuffed down people's throats, turns them off to math, and keeps them from every being able to practically apply math or enjoy the theory.
For example: "Oh, I think it was either rate divided by time or time divided by distance, I don't remember. I don't know. Oh well." That's wrote memorization of applied math gone awry, not too much theory being taught. It must be said, though, that either theory or application can be taught by wrote memorization or otherwise, and simply memorizing math theory also doesn't get a student any closer to using OR enjoying math.
And use the SI prefixes for powers-of-ten, and all will be okay. The more who do this, the more accepted it will be, the fewer who won't understand what these mean, and less confusion will result.
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Like I said, most of the software is available completely free, just not directly from Enthought; they are responsible for much of SciPy, which is 100% FOSS. MayaVi 1.x is completely free. NumPy is completely free. Documentation for these is completely free.
The Enthought package that they put together, which includes MayaVi 2.x, is not free. But the parent poster wanted paid-for support, so I recommended the Enthought package. For another good free bundled package, check out python(x,y).
Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying "Yes, NumPy and Matlab work the same way, so no advantage to Matlab," or are you saying "the comparison isn't fair because compiled-C/Fortran routines being called by Numpy are being compared to compiled-C/Fortran routines being called by Matlab?"
If you're saying the latter, you need to know that the two software packages pretty much work the same way, you write a quick script and the array (vector) data is passed into a compiled routine to munch on and only when the routine is done operating over all of the data does the result get passed back up to the script (hence both use the "vectorized" coding style). In this sense, Matlab and NumPy are THE SAME.
And lest you be confused, Matlab used Atlas-compiled BLAS routines as of a few releases ago, and as of late they were using the Intel-compiled Netlib-like routines (BLAS, LAPACK, LINPACK, etc.). There is no Mathworks special sauce that makes these fast. Mathworks just passes data down to these routines like NumPy does.
Oh, and I think you meant to say "interpreted," not "interpretive."
Check out Enthought's Python package, it includes amazing 3D visualization (on par with Matlab or superior, I think), the IDE you like from Matlab, good support, good documentation, etc. I don't think that Matlab has much advantage except for certain application-specific software that has just happened to be designed to interoperate with Matlab.
The Enthought pricing page: http://www.enthought.com/products/epd_sublevels.php
(But note that you can get most of the functionality of the software for free, just you mentioned paying for support as an advantage of Matlab.)
Check your comparison facts:
1) Near-compiled speed with a scripting front-end? Try NumPy out, it works the SAME WAY as Matlab (vectorize your code and it runs at near-compiled speed). There isn't any secret to how Matlab does things, it's just what they've put together into one package and the loyal userbase that keeps them going.
2) UI's: iPython or Spyder are user interfaces achieving similar goals to that of Matlab (I prefer the former as I'm a command-line junkie, but the latter will make you believe you're in Matlab: lint and debugger are integrated).
3) Bugs: maybe somebody codes like their job depended on it, but the bugs I've seen got fixed with their 6-month release cycle. That didn't help me a damn bit.
4) Price "up-front": hahahaha, you're joking, right? So if you want your bugs fixed, like I said, most get fixed in their semi-yearly releases, but you only get THOSE if you have an active (a recurring cost) support contract. And then you find that one of your toolboxes or another sw requires the Matlab version that still has the bug in it. Now you're SOL. Commercial software ain't all roses, especially if you aren't a fortune 100 company or a big research institution. I update my Python, NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib whenever they have a release OR bugfix/patch, for free, now until doomsday.
Look into the libraries that Sage Math uses for near-Mathematica symbolic manipulation. Or just use Sage (which is built on top of Python).
Simulink I haven't found a great replacement for within Python, but graphical programming is often more of an impediment than a help for me. For layout of one-off control systems, it was nice, but I've just gotten too efficient with text editing (and I'm to the point that I can visualize what's going on) to want to worry about connecting wires, double-clicking, changing properties, etc. (To wit, last time I used Simulink, I auto-generated all of the block diagrams and set all block properties with an m-file script.)
There are 4 kinds of devices, I believe, that make any sense for the FCC to care about:
1. Passive antennas
2. Radios intended to transmit (which do not include an antenna)
3. Radios intended to transmit (which include an antenna)
4. Electronic devices not intended to transmit but that, nonetheless, do radiate (EMI)
Passive antennas are the only category where what you said makes sense. But I think all the FCC cares about passive antennas is what the FAA cares about passive antennas: that they aren't so tall as to knock an airplane out of the sky. An antenna receives as well (that is, with equal gain) as it transmits, so characterizing their gain is important when matching an antenna to device type (2). Typically the FCC wants to approve the entire system (devices in the third category), because it is virtually impossible to know the consequences (including increases in EMI and harmonics that suddenly pop up) of attaching, for example, a 6 dBi antenna to a 100 mW 2.4 GHz WiFi card. But the FCC also must approve the radio (category 2 above) if it is sold separately and then put together by somebody else. A radio will get an advisory that it should only be coupled with antennas equal to or below a certain gain.
Otherwise, a radio in receive mode essentially falls into category (4), which, in other words, needs to pass the same requirements as the computer sitting on your desk does. But the FCC doesn't care if you put a 60 dBi antenna, sensitive to a restricted band, with a receive-only radio.
The PURPOSE of the FCC regs is to keep people playing well together. And it isn't like you listening on a frequency causes somebody else to NOT be able to listen in on that frequency.
That isn't how the process works. First, you can measure phase error (timing error) or frequency error of an oscillator continuously. So it needn't be a discrete-in-time measurement, and you can certainly measure errors of much less than one second on a 1 Hz signal. And your corrections certainly do not need to be discrete-in-time updates or, more importantly, corrections needn't come in multiples of 1 second.
Updating physical clocks or correcting for their drift doesn't have to happen like leap seconds do for UTC (which tracks TAI on the sub-second level but tracks astronomical time as far as which second it is, to within 0.9 seconds.)
So if you have an oscillator that should be running at 1 Hz, and it started out that way, but it is slowing down at PRECISELY the rate of 1 Hz per hour, you could theoretically apply a constant 1 Hz per hour correction to the oscillator (after bringing the oscillator back to 1 Hz), and then the oscillator would be perfect at all times.
There is no inherent advantage to performing this process with a 4.5 GHz oscillator as opposed to a 1 Hz oscillator.
A manual is a GREAT idea. Really good documentation is something I've paid for in an open source project, since it seems that many projects lack great (or good or ANY) documentation or the people willing to do such documentation.
The original developer of the code is in a great position to do so.
Good suggestion.
You can perfectly well have an amount of something but refer to the amount of its unit: four inches, for example, where the amount is four and the unit is inches. In this case, one might not have a respectable amount of inches.
You can refer to http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=amount for the definition of amount. Just think: one potato is a small amount (or number, see discussion at dictionary.com) of potatoes. The amount is one, the unit is potatoes. A farm can have a respectable amount of acres, though "acreage" might be more acceptable to the prescriptivist crowd. Not so weird though, at least to me.
But what do I know; I am just one speaker of yet another amalgam of regional English dialects.
Are they really "triangulating" using cell towers? Or are they doing something like finding a rough area for the phone by which the cell the phone is associated with and which towers can see the phone? So if towers X, Y,and Z can see your phone, but X has strongest signal, you are probably in a certain area and closest to tower X.
Triangulation, technically, is using the angles to a target from two known locations to determine the target's location. I don't know if the base stations have the ability to tell what the angle to a cell phone is; I thought they only had signal strength information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulate for more info
Wow. The leagues of uninformed.
You think there are two things here, Matlab and Octave. Matlab is proprietary, and Octave followed it. It's as simple as that to you.
But wait, where does much of the meat in Matlab come from? Netlib. OPEN SOURCE! HAHAHAHA (Some of the Netlib code has license restrictions, some does not.)
http://www.netlib.org/
What does Matlab use for optimized BLAS routines to run super-quick on your Windows/Linux/Mac? ATLAS. Check out the Sourceforge page:
http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/
The really important thing for me is that now that Octave is out there (actually, Octave has been around since about 1994), the explorations that I made in undergrad in Matlab can be done entirely in Octave now and forever. A good tool doesn't get worse as it gets old, it just gets used more.
If there was once a patent on hammers, there is no less usefulness in (but much lower prices on) hammers after the patent expires. Now we get much of Matlab's functionality completely free. Congratulations John Eaton, et al., for giving all who follow another tool to use freely to build bigger and better tools.
And as others have mentioned, if you don't like Matlab/Octave, use another tool that tried to accomplish the task of a high-level numerical tool in a different way. To me, however, I can code up an algorithm, test out concepts, and produce incredibly helpful visualizations in a matter of minutes using Matlab or Octave. Any tool this powerful has a learning curve to get over before it is so efficient, and I climbed that learning curve with Matlab, but I was able to use Octave immediately because I had already gone through that process using Matlab.
If you made a completely innovative new tool, it likely wouldn't be worth it for me to use for a while because I am so fast at coding Matlab/Octave, and the whole point in these tools is to make the programmer's job easy (if I wanted fast code execution, C or Fortran could be used).
I call bullshit. Check out the price list, which I have only picked items that make sense for tasks that I do regularly (and hence this is not too broad of a scope):
The bare minimum for signal processing stuff:
MATLAB: $1900
Simulink: $3000
Signal Processing: $800
Signal Processing Blockset: $1000
Subtotal: $6,700
A few more helpful tools that almost every engineer can make use of, not very extravagant:
Control System Toolbox: $1000
Filter Design Toolbox: $1000
Subtotal now: $8,700
I do a lot of RF comms stuff, so the following are very useful for me:
Communications Toolbox: $1000
Communications Blockset: $1000
RF Blockset: $2000
RF Toolbox: $1000
Subtotal now: $13,700
Implementing algorithms in the real world almost always involves fixed-point computation, so:
Simulink Fixed Point: $1000
Fixed-Point Toolbox: $1000
Grand total: $15,700
In fact, if you look at the MathWorks product listing for each category:
MATLAB CATEGORIES:
Math & Optimization: $4,100
Statistics & Data Analysis: $9,800
Control System Design and Analysis: $6,700
Signal Processing and Communications: $7,800
Image Processing: $2,900
Test & Measurement: $4,900
Computational Biology: $4,000
Financial Modeling and Analysis: $5,500
Application Deployment: $5,200
Application Deployment Targets: $12,000 (.NET, Excel, and Java each are $4k)
Database Connectivity and Reporting: $1,500
SIMULINK CATEGORIES:
Fixed-point Modeling: $1,000
Event-based Modeling: $5,800
Physical Modeling: $11,000
Simulation Graphics: $1,700
Control System Design and Analysis: $4,000
Signal Processing and Communications: $5,000
Code Generation: $30,300
PC-Based Rapid Control Prototyping and HIL: $10,000
Embedded Targets: $12,000 (Each processor is $3k apiece)
Verification, Validation, and Testing: $9,000
Find their product price list here:
http://www.mathworks.com/store/default.do
And you can add up what they recommend for signal processing applications yourself (Hint: just getting the recommended Matlab, Simulink, and Real-Time Workshop is $12,400.)
http://www.mathworks.com/applications/dsp_comm/products.html
They have recommendations for other fields of R&D also if you want to look.
Wow, I can't see how ANYONE could POSSIBLY rack up a $15k MathWorks bill. My educated guess is that you are not a moron, but that you are uninformed about more than just the moron status of this guy's "math guy." Maybe you got a very nice academic discount. Maybe you just got Matlab and a couple of toolboxes. But that's not the situation a lot of folks face when they actually want to accomplish something with Matlab/Simulink.
So at least by the 1920s scientists knew that something man-made could break the sound barrier:
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDeA statement like "[VIM] just makes the entire system seem antiquated and stupid" is foppish and itself ignorant. If text (and keyboard input) is antiquated, then I guess we should all get out of the programming game. Maybe do a little LabVIEW and then commit mass suicide.
In a way, [G]VI[M] and EMACS each represent a club. Clubs of people who took the temporary productivity hit to learn a difficult tool (and possibly put in extra hours to still make the deadline) with some promise of greater productivity in the end.
Is it a false promise? Maybe. There may be a little elitist ego in there, too, but I'd like to think that many who have learned those tools are people willing to put in effort for overall efficiency, and it seems to me to have been beneficial.
Each time I've coded a different "language" (Verilog, C, C++, javascript, Python, Magic VLSI text files, shell, SVG, POV-Ray, bill-of-materials files, SPICE models, config files, etc.) VIM has been there for me, equally handy and powerful. But it didn't look as pretty as Visual Studio, so I guess I shouldn't bother to tell anyone about it. And remember, these are not necessarily tools for a first-time programmer, but for a first-time Linux programmer.
I'll post this again: The news is not that they've built an oscillator at the highest frequency ever (think: LASER is much higher frequency); the news is that it's the highest-frequency CMOS oscillator built to date. (Which I can't confirm, but it sounds right to me.)
Yes, people have achieved higher frequencies, and controlled them very precisely, as you point out; however, such oscillators aren't CMOS oscillators. That's the news, that they've built a CMOS oscillator at such a frequency, not that they have achieved the highest frequency ever to be controlled (which would be a joke). Not exactly what the /. headline implies, though.
Well, I would be interested in the source you site, and I would tend to agree... but for a smaller business than the ones we're talking, not for businesses with monopolies or a very large % of the market share of their core business.
If you look at Google as a search engine business (which another poster appropriately points out is probably not quite accurate), they already have a good-sized portion of the market (64% and growing, according to one source).
If Google goes for the last 36% of the search market (because they are a good business by your standards and only focus on their core), then at best Google can only increase its value by just over 56%. That means that, with a lot of assumptions thrown in, if it takes 10 years for Google to monopolize search, you get 4.6% increase in stock value each year. That isn't going to even beat inflation. (Of course if they monopolize, then not only can they drive prices up, but they can also get some government regulators interested.)
Now you own stock for a second company, MS, whose core business is operating systems. MS has 94% of the market share, based upon Wikipedia. But close enough. Say they just focus on their core business, and it takes them 5 years to totally monopolize their market. That yields about 1.2% per year. Wow.
So now you have two stocks, both for companies who focus only on their core business. But you'd have a better investment with a money market or CD at your local bank. Do you see my point now about these big businesses dabbling in other things (never too far from the core, but definitely not in the core) to see if something else pans out?
The problem with the "core business" model is when people invest in your business (which covers a lot of businesses out there). Dividends from a company's profits are okay every year, but people want to see their stock triple in value.
And that doesn't happen if a business that dominates a market sticks to their "core business." Stock doesn't increase much if you go for the last 10% (or whatever) of the OS market share. Can you define their core business? Once you ID that, can you identify a clear path they can take to double the value of their company by pursuing that core business further? There are some obvious answers, and smart-ass answers. But I think they need to find new paths in order to grow further.
So Microsoft may look confused to you, but if you have billions of $$ in your war chest, you can afford to put many irons in many fires. If somebody else in any given realm gets successful, you at least have a beachhead from which to expand into the new, profitable territory. That's smart, although maybe less romantic than sticking tight to Windows until both Windows and MS die together.
Well, more so, a teacher's lesson would be taught by literally dictating keystroke combinations to the students for the TI calculators. I used HP and had to figure out *what* was being done to do it myself (though learning involved a lot more than just translating the teacher's poor lesson onto my calculator, of course). But all the other kids just dutifully re-typed what the teacher said. Wow, what a poor learning environment.
So to me TI calculators symbolize the cattle-and-parrot education system, and hence why I have always shied away from them. There are some absolutely great TI calculators, but I feel dirty if I touch them after how they were used in school.
And bless RPN / stack manipulation for making introductory assembly language in college a good bit easier!
But to be fair, I did become a bit dependent upon my HP, although I was dependent in the sense that I would program everything I learned (from scratch) but then I needed those programs to repeat what I had done. In a sense it was a study mechanism because I had to figure the concept out in order to program it, but then I would forget it shortly after that. So in the end my HP didn't save me from my own (perceived) cleverness.
My comment addresses yours, but wanders, so apologies in advance.
I use POVRay for explaining engineering concepts to co-workers, in papers for external viewing, and for use by the marketing folks. Word on the street is that its renders find their way into publications such as Nature and Science.
You talk of "production," which sounds like "movie," but it isn't a chump app just because movies don't use it for their render engine. It's a free, not-too-restricted-source-code app that yields stunning results. (Side-note: PRMan is ~$1k, and I couldn't find a price on Mental Ray, but my attitude towards Autodesk is that of the indentured slave to his master. But I digress.)
It is the single most time-consuming task I do, doing a render, and about everything else runs "fast enough" for me on my three-year-old mid-grade P4 system. Sometimes I wish for greater performance with an Octave/Matlab script when I am playing around. But that's hard to benchmark & compare on systems and only rarely does it take the same order of magnitude of time that POVRay can take.
So in response to another, I am one (and likely not the only) person who would lean towards a system based upon its POVRay performance. I have just been overjoyed that this has started to be used for benchmarks. I personally find the frames-per-second on Doom4 benchmarks useless, but what it comes down to is one thing:
The more apps people benchmark (accurately), the more people benefit and can make informed decisions that address their specific situations.
So I would like to see the apps you mention benchmarked, too. CompUSA never let me install photoshop and run my personal tests on it back when Photoshop was important to me. And now the greatest computer selection is from online retailers; how will you compare the value of a computer for you? $3000 for a Core2Duo Extreme Quad SSE2 from Dell, $2800 for an AMD Dual Quad HyperTransport blah, blah, from HP, and a bare-bones system from somebody else? What is each worth to you? And performance, obviously, gets far more complicated when you move beyond the processor isolated in a system. Is it worth the extra $100 for me to get another 1GB of memory? Will I ever really know how that will effect my apps, or does it just come down to whether or not I am willing to hand over another $100 just in case it might help?
I guess that is it: What are people's expectations for spending their money? Those who look at benchmarks might just find the "best" and drop their cash (or credit) on that one. Those who don't look at benchmarks might hit a price point, and just grab the best-looking system or find something from a specific brand. People like myself who want to optimize on a personally-important criteria are mostly left to guess and always be uncomfortable with any choice they make. And this situation might only change when spending the $1000 (or whatever) is worth caring a great deal about.
My apologies for the apparent personal insult (although I don't find being a dependent to be anything demeaning, just a reason why someone wouldn't know that a tax preparer is held accountable). And apologies for the "Honestly?" comment, which was an unnecessary gibe. And yes, you are correct that the individual is held accountable. That was your point, that nothing alleviates the taxpayer of accountability, so the "NO GUARANTEES" text shouldn't be shocking, and is no different from a CPA or any other tax preparation method (Jack next door, turbotax, etc.). I misinterpreted your post as one of the posts that was saying the CPA has no responsibility for getting your taxes right, just like this software. I apologize for that, too, because that wasn't what you were saying.
I was frustrated that no one was seeming to acknowledge that tax preparers ARE held accountable for what they do; that seems to be a larger issue of trust at play here since, as you pointed out, the tax payer is on the line any way he/she goes.
So since the CPA can go to jail, too, if he/she signs on the line of a fraudulent return, the CPA may have more reason to do a good job than the software, if that is one's perception of the situation. Personally, I've both prepared my own taxes and had others do it, and I would likely use this software because I can assess its accuracy by checking the tax guides (which I do regardless of who prepares my taxes) and I end up writing my own software (a fairly complex set of spreadsheets) when I do my own taxes anyway. This would save me the hassle and the more people who use it, likely the better the quality for everyone, so as far as using a piece of software, this open source package seems to be good to me.
"Honestly"? who is being honest? Who hasn't checked the 1040 form recently? The tax preparer gets his/her OWN line on the tax form that he/she signs. So there IS accountability for the preparer, if he/she does things incorrectly. There is no guarantee that you get all the best loopholes (though some DO guarantee this) with an accountant, but the IRS likely has never convicted anyone of paying too much in taxes.
I have posted this comment to other posters who don't know how taxes work (are you still a dependent?). Not sure about TurboTax or whatnot. But if someone prepares your taxes for you, they will be held responsible in some manner by the government, whether or not they want to be held responsible, once they sign on the line. Check out the 1040 form on the IRS.gov website if you want to see for yourself.
The tax preparer gets his/her OWN line on the tax form that he/she signs. So there IS some accountability. Not sure about TurboTax or whatnot. But if someone prepares your taxes for you, they will be held responsible in some manner by the government, whether or not they want to be held responsible, once they sign on the line. Check out the 1040 form on the IRS.gov website if you want to see for yourself.
Amen! Understanding goes so much further than memorizing. Understanding allows people to USE mathematics, for whatever they like. Otherwise, if they haven't memorized the formula for X, then the student can't do X.
The parent to your post, I believe, was confusing two things: THEORY with "stuffing it down their throats." The latter sounds more like wrote memorization, NOT understanding, and not necessarily theory. Theory is intriguing and fun and leads to a student's ability to apply math in many ways; memorization is what gets stuffed down people's throats, turns them off to math, and keeps them from every being able to practically apply math or enjoy the theory.
For example: "Oh, I think it was either rate divided by time or time divided by distance, I don't remember. I don't know. Oh well." That's wrote memorization of applied math gone awry, not too much theory being taught. It must be said, though, that either theory or application can be taught by wrote memorization or otherwise, and simply memorizing math theory also doesn't get a student any closer to using OR enjoying math.
Just use these for binary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
And use the SI prefixes for powers-of-ten, and all will be okay. The more who do this, the more accepted it will be, the fewer who won't understand what these mean, and less confusion will result.