Speaking of archaic uses, why isn't there a movement to replace analog AM, FM, and shortwave radio with something more robust and spectrum/power efficient?
I thought I heard somewhere that AM occupies a chunk of the EM spectrum that actually follows the curvature of the earth, and doesn't need line-of-sight to work. Seems to me like that could be put to use for some other, more modern broadcast medium. The fact that AM is nice because you can listen to it with an unpowered transistor radio is irrelevant these days.
I seem to recall a long stretch in the Pigeon River Gorge in the Smoky Mountains where the speed limit is 50mph. That's about the curviest piece of interstate that I've ever seen.
This should be modded down.
on
Who Needs Harvard?
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Oh please, moderating a grammar correction and a classless insult to +5 funny? I was under the impression, that slashdotters didn't like that sort of crap. Obviously, I was mistaken.
These pictures (both the perspective and the devistation) remind me a lot of the big panoramic picture that they have on the wall of the atomic bomb museum at Peace Park in Hiroshima. Except I imagine the pictures in Hiroshima were taken from an airplane rather than a kite.
Timed lights are often an impediment to pedestrians as well because they tend to have long cycles. While there are lots of cases where this doesn't really matter due to a lack of foot traffic, turning downtown streets into 45mph thoroughfares is not a good thing.
It seems to me that whenever a once-thriving industry starts to decline due to the changing world, the corporations in that industry will do one of two things. 1: See the writing on the wall, realize that eternal success can't be achieved through an antiquated business model, and try to adapt (which is great), or 2: continue stubbornly until ends no longer meet, and then cry "foul play!" and use the courts (or worse yet, lobbyists and legislation) to make up for their lack of innovation.
So far the TV industry has experimented with new technologies and delivery media such as the internet and on-demand delivery to a degree of success, but I get the feeling that if TV as we know it were to truly reach the end of the line, the networks would be very quick to make the shift into category #2. No facts to back that up, just a gut feeling. What do you think?
Be careful, lest we should forget that the radio stations are evil as well. If this is a major source of dough for the buyer of mass swaths of frequency and stomper of all private, unique, and worthwhile radio stations, I say take it away! Even if it means benefitting the record labels.
And as far as the radio stations are concerned, without the cash kickbacks from the labesl, even ClearChannel stations may be more willing to play independent / non-major-label music. Fat chance, I know, but as far as I can see, everything about this move is good in principle.
Were people in China able use the google cache to circumvent the governmental censorship? If that's the case, it seems that leaving the service active would provide a "better experience" to me.
This is exactly half the horizontal resolution of a full HD frame.
What I don't get, is that the resolution of HDV (the standard that this camera uses) is actually 1440x1080i. Why? This would make sense in a 4:3, since 1080 * (4/3) = 1440. But this is a 16:9 camera, isn't it? This meanst that in order to play this back on a 1080i HDTV, it will be horizontally resampled TWICE - 960 lines coming out of the sensors, interpolated to 1440 and encoded, and then interpolated again to 1920 in order to be displayed on a 1920 line HDTV.
I also hear tell that there are large amounts of Helium 3 buried on the surface of the moon, deposited there by the solar wind over the eons.
What good is Helium 3?
It's great fuel for fusion! Instead of the radioactive byproducts from Deuterium-Tritium fusion, it's clean, and the byproducts are both charged particles and it is hence very easy to reclaim their energy as electicity.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. The article states that Ericsson will no longer be making products for the semiconductor market- ie, they will no longer be making Bluetooth CHIPS. It has probably become more economical for Ericsson to buy said bluetooth chips from other (probably Chinese or Taiwanese) vendors and integrate them into their mobile devices instead of producing the chips they integrate themselves.
And this is nothing but a good thing, as it means that the Bluetooth implementations have become uniform to the point that Ericsson can trust other manufacturers to make the chips that they use.
While the majority of the comments for this article seem to be ringing the death-knell for Bluetooth or at least proclaiming that Ericsson has lost faith in the technology, you correctly show that this couldn't be further from the truth.
1. English nouns do not have cases (Well, pronouns do, a whopping two of them, but that aside..)
2. English nouns do not have gender.
3. For any given verb, there are very few actual forms that the verb can take. Any other conjugations are handled by helper words that are the same across the board for all verbs.
These are all factors which contribute to English not being too hard on the scale of things. Of course, it also depends on what language you start from. For example, starting from Japanese or Chinese, the concept of articles (a, the, etc..) is rather difficult to master, whereas if you were to start from a language like Spanish which follows generally the same principles for articles as English, it's no problem.
Gosh. Why do posts on slashdot pointing out a dupe (whether they're right or wrong!) automatically get moderated up to +5?
Although I can't read the article from the 2.5year old post, that slashdot post is merely pointing out that German scientists have devised a method for making glass from aluminum oxides. This new post, however, points out that researchers at 3M have developed a process for making large quantities of said glass, bringing aluminum glass much closer to market.
This is just as newsworthy, if not more so, than the article that this is supposedly a "dupe" of. Quit jumping the gun like that.
And how can anyone stand 1280x1024 at all? Whoever invented this resolution should be made a pariah to modern society. In a world of 4;3 resolutions, it stands alone as the only one that's 5:4, which just makes my teeth burn every time I think about it.
In the case of an LCD, the pixels are still 1:1, but if you want to run something, i.e. a game or a movie that wants to run at 4:3 either you get distortion (unacceptable) or black bars (in which case, why did you get a 17 inch monitor when you're not using all 17 of those inches?).
And in the case of a CRT monitor, at 1280x1024 you get nonsquare pixels. It irks me a lot more than it probably should when I see a 32x32 icon displayed wider than it is tall. It's the same sort of feeling as when I'm using someone else's computer with an improperly adjusted CRT monitor, or perhaps a computer with a 1024x768 LCD monitor set to run scaled at 800x600.
But back to my point, All you people with CRTs at 1280x1024, use a real resolution... 1280x960, 1440x1080, 1600x1200, 4:3 for all!!
There are SMS (and e-mail and IM) capable smart phones with qwerty keyboards. While typing on a numeric keypad is indeed a huge pain in the ass, give a phone a more standard keyboard and you're all good.
Indeed this is not new news; from where I live in hiroshima, there are quite a few mechanical parking garages within easy walking distance. In Japan such garages generally take the form of a tower about six stories high and perhaps ten meters by ten meters at the base, however there are undoubtedly some that go underground or take different shapes underneath department stores and such. These things (Along with multitudes of twelve story high-rise apartments) can freqently be found even in quite small towns. Must have something to do with the rather high land prices in Japan.
Of course these sheet metal covered boxes aren't pretty; but in my opinion there are very few things about the skyline of a Japanese city that ould be called pretty. I speculate that due to the density of urban development in Japan, people here seem to be willing to endure endure such things to a much greater degree than people in the US.
In Japan, DoCoMo offers video phone service over their 3G wireless network. I don't have DoCoMo myself (I use AU, I chose cost over features) but last night I actually had a chance to try out the videophone on a friend's mobile. Although the screen was small, the framerate seemed decent. In my opinion, the worst part was the sound, since you can't hold the earpiece up to your face while you're talking on the videophone, the phone relied on its external speakerphone mode, which definitely made the audio much less clear. However, if you hold the phone in one place and don't move around too much, mouth movements are transmitted quite clearly, with surprislingly little lag.
That aside, and perhaps most importantly, it really helped my brain to make the connection that I was actually talking to another person. I suppose that there must be a hard-wired light in the human brain that turns on when you actually see someone's face while you're talking to them. It's a bit hard to describe, but after trying it out, it's not difficult for me to believe that this is the future.
I haven't read much about it recently, but I heard that korea is almost entirely CDMA (to a greater degree than even the US). As for what frequency band, I don't know. But if you look at the info on this device, there are two seperate models and if I were to guess at the difference, one is probably GSM and the other is probably CDMA.
OK. This phone/PDA has quite a few uncommon features. - the sliding form factor with a number pad in a pocketpc device - a megapixel-plus camera in a pocketpc device - a 2.8inch, 18 bit LCD in a pocket pc device. Personally I think this the most important feature. Most pocketpc's these days have 3.5 inch 16 bit displays; shaving the screen down makes the device much more easily pocketable and the greater color depth means (among other things) that font antialiasing (cleartype) will be improved. - 192mb built in memory. I've not seen anything higher than 128 so far. - Did I read that it has built-in GPS? If so, that's definitely news.
What remains to be seen is: - What wireless protocols does it use? GSM/GPRS? CDMA? Both? What frequency bands? - From pictures that I've seen, it has an SD slot. But what about SDIO? - Does it support bluetooth? wifi? - How big is the battery? - Will it be made available outside of Korea? - Exactly what are its dimensions? How much does it weigh? - How much will it cost?
What it almost certainly lacks: - A full thumbboard. I don't care if it's qwerty; if it had one key per letter I'd be ecstatic. - A CompactFlash slot. With all that stuff and such a small package, there's just no way it'd fit. I'm not too disappointed. - Optical zoom on the digital camera. This may just be a pipe dream, but I can't help but think that an internal zoom lens like the one in the Minolta DIMAGE X series or the recently announced Sony DSC-T1 would fit quite well inside a PDA.
This device is the closest that anything has come to what I'd consider the ultimate convergence device. Where do I sign up?
Looks like you've fallen victim to a problem similar to one that bit NASA in the rear recently. The temperature 1650C is 1923K and 3002F- so if the ESA/NASA made a heat shield out of Scandium, the shuttle would be screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of archaic uses, why isn't there a movement to replace analog AM, FM, and shortwave radio with something more robust and spectrum/power efficient?
I thought I heard somewhere that AM occupies a chunk of the EM spectrum that actually follows the curvature of the earth, and doesn't need line-of-sight to work. Seems to me like that could be put to use for some other, more modern broadcast medium. The fact that AM is nice because you can listen to it with an unpowered transistor radio is irrelevant these days.
Talk about archaic technology!
I seem to recall a long stretch in the Pigeon River Gorge in the Smoky Mountains where the speed limit is 50mph. That's about the curviest piece of interstate that I've ever seen.
Oh please, moderating a grammar correction and a classless insult to +5 funny? I was under the impression, that slashdotters didn't like that sort of crap. Obviously, I was mistaken.
These pictures (both the perspective and the devistation) remind me a lot of the big panoramic picture that they have on the wall of the atomic bomb museum at Peace Park in Hiroshima. Except I imagine the pictures in Hiroshima were taken from an airplane rather than a kite.
Timed lights are often an impediment to pedestrians as well because they tend to have long cycles. While there are lots of cases where this doesn't really matter due to a lack of foot traffic, turning downtown streets into 45mph thoroughfares is not a good thing.
Yeah, and what if you end up losing that first $20 that you were trying to double. Do you stop? Or do play again to "make up your losses"?
Statistically, no matter how you play, the house eventually wins at roulette.
It seems to me that whenever a once-thriving industry starts to decline due to the changing world, the corporations in that industry will do one of two things. 1: See the writing on the wall, realize that eternal success can't be achieved through an antiquated business model, and try to adapt (which is great), or 2: continue stubbornly until ends no longer meet, and then cry "foul play!" and use the courts (or worse yet, lobbyists and legislation) to make up for their lack of innovation.
So far the TV industry has experimented with new technologies and delivery media such as the internet and on-demand delivery to a degree of success, but I get the feeling that if TV as we know it were to truly reach the end of the line, the networks would be very quick to make the shift into category #2. No facts to back that up, just a gut feeling. What do you think?
Funniest post I've read in a while!
Be careful, lest we should forget that the radio stations are evil as well. If this is a major source of dough for the buyer of mass swaths of frequency and stomper of all private, unique, and worthwhile radio stations, I say take it away! Even if it means benefitting the record labels.
And as far as the radio stations are concerned, without the cash kickbacks from the labesl, even ClearChannel stations may be more willing to play independent / non-major-label music. Fat chance, I know, but as far as I can see, everything about this move is good in principle.
Were people in China able use the google cache to circumvent the governmental censorship? If that's the case, it seems that leaving the service active would provide a "better experience" to me.
I've always considered myself the kind who just... cracks, pressure or no. Kinda sucks when it just "goes off" while I'm watching TV or something.
less than half?
1920 / 2 = 960.
This is exactly half the horizontal resolution of a full HD frame.
What I don't get, is that the resolution of HDV (the standard that this camera uses) is actually 1440x1080i. Why? This would make sense in a 4:3, since 1080 * (4/3) = 1440. But this is a 16:9 camera, isn't it? This meanst that in order to play this back on a 1080i HDTV, it will be horizontally resampled TWICE - 960 lines coming out of the sensors, interpolated to 1440 and encoded, and then interpolated again to 1920 in order to be displayed on a 1920 line HDTV.
SHEESH. Let's just move on to 1:1, okay?!
I also hear tell that there are large amounts of Helium 3 buried on the surface of the moon, deposited there by the solar wind over the eons.
What good is Helium 3?
It's great fuel for fusion! Instead of the radioactive byproducts from Deuterium-Tritium fusion, it's clean, and the byproducts are both charged particles and it is hence very easy to reclaim their energy as electicity.
That's what might make moon mining worthwhile.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. The article states that Ericsson will no longer be making products for the semiconductor market- ie, they will no longer be making Bluetooth CHIPS. It has probably become more economical for Ericsson to buy said bluetooth chips from other (probably Chinese or Taiwanese) vendors and integrate them into their mobile devices instead of producing the chips they integrate themselves.
And this is nothing but a good thing, as it means that the Bluetooth implementations have become uniform to the point that Ericsson can trust other manufacturers to make the chips that they use.
While the majority of the comments for this article seem to be ringing the death-knell for Bluetooth or at least proclaiming that Ericsson has lost faith in the technology, you correctly show that this couldn't be further from the truth.
1. English nouns do not have cases (Well, pronouns do, a whopping two of them, but that aside..)
2. English nouns do not have gender.
3. For any given verb, there are very few actual forms that the verb can take. Any other conjugations are handled by helper words that are the same across the board for all verbs.
These are all factors which contribute to English not being too hard on the scale of things. Of course, it also depends on what language you start from. For example, starting from Japanese or Chinese, the concept of articles (a, the, etc..) is rather difficult to master, whereas if you were to start from a language like Spanish which follows generally the same principles for articles as English, it's no problem.
Gosh. Why do posts on slashdot pointing out a dupe (whether they're right or wrong!) automatically get moderated up to +5?
Although I can't read the article from the 2.5year old post, that slashdot post is merely pointing out that German scientists have devised a method for making glass from aluminum oxides. This new post, however, points out that researchers at 3M have developed a process for making large quantities of said glass, bringing aluminum glass much closer to market.
This is just as newsworthy, if not more so, than the article that this is supposedly a "dupe" of. Quit jumping the gun like that.
Notice that the article says 25kph, not mph. 25kph =~ 15.5mph. Sounds more reasonable like that, doesn't it?
And how can anyone stand 1280x1024 at all? Whoever invented this resolution should be made a pariah to modern society. In a world of 4;3 resolutions, it stands alone as the only one that's 5:4, which just makes my teeth burn every time I think about it.
In the case of an LCD, the pixels are still 1:1, but if you want to run something, i.e. a game or a movie that wants to run at 4:3 either you get distortion (unacceptable) or black bars (in which case, why did you get a 17 inch monitor when you're not using all 17 of those inches?).
And in the case of a CRT monitor, at 1280x1024 you get nonsquare pixels. It irks me a lot more than it probably should when I see a 32x32 icon displayed wider than it is tall. It's the same sort of feeling as when I'm using someone else's computer with an improperly adjusted CRT monitor, or perhaps a computer with a 1024x768 LCD monitor set to run scaled at 800x600.
But back to my point, All you people with CRTs at 1280x1024, use a real resolution... 1280x960, 1440x1080, 1600x1200, 4:3 for all!!
There are SMS (and e-mail and IM) capable smart phones with qwerty keyboards. While typing on a numeric keypad is indeed a huge pain in the ass, give a phone a more standard keyboard and you're all good.
Indeed this is not new news; from where I live in hiroshima, there are quite a few mechanical parking garages within easy walking distance. In Japan such garages generally take the form of a tower about six stories high and perhaps ten meters by ten meters at the base, however there are undoubtedly some that go underground or take different shapes underneath department stores and such. These things (Along with multitudes of twelve story high-rise apartments) can freqently be found even in quite small towns. Must have something to do with the rather high land prices in Japan.
Of course these sheet metal covered boxes aren't pretty; but in my opinion there are very few things about the skyline of a Japanese city that ould be called pretty. I speculate that due to the density of urban development in Japan, people here seem to be willing to endure endure such things to a much greater degree than people in the US.
In Japan, DoCoMo offers video phone service over their 3G wireless network. I don't have DoCoMo myself (I use AU, I chose cost over features) but last night I actually had a chance to try out the videophone on a friend's mobile. Although the screen was small, the framerate seemed decent. In my opinion, the worst part was the sound, since you can't hold the earpiece up to your face while you're talking on the videophone, the phone relied on its external speakerphone mode, which definitely made the audio much less clear. However, if you hold the phone in one place and don't move around too much, mouth movements are transmitted quite clearly, with surprislingly little lag.
That aside, and perhaps most importantly, it really helped my brain to make the connection that I was actually talking to another person. I suppose that there must be a hard-wired light in the human brain that turns on when you actually see someone's face while you're talking to them. It's a bit hard to describe, but after trying it out, it's not difficult for me to believe that this is the future.
I haven't read much about it recently, but I heard that korea is almost entirely CDMA (to a greater degree than even the US). As for what frequency band, I don't know. But if you look at the info on this device, there are two seperate models and if I were to guess at the difference, one is probably GSM and the other is probably CDMA.
OK. This phone/PDA has quite a few uncommon features.
- the sliding form factor with a number pad in a pocketpc device
- a megapixel-plus camera in a pocketpc device
- a 2.8inch, 18 bit LCD in a pocket pc device. Personally I think this the most important feature. Most pocketpc's these days have 3.5 inch 16 bit displays; shaving the screen down makes the device much more easily pocketable and the greater color depth means (among other things) that font antialiasing (cleartype) will be improved.
- 192mb built in memory. I've not seen anything higher than 128 so far.
- Did I read that it has built-in GPS? If so, that's definitely news.
What remains to be seen is:
- What wireless protocols does it use? GSM/GPRS? CDMA? Both? What frequency bands?
- From pictures that I've seen, it has an SD slot. But what about SDIO?
- Does it support bluetooth? wifi?
- How big is the battery?
- Will it be made available outside of Korea?
- Exactly what are its dimensions? How much does it weigh?
- How much will it cost?
What it almost certainly lacks:
- A full thumbboard. I don't care if it's qwerty; if it had one key per letter I'd be ecstatic.
- A CompactFlash slot. With all that stuff and such a small package, there's just no way it'd fit. I'm not too disappointed.
- Optical zoom on the digital camera. This may just be a pipe dream, but I can't help but think that an internal zoom lens like the one in the Minolta DIMAGE X series or the recently announced Sony DSC-T1 would fit quite well inside a PDA.
This device is the closest that anything has come to what I'd consider the ultimate convergence device. Where do I sign up?
At $2.10 per textbook, I don't give a crap whether it falls apart halfway through the semester. Just buy two of them. Or three.
(Of course there's shipping to worry about...)
Looks like you've fallen victim to a problem similar to one that bit NASA in the rear recently. The temperature 1650C is 1923K and 3002F- so if the ESA/NASA made a heat shield out of Scandium, the shuttle would be screwed.