Posts by easyk

Microsoft promises not-quite-as-much Street View

LADAR

you all don't understand... Adding LADAR (LIDAR) data to streetview vehicles is huge. Any word on what LADAR system they are using?

Red Dwarf to blast off on new adventure

feck it.

I'd rather they brought back Father Ted.

Naked at 30: Osborne 1 stripped to its chips

caps

I made that mistake twice myself but it was on the same day. I was examining a power supply with a really big al-elec 200V cap. It discharged on me. After I picked myself up I made the stupid assumption that now that it had kicked my ass it must be fully discharged. It wasn't.

TI acquires National Semiconductor for $6.5bn

complaint and company impressions

"Whereas digital chips can only handle 1s and 0s, analog chips can read and process varying signals..."

Did you think we didn't know that? Furthermore, like was said above, digital chips can be characterized as analog differential comparators: comparing the input vs a threshold.

My EE impression of TI, gathered from talking with numerous laid off TI employees, is a company without a focus. I've seen that they have the best options for IEEE 1394 chips and 74LS04 in DIP packages. I don't imagine they make a whole lot of money on either of those. And lets not mention the shame that is their calculator line.

National, though, has some products that really make an engineer's life easier. Their Simple Switchers are easy to design with. For me they also have some very interesting ADC chips that I would love to get into a research project some day. They seem more inovative to the casual observer engineer.

Nanotech nerds assemble überfast-charge battery

worry not

"Ironically the question might be now can it be built to discharge *slowly* enough not to fry the motors."

Fear not my non-electrically inclined friend. If the batteries supply the same voltage as before the motors will not draw any more power than they did before.

NASA aims for space tests of Mars-in-a-month plasma drive

sun's gravity well

As I understand it... The Earth and Mars are orbitting in the Sun's gravity well. The energy from the engine accelerate the vehicle until it matches the orbital velocity (and thus orbital distance from the sun) of Mars.

Texting teenager plunges to his death

But for the grace of $deity go I

I'm clumsy. I fully expect to die in some moronic fashion. For example, I've nearly stepped off a mountain trying to get some people in the frame of a picture. I guess I don't have a point here except that I can empathise with the poor bastard. And 1m does seem a bit low.

The forgotten, fat generation of Mac Portables

hybrid chip

all of the interesting chips are from linear technology www.linear.com

The LT1054 is a monolithic, bipolar, switched-capacitor voltage converter and regulator.

The LTC™1040 is a monolithic CMOS dual comparator.

The one marked 0412 is the LT1004 Micropower Voltage Reference

The rest of the parts are opamps, descrete transistors, capacitors and one surface mount diode in a glass case (you dont' see those anymore). So yes, it is an eary switching regulator back when switched power supply design was still a black art.

Intel lets outside chip maker into its fabs

some FPGA are cheap and fun

You can get a couple year old Spartan 3AN starting at $10 in small quantities and it is just a blast to play with. It even comes in a TFQP package you can hand solder (if you've got a steady hand). I never mastered the art of home BGA assembly but I hear you can do it with a toaster oven. The newish Spartan 6 runs about $50. Of course a top of the line Virtex 6 can run $10K. Is it obvious I've only used Xilinx?

Iran unveils 'robot bomber'

@Ground Rush

The idea that the US overthrew the Iranian govermnet on its own is false. The US needed and had the tacit support of the mullahs. Those same mullahs that later used the US as a great satan to bring themselves to absolute power.

The iranian revolution was executed by intelectuals and religious fanatics working together. When complete the intelectuals put away their weapons but the religious fanatics did not leaving them in power.

The Iranian theocracy is far more guilty for the bad relationship with the world than the US.

15K Wikileaks docs 'potentially more explosive,' US frets

an inconvenient truth

exaclty, so far I think the documents expose that war is confusing and bloody. And that you shouldn't use your real name when giving intel to the US.

Chinese go beyond binary with ternary molecule

truth table

decimal, binary, ternary

0, 0, 0

1, 1, 1

2, 10, 02

3, 11, 10

hope this helps.

Research In Motion drives away with QNX

QNX good mostly

We have used QNX since 2001 as the embedded RTOS in some of our sensors. It is POSIX compliant so it ports from/to Linux very easy. The reason I chose to keep it when I took over the code was we had arlready bought the $10K developer seat and it is super easy to wite device drivers for.

US Navy plans self-building floating fortresses

It will go well until

someone decides they need more disk space on the server and ends up deleting all the program files in the TEMP folder.

SeaWorld killer killer whale must die, Bible insists

It's Bibles not Bible

New Testament and Old Testament

New Testament - happy god; turn other cheek; faith alone can save you(by some interpretatoins); etc

Old Testament - angry god; eye for eye; gods unbending law; genocide of any civilizatoin that dare oppose god's chosen people.

Lightning-gun tech 'approaching weaponisation'

electron death

yes AC Defeated by tinfoil : Trying to hurt someone with electrons is not a sure thing.

Lads from Lagos cut off

ahhhh

I sit corrected.

@ What's the betting?

not usually a lot of copper in fiber optic lines.

W3C launches appeal to scupper Apple patent

patants meh

I knew patents were in trouble when my boss told me to get with the company lawyer to patent a trivial improvement to a system. I must give some credit to the US Patent office though since it has been languising in the approval process for 3 years now.

Jimbo Wales: No one can make money from Wikipedia...

koolaide

Just a note that "kool aide drunk" makes no sense. It is a perversion of the "drink Kool Aid" which is a rather obscene reference to the unfortuanate episode when cult leader Jim Jones made his followers, mostly at gun piont, drink poison ( that contained zero percent kool aid ). Many people died. No one got the least bit drunk.

Anyway its overused and tiresome. Come up with something new for once in your life.

Firefox users flip out over sneak MS add-on

yipee!

I installed FedoraCore 10 over the weekend and already I can gloat about it on the reg forums. Score!

Sims 3 leaked two weeks before release

good work EA

I think their marketing is working very well as I am a SIMS 1 customer who was unaware of their new product. Now I am.

Raygun 747 to fight 'one-off' tag with twin '09 missile fryings

@ mirrors

So there you are all worried about the possible Death Ray Jumbo so you run down to your arsenal and strip off all the paint of your SRBM and polish the alluminum untill it is Oh so Shiny and reflects all the energy at the wavelength you think the jumbo laser shoots at. The americans are comming so you decide to launch some of your shiney missiles at them. They go up and lo and behold there are not Death Ray Jumbos in the area and your shiney missiles are now glowing like a muthaf$%ka on the radar designators of the "much more likely to be in the area" PAC3 anti-missile missile banks. Fudge, time to go hide in a spider hole.

Chip cooler launches liquid nitro at CPUs

cold != good

those processors will die just as fast at -40 as they will at 120. These things are designed to operate at in a temperature range, violate at your own risk

Hulu recognizes Blighty existence

interested only in themselves?

feck off you smeg heads!

- a merkin

An unthinking programmer's guide to the new C++

I like C++

Am I wierd? After using boost for a couple years and eliminating most of my OS dependencies between QNX, Linux and Windows I really began to appreciate the power C++ gives to library developers. Most of the complex constructs in C++ are only used where needed and then hidden away in a library or class so you can have neat and easy to understand code while still having powerful full control code under the hood. Besides Perl performs poorly for device drivers.

Homer Simpson 'nuclear waste spill' panic at nuke sub base!

doh

or is it d'oh?

Liquid crystals - Display genius no match for petty politics

@back then

No, back then a lot of research was done at Bell Labs, RCA, IBM and many other tech research shops. These are mostly gone now but today there is Google, Microsoft, and??. More research (porpotionatly) is done at Universities but a lot of that is useless crap done by grad students trying to get published.

We Were Burning

For a fantastic, if slightly borringly written, account of the development of LCDs in Japan read "We Were Burning : Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age "

Highly enjoyable if you rank high on the nerdscale.

Boffins sniff keystrokes with lasers, oscilloscopes

@USB keyboards not immune

More likely USB is immune because it uses differential signaliing and any bounce it creates on the power supply is identical for a '1' or a '0'. PS2 is single ended.

National Semiconductor to lay off 1,725

close one

Wow, that plant (Arlingon) is 4 blocks from my house. I guess I should have gotten my regulators from them instead of Linear Tech. Its just that Linear has a nicer website.

Boffins: Send robot lawn tractors to the Moon

"Berm"

I first heard the term “berm” when I was working with Marines at Fort Carson. I know they use the word constantly.

As in; “you can setup your equipment by that berm.”

I think it is a common mil-speak word for a wall-like low hill or mound.

Microsoft trades goodwill for TomTom Linux satisfaction

That reminds me...

I was going to buy one of them there Tom Tom thingys. Now would be a good time.

Geekerati brace for Unix timestamp milestone

unsigned int?

Why the hell would you use a signed number to represent a quantity that will never be negative?

unsigned int a _136_year_clock // me smart!

American Stereotype™ walks Google's mean Street View

that container is a Thermos

not a bottle

Microsoft axes 5,000 staff as Q2 profit dives 11%

doh

My brother just took at job at Microsoft R&D. I need to give him a call.

Spy chief to Obama: Let DARPA fix economy

ARPA

Just change the name to ARPA and double the budget. Half still does the Military BS (and keeps me employed) and the other can work much the same way DARPA does now. Get inventors, proffessors, etc. to sign up for 3 year or less shifts and tell them to make a difference.

BTW one good way to get a DARPA proposal NOT funded is to use the words "Low Risk".

Pioneer calls a halt to LaserDisc hardware production

@ac yeah right.

I think they are referring to the lossy mpeg 2* compression used on DVDs. Presumably the master is digitized but uncompressed ( or losslessly ). They can get a higher SNR from an uncompressed digital source after you consider the bandwidth of the disk and reading hardware. The claim is total balls** without some analysis that I am not willing to do.

* I think thats right; not going to look it up though.

** I wanted to use the brittish version of this word but I wasn't sure of the spelling.

'Ruggedised, weaponised' raygun modules now on sale

@ damage

"What sort of damage are we talking about? Is there any scale for what level of damage 15Kw and 100Kw weapons would be capable of(first person to suggest 1d20 needs to get our more)?"

In the lab we had a 4 watt (pulsed) 1550nm laser. If you left in on a target for a few seconds it would bun holes in paper. About equivalent to a 4 inch magnifying lense on a sunny day. Multiply by 375.

Wi-Fi: You old new smoothie?

how you say...

I propose the new WiFi standard 802.11whiff whereby the pronunciation formally becomes Whiffy instead of the preposterous sounding why-fie

SpaceShipOne firm to build DARPA's Heliplane

@ ian

" As I recall, this design was from the start of Britain's decline as a world-beating engineering power- does this mean that America is entering a similar death-spiral?"

As A US Engineer... yup.

Man powers up PC to pop popcorn

USB spec

USB is spec'ed to provide at least 2.5 watts (.5A at 5V) but any individual implementation is free to provide more. Still the question remains how much power is required to get the bottom plate of this device to the required 400 degree F to pop the corn.

I like popcorn. Is there an icon for that?

Nvidia launches GTX 200 series GPUs

@ Nice Pins... By Christopher Reeve's Horse

"What about all the people that already have a very good power supply that has a standard 6+6pin SLI output? There's definitely market collusion going on here to force people into unnecessary upgrades!"

The power pinout of the cards is dictated by the fact that the conector pins have a specific "amps per conductor". The engineers hands were probably tied. You can violate the spec yourself by plugging into an interface connector. Better though is to cut off the wires at the supply and run your own appropriate gauge conductors to the required connector. Just dont wire 12 volts to a ground pin as smoke and fire quickly follow.

SanDisk makes sub-SSDs for sub-laptops

A name for small cheap laptops

How about "laptop" ?

American auto dealer offers free handguns

guns are fine.

I've lived in Texas my whole life and I've never been shot.

Boeing robot whisper-copter team claims record

colo(u)r

White paint is the lightest.

MEP tries to ban lightbulbs with mercury amendment

Incandecents are 100% efficent...

... in environments that are heated. The waste product of an incandecant is heat. Heat that would otherwise have to be added to the environment from other energy sources. Watts per Lumen only become important in air conditioned or outdoor environments. For outdoor there are already very good LED solutions.

Additionaly compact flourecents have circuits that are prone to failure. After 2 CF bulbs failed I opened and examined the circuit board. In both cases the manufacurer used a capacitor that could not handle the normal voltage spikes that appear on a 120AC line. I replaced the caps and the bulbs work but how many other people would have just thrown them out?

Regular flourecents require additional circuit elements (ballast) that need to be replaced periodicaly ( thats the extent of my knowledge on that).

Point is that banning incandecents is stupid because there are definite situations where the are absolutely the right choice.

Royal Navy warships could run on sunflower oil - if fresh

green bomb

maybe we could attach ecosystem appropriate seed packets to all the bombs? Surely the high exploseive will take care of the tilling and seed spreading.

Dell denies death of XPS to aid Alienware

xps and alienware experience

We use laptops as devleopment stations and deliver them with systems as the operator interface. We render large amounts of data in 3D so we use gaming laptops. Our experience with alienware and Dell are such. Alienware was poorly engineered, created too much heat, too heavy, and broke down too often. Our XPS and Vostro systems are perfectly balanced between performance and usability; and we have not had any of the reliablity problems that plagued the alienwares. Maybe we're lucky.