Posts by Francis Vaughan 397 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2007
"inability to perfectly measure velocity and direction at the same time"
Almost. Inability to perfectly measure both momentum and position is probably the version you meant. Direction is already a component of velocity, so the original sentence isn't so much wrong as actually makes no sense. Needless to say it is more complex than this, there are more pairs of measures beyond momentum and position, but that is the one people tend to hear about most.
As a resident of Oz, seriously dismayed by the cargo cult mentality of the NBN, I am really cheered by this. Turnbull is a lot of people's pick for our next PM. Not just by preference, but the betting will be flowing his way no matter what one's political leaning. So maybe, just maybe, sanity will prevail for real.
Indeed. I would suggest that any reasonable review of in-ear phones needs to include the Etymotic ER-4S simply as this was pretty much the original and remains a favoured benchmark unit. It is used in a large number of professional applications and is the standard unit used for many psycho-acoustic research. It may (or many not) have been bettered over the years, but it remains both very good, is still available, and is the gold standard to beat.
I rather wish I had thought of this for PARIS. But the possibility remains.
How about including a little science payload? In this case, a stack of photographic film to detect cosmic ray shower particles? Within the allowable payload, this might mean only limited amount is possible, but the possibilities of reproducing some old school science is very cool. With a modern twist it should be possible to build a stack of film to form a cube. Once retrieved and developed it could simply be scanned on a reasonable film scanner, and then massaged into a 3D volume. The longer and higher it gets on the flight the better. Sorting out the design, testing and validating of the experiment might take some effort, but it would be really nice to see.
For a very British tie in, you can't do much better than this:
http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=60134
The sensor size can be reasonably well derived as follows.
The origin of the size metric is vacuum tube television sensors. The listed size is the diameter of the tube. This isn't the size of the sensor. The sensitive spot on the tube is about two thirds of the tube diameter. You inscribe your rectangular sensor in a circle of this diameter.
So, 1/2.3 inch, is 0.4.48 inches, is 11mm, times 2/3 equals about 7.3 mm diagonal. So, about 5.9 mm by 4.4 mm is my calculation for a 3:2 format sensor. That is pretty tiny. The original 110 film format was 13 x 17mm.
35mm was the width of the film, sprocket holes an all. The format was developed for the movie industry, not still cameras. The actual still camera picture format was 24mm x 36 mm.
The writing is a bit worse than this. The term "unstart" does not refer the the engine running, but to the positioning of the shockwave in the inlet. If the position of the shockwave is correct the inlet is "started," if the shockwave is ejected or fails to fall in the right position the inlet "unstarts". The attempt to change attitude of the craft was an attempt to make the shockwave sit correctly and thus "restart." This would then allow the engine to ignite the supersonic stream. Ignition has "starting" as a precondition, rather than a consequence. The writing is actually perfectly good, just written at the the wrong level and allowed to escape from captivity in a manner that makes it essentially incomprehensible.
Lets see how down voted I can get.
Given that syncing over WiFi has been one of the most clearly missing features from iOS, and its lack has been the subject of a lot of complaint over time, it is hardly reasonable to suggest that either the idea is somehow original to this guy, or that Apple didn't have it in the feature roadmap from day one, along with things like cut and paste. Indeed, if a few years ago some guy had come out with an app for "cut and paste" for iOS, and had had it rejected by Apple, would we be baying for Apple's blood because they later added a feature called "cut and paste" which, surprise surprise, did cut and paste? Hardly.
This guy got given an amazing opportunity by Apple being ridiculous and not having WiFi ability from day one. The idea is obvious, the name obvious, and the logo obvious. (Put ten people in a room and ask them to design the WiFi Sync logo, the majority will come up with the same one. The point of the logo design is not that it be some creative triumph, but that it be obvious what it means. This leads to pretty well only one possible design.)
So, the gravy train is over. Half a million in sales is a gift that most of us could only dream of. Be grateful, move on.
"created a depleted uranium molecule, one with its radio-active element removed, built from two uranium atoms with a bridging atom of toluene"
This is one of those sentences where it is hard to start listing all the mistakes. Could someone with some vague scientific background proofread these pieces sometime? All well and good to criticise "boffins obviously know diddly squat", if only the writer had a clue.
Hint, there is no such thing as a depleted uranium molecule, or a depleted uranium atom even. "one with its radio-active element removed" is almost meaningless in context. Nor is there any such thing as a toluene atom. One suspects that some of the blame might come down to ham fisted attempts by the researchers to defuse any fear about the use of a radioactive element. But it would be nice if el Reg could QC this stuff before spouting off about things they don't understand. The video was actually remarkably well done for a bunch of academics trying to explain something, and vastly better than the article.
"Unless the paper's costly full text in Nature Chemistry discusses it" so we assume that el Reg's budget doesn't run to the the $32 needed to actually read the article and find out the answer. Or maybe just email one of the researchers. Maybe this sets some sort of metric to the value placed on finding out information for publication here.
To complete the answer from the above excellent points. There is a fundamental difference between reaching the edge of space and going into a useful orbit. The energy required to get to the needed altitude it trivial. However the orbit that you are in has a rather unfortunate geometry. Whilst you will technically be in orbit about the centre of the earth's mass, the orbit's path also intersects the surface of the Earth remarkably close to the point where you took off. In order to get your orbit round enough that you get back to your starting point in space without embarrassing terrestrial intersections you need to put a heck of a lot of energy into circularising the orbit. Once you want to come back this same amount of energy has to be dissipated. Whilst you can get rid of some orbital energy slowly (aerobraking has been used for such things as orbital circularisation into Mars orbit from the much faster approach speed from Earth) you are going to find that there will always be a point where you are orbiting inside a thick enough layer of the atmosphere that you have no remaining choice about the rate at which the energy must be got rid off. The answer being: very very quickly.
Thunderbolt isn't essentailly just Displayport. What Thunderbolt has is a backward compatibility mode where chips will drop back to Displayport mode if the only thing they see is a display. What Thunderbolt is, is encapsulated PCIe. In a sentence, you take all the good ideas from Firewire: hot plug, dynamic reconfiguration, peer to peer communication, isocronous transport, and use it to wrap around a PCIe lane or two as payload. Pretty much exactly the best of all worlds.
This means some pretty interesting things can happen. One of the neat tricks is that Thunderbolt is not difficult to port a peripheral to. A PCIe lane pops out at each end, and all the work done on previous device drivers should be trivially ported. Amongst other things it neatly subsumes the role that Express slot had. But better.
The article seems to take a very odd position on the reasons behind the patent activity, and Apple's various actions. And yet the article contains the critical point, but ignores it.
"Ownership of patents is vital to being a real power player in wireless, where licensing of IPR still relies primarily on bilateral tit-for-tat agreements rather than pools or the "reasonable and non-discriminatory" principles of other standards. "
Apple are not part of the club, and have been banging on the door for ages demanding entry into the cross licensing club. All of the current spat can be trivially explained as an ongoing part of this. It is very unlikely that Apple is trying to gain market advantage through patent actions. Indeed the manifest lack of gaining any by stopping imports might be a clue. What they are trying to do is demonstrate that their exiting patent portfolio is big and important enough to be invited in. They are making life difficult enough for the other layers that we will probably eventually see a sudden dropping of all actions involving Apple, and an announcement of mutually satisfactory cross licensing.
Apple's lack of ability to sync iPads via a cloud or other Internet service is hardly a technological limitation that they need to catch up from. IOS is built from the same code base as OSX. Any features that the iPad lacks are lacking due to an explicit decision by Apple to remove them, not through lagging development. It isn't that Apple are behind on the cloud, it is that Apple don't want the users to have the capability. Yet. Apple will have their own timetable and own reasons. The pace with which they unveil new features is the clue as to how pressured they feel by the competition. That will be interesting.
Talking rather the opposite tack to Tom 38 above. Why on earth did the review not also listen to some lossless encoded music. Indeed while would anyone bother to listen to lossy encoding on high quality device. You can use an iPod classic, or stream from iTunes on a Mac or PC, and rip everything lossless. I get 500 CDs on my Classic lossless. It is essentially impossible to buy a disk small enough to justify lossy compression. The only justification is a device with flash memory, and these are either toy music players (i.e. a Nano) or multipurpose device intended to be used upon one's person (i.e. iPhone.) Spending £500 on speakers one would hope might involve thinking about the source enough to use a lossless format. The review could have been better, and more useful for addressing this.
One thing that most of the conspiracy theorists supporting the idea that it is an engineered scarcity forget is that there is a clear lead time need to build up stocks. The factories do not have infinite capacity - Apple can't simply order an additional 500,000 to be delivered Friday. The factory production lines will be sized for an estimated average production need, too big and you waste money on unneeded capability. For a product release Apple have to balance the time of beginning of production, which is largely determined by the product readiness, the desired time of release, and the number of units Apple want on have on hand at the time of release. There were persistent rumors of production delays due to last minute redesign, which if you believe them would alone account for a significant shortfall of stock at launch time. Apple really like their release cycles and it would not be at all surprising to find that the decision to release on the date was given precedence over lead time to build stock.
Many years ago there was a lovely supercomputer company called Thinking Machines. Sadly, along with most of the other supercomputer startups of the time, they didn't survive. But as they failed their assets were sold off. Sun got most of the hardware expertise, plus the compilers, some of which surfaced in a limited manner. The service division was sold off, and the last functioning component, which was the data mining software operation, still called Thinking Machines, was bought by Oracle. So curiously Oracle now owns essentially all of the old Thinking Machines.
Thinking Machines had domain names, tmc.com, thinkingmachines.com, and think.com. Oracle kept the last of these. It is now their K-12 education site. Nary a trace of the once glorious supercomputer company that made arguably the sexiest machines on the planet.
This is really sad. Here we have a device designed with a multi-touch gesture based ui, capable of reasonably high performance graphics, and a million odd pixels of display. And all they can do is draw pictures of the same buttons you would get on a physical remote control. So you get none of the advantages of a physical button - no tactile feedback - and all the disadvantages. Stupid meaningless icons, contrived rectangular layout, all the same size (hint, you can actually made important functions take up more screen space relative to unimportant ones). It is 2011, and they are programming one of the most advanced consumer devices currently made, and all they can do is try to make it look like a cheap piece of crap unchanged in over 30 years?
It would be fine of the old device had a highly familiar, perfectly understood, and evolved UI, but of any device on the planet that you would want to avoid emulating, the morass of tiny buttons that is a cheap consumer device remote control would rate number one. They look they way they do because they are made as cheap as technology allows. £200 to emulate that UI motif is a mixture of lazy and stupid.
I will confess to being pretty impressed. For years we kept hearing about how the really good design elements were being delayed for IA64. But it seems Intel did keep the faith as it was, and what looks like a range of significant design streams have all come in at once.
Seriously, if an x86 chip was announced with this amount of progress from Intel we would be utterly gobsmacked, and AMD would crawl away to die. But it is the IA64, and sadly no one cares. At least for now.
What people tend to miss is that the expected topping out of the value of the x86 architecture that prompted the initial work on IA64 as a replacement has pretty much come as expected. However the question that may be more important is whether anyone cares either. Nobody really cares that desktop performance is moribund. The action is elsewhere. In a decade we might live in an environment where ARM and Itanium are most important architectures, and where their use essentially doesn't overlap. Clouds and portables might be the reality. In the high performance area it would actually be nice to see Itanium get a second chance. SGI might still be smarting from the disaster that came with their first foray with it, but a next generation UV with these would be something to see. The Altix 4700 series were a very nice machine. A 12 wide instruction path should allow for some stunning speed on many numerical codes. Couple that with a ccNUMA machine with a few thousand cores and you get some serious grunt.
Since, as has been pointed out, the prize is for iTunes content, rather than just apps, (funny how everyone soon forgets the original purpose of the iTunes store) she is very likely the only person on the planet who will fill her iPod with legally downloaded music. Well, nearly. Apple claim 40,000 songs on an iPod classic. So one quarter filled with legally downloaded content.
"also its low density means that any hydrogen-fuelled vehicle has to be mostly fuel tank"
It is worse than that. The SR71 was already mostly fuel tank. So much so that it was unable to take off with a full fuel load. The shuttle vehicle has no tank at all - the hydrogen fuel is so bulky that you need the huge orange thing bolted to the side of the vehicle. A huge orange thing that is many times the size of the actual vehicle. There was a plan to place small cryogenic fuel tanks in the shuttle to allow some powered flight after separation from the ET, but they were dropped late in the design. So the only fuel the shuttle contains is for the reaction control system thrusters. None for the main engines.
A shielded mains cable actually makes sense in some circumstances, and they are available and fit for purpose. They cost a small margin more than conventional mains cables. That is, for a few pounds.
In addition to the sin of selling grossly overpriced snake oil (hardly a new new thing in audio) these guys commit an even greater sin. They clearly have so little actual understanding of what they are doing or selling that they were unable to construct a test that would have shown a difference. It isn't all that hard. (That is, they could have shown that shielding is helpful, not that a thousand quid of shielding helps any more than a few tens of pence.) But they have clearly demonstrated an almost total lack of understanding of physics with what amounts to an own goal. Priceless.
"because Apple have shown themselves not open to the idea of patent sharing, what with the lawsuit of & from Nokia."
Actually it is the opposite. Apple are demanding entry into the mobile patent sharing club, but are considered latecomers by Nokia and irs mates. The price of entry to any patent sharing club is more useful patents. So Apple are trying to prove to Nokia that they have important and useful patents to share. You prove this in court. If Apple's legal action goes their way, expect to see the action dropped after Apple is given membership to Nokia's club.
Well, I beg to differ on the effectiveness, and innovativeness of this idea. I suspect that it can be made to work and with not too great a leap in both compute power and projection technology.
Years ago I set up a single wall VR system. SGI Onyx, Crystal Eyes shutter glasses, Ascension Flock of Birds motion tracker. We ran a mix of open source and proprietory software on it, and it provided a very nice semi-immersive 3D environment. It suffered from all the defects that are well, known, not the least of which is the problem that there is no depth of field. That problem is common to every 3D system in existence, including all the movies.
But, looking at this patent, and looking at what we had to work with, what we could achieve with the then available technology, versus what is needed here, I don't think the jump isn't nearly as large as people think. Probably the most expensive thing to make will be the screen, and that is simply a matrix of thousands of shiny hemispheres.
The issues of tracking the subjects and locating their eyes is pretty much a solved problem. The Old Flock of Birds did it very well, but needed a sensor mounted on the shutter glasses. There are modern multi-camera systems that can identify and track humans to enough resolution. The projection systems could be addressed with little more than a stack of modern LCD or DLP projectors. As a rough approximation you need one projector worth of illumination per eye observing the screen. Considering what we used in old VR systems, this is dirt cheap. The compute power needed to convolve the image isn't actually all that much. It is simple geometry - all you need to do is determine where the eye is - cast a ray back to each hemishphere, calculate the bounce, and find which pixel in the reflected screen you pick up. There will be conflicts, and some image degradation, but it may be manageable. Once you know the mapping from hemishphere to projected pixel you just scramble the projected images with the map. A couple of FPGAs would be coasting, Not likely doable with a home gaming PC, but certainly doable with a more high end processing setup.
More of the same old same old - the above comments that is. (Even down the tired old saw that Apple stole the ideas from Xerox.)
It isn't about the individual patents. Never was. It is about membership to the phone club. Apple want to join, Motorola/Nokia etc etc don't want Apple in. Nobody seriously expects these suits to reach a court judgement that results in anyone having to pull products. This is sabre rattling to allow Apple to join the cross licensing club. It has been playing out all year, and this is just another shot across the bows by both sides to see who blinks. Neither side did, and it will go on.
About the only thing we on the sidelines can hope for is that someone will slip up and we might get a taste of software patent armageddon. That is the only thing that will get some sense into the legislators. On the other hand, the spectre of these huge companies slugging it out over these patents might make legislators in countries other then the USA take a bit more notice of the inherent dangers in software patents. It should become manifestly clear that only very very large corporations and patent trolls are advantaged by the system, and that perfectly honest middle sized players can only ever get hurt.
That is the difference to when MS plays patents. They go out to hurt the middle sized and small guys by intent. What we see now is a war, not a mugging. It plays out very differently with different rules and goals.
Bravo for a very well put argument. It depresses me just how often it does just turn into a cheque to build a machine specifically designed to address the gigaflop harlotry of the top 500. Considering the rich history of real innovations that did come from Europe, there is no reason why it can't be got right.
Perhaps the most damning thing about the grant is that it is only for 1 million. A couple of years ago the combined F1 circus would burn though that in less than a morning's work on engine research. Rather than pissing away trivial amounts of money on such hopeless odds, perhaps DARPA would be better served by opening up the technology and convincing the FIA to change the rules to allow it to be used.
The article seems to have the tenet that the new Apple TV and associated business is Apple getting it wrong and thus losing the war. However it goes on to show that the entire market is already essentially flat, and Apple's offering simply a me-too. Which rather suggests that this isn't Apple miss-stepping on its way to a loss, but Apple publicly admitting that it has already capitulated.
The expectation (well perhaps hope is closer) was that Steve, with his inside edge in the business and corporate muscle, could swing a paradigm changing deal on content pricing. The answer is clearly that he couldn't. The movie business had learned from the music experience, and had already closed ranks and set the terms. Apple is merely joining the party, not crashing it.
Hardware wise, the Apple TV is closer to an Airport Express than much else. Indeed for music it is the required device if you stream from iOS.
So what patents has Google now acquired? Not enough to provide a nuclear option I would imagine, but I doubt there are none. Contributing patents to defend OSS would be a very interesting move.
Also, one wonders how long the MP3 gravy train has to go. The patents should be getting pretty close to their use by date. Even the video codec patents must be half way done by now.
Thinking this is a plant is taking geekdom far too seriously. The iPhone isn't marketed to geeks, and 99.9% of all iPhone buyers woudn't know what Gizmondo was, and woudn't care if you told them. Apple have tens of billions in the bank, and one of the most well oiled publicity machines on the planet, the world's press fall over themselves to report on every word Steve says, - and they resort to losing phones in pubs? Hardly.
This provides a clue as to one way that MS see moving beyond the PC centric market. Not everyone at MS is a total fool, and they realise that the business model of lock in with Windows on x86 isn't taking them anywhere anymore. But a new operating model based upon Sliverlight might. Remember it is Office that makes them the big money. A widely deployed Silverlight is a way of providing a nice ready plaform to continue to push Office out. The biggest threat to MS (and Intel) is probably Linux on ARM. If they get the Silverlight platform (via Moonlight) out onto that, MS may dodge that bullet to some extent. Of couse if it doesn't pan out, or some idiot middle manager decides it is was a bad idea, they can, and would drop support again. But it is a play that may make a lot of sense in the long term.
I don't supose there is any chance the el Reg might apply a bit of critical analysis to this pathetic bit of work? As so eloquently pointed out above, Flash isn't simply about video, and indeed the whole argument about Flash on iPhones isn't about video either. For all useful intents the cited study is useless. It fails to address the core point of the argument. Once upon a time we might have seen The Register take such shoddy work to task. Perhaps because it attacks Steve Jobs, El Reg's bias is allowed to show a bit.
A test where browsers with and without Flashblock enabled were pointed at a slew of popular sites, and the power overhead of the Flash crap measured would have been a worthwhile study. If you want a really interesting headline - multiply it by the estimated number of computers with open browsers and work out the carbon footprint of Adobe Inc. It won't be pretty.
Egads. There is scope for research in the manner in which the mere mention of Apple causes this same drivel seen above to be trotted out every time. Right down to the usual urban myths about the early days of Apple.
The whole point of this action is about cross licencing. It is nothing more than an continuation of the Nokia verus Apple suit. The established phone players cross license their patents. They view Apple as a newcomer, and have not admitted Apple into the club. So Nokia have gone after Apple with their 3G patents. Apple don'e see why they should pay, whilst all the other phone players don't, and have demanded admission into the club. The price of admission is patents that can be exchanged in a cross license deal. You need to have enough patents that are important enough to barter with. You can establish the value of these patents in court, or at least the threat of court.
Apple's intent is not to force competition out of the market, their intent is to gain admission to the phone manufactures club.
This is a big company with a big patent portfolio suing other big companies, also with big patent porfolios (at least Google counts here.) The likelihood that Xerox have a product that infringes some odd patent that Google owns is pretty high. So there is a good chance that this will break out into the sort of war that lawyers love. It isn't supposed to work like this. The big boys are supposed to cross licence everything and use their patents to wipe out small fry. (Or in the case of Apple versus Nokia, slog it out until they admit one another to their seperate private cross licencing clubs. Then they wipe out the small fry.)
Whilst Xerox have hardly been the titan of innovation they once were (where just about everything people think is modern in computiing was invented 30 years ago at Xerox PARC) they are not exactly fading away either. So they are not some dying has-been of a company trying to leverage a piddly bit of IP to significantly bolster the company's bottom line. In all, slightly odd.
On the other hand, a few more highly damaging and stupid patent cases that cost big companies real money might start to sway to pro software patent lobby in these companies. That just might start to sway the lawmakers. We can onyl hope.
Sadly whilst you are excluded from patenting an algorithm, you are not excluded from patenting the application of an algorithm to solve a particular problem. Or indeed the method by which an algorithm may be applied to a problem. Map-reduce is hardly new. But it is the application of the algorithm to the problem described that is patented.
On the other hand, there is vastly less new in computer science than many people (especially the patent offices) realise. Indeed, most ideas that are constantly being reinvented and trumpeted as something new date back to before 1975. But because modern computer science education is mostly rubbish, and most geeks weren't alive when this stuff was first invented, there is an astounding and depressing lack of knowledge. This patent should almost certainly never have been allowed.
I'm writing this on a seven year old PPC based Powerbook. It is currently running 10.5.8. Whilst you can't get 10.4 for an x86 based Mac, you most certainly can run 10.5 on a PPC based one. It is 10.6 that dropped PPC support.
One of the difficulties in support for older platforms is security. Dropping 10.4 support for a new major release is not unreasonable. But don't lose sight of the fact that one of the key reasons we like FF is that it provides a level of security and control of security that the other browsers simply don't and, it seems, won't provide. As much as the underpinning OS is a security critical component, for most people, the browser is too. That suggests that security support must, just like for an OS, be maintained for a much longer period. Lack of new features is simply part of the price of being stuck in the past. But lack of security support is evidence of a serious lack of sincerity on the part of any software provider. Free or not.
One gets the feeling that Google's "Do no evil" is rapidly becoming a rather poor joke. Indeed, as Google insinuate themselves into every part of life that they can, it has probably already past the point where it has much the same role as the "Ministry of Truth" had in 1984.
I rathger suspect that we will mark 2010 as the year that Google overtly changed from the nice set of neat services created by a bunch of well meaning geeks into the next incarnation of the evil empire. It has been brewing for some time, but this year will probably see many things come to fruition.
Constantly referring to them as the Chocolate Factory doesn't help either. That preserves the aura of geekyness and warm fuzzy ideals, and even a slightl level of incompetance. Face it, that image has past its use by date. The nice friendly colours of the logo, whimsical name, and projected image of cool technology covers up a publicly listed company whose only goal is to make as much money as possible for its shareholders. And they realised a long time ago that the best way to do this is to own everyone's soul.
One suspects there is something deeper here. Apple are not fools, and would not have gone into this without thinking the risks through carefully. It won't have been that the need to license various bits of the standards would have come as a surprise. Nor would the lawsuit. As pointed out above, this has nothing to do with software patents, nothing to do with the UI, and nothing to do with the usual and tiresome fanboi/antifanboi drivel that these stories are guaranteed to attract. Apple clearly believed from the start (where start is deciding to make the iPhone) that they would be able to defend themselves against this claim, and one assumes have long planned for it.
Google's customer is neither the end user, nor the carrier. It is their paying advertisers. So we will want to view the ecosystem in a slightly different manner. However Motorola might view things in a somewhat different manner. They have bet the farm on Android, at least as far as smart phones go. If Motorola decide the Nexus is screwing them over it may begin to precipitate a split in the Android ecosystem. Google have their own specific agenda, but it doesn't actually fit with that of any of their partners. For everyone to work out how they get their slice of the action out of smartphones is very much an evolving issue. In the past it was easy, they just wanted some of your money. Google however would seem to prefer your soul.
"Their job is to devise policies that are acceptable to the electorate."
No it isn't. This is the disease of the modern age where politicians only care about the next election. The idea once was that you voted for those that you trusted to run the country. Not unless there is a single dominant issue at a poll, and a single issue party do you vote for a particular policy.
The government's job is to run the country as best possible. Once every few years they submit the quality of that to the people. They are not elected to implement the majority will of the people as determined by some idiotic poll or the most strident voice of the media on each individual policy. Nor should they ever be held to such an idea. A statesman makes unpopular decisions for the good of a country. A politician makes popular decisions to the detriment of the country. There is a reason why elections are years apart.
Clearly the current UK government has gone so far away from statesmanship that they are little more than a pale shadow of what any citizen, no matter what political leaning, should reasonably expect.
The augmented reality glasses won't work. What everyone forgets is that the screen is about one inch from your eyball. You can't focus that close unless there is an approriate lens between the screen and your eye. A lens that makes it impossible to focus on anything past the screen. The current augmented reality glasses use a partially silvered mirror to project the image from a screen though the needed close focussing lens, and hence into your field of view.
Same problem exists for HUDs too. A proper HUD places the image at infinity so you don't need to refocus your eyes, and the image appears in focus superimposed on the field of view. Just a panel on the windscreen will be an annoying blur when focussed on the road, and the road a blur when focussing on the screen.
Sadly this will be just another round of lawyers trying to justify their existence. Some firm of US lawyers will have already billed Apple for an insane amount of money to start this. But Woolworth's lawyers won't be telling them to sod off. Far from it. They will be advising Woolworth's management of the seriousness of the threat, and the need to spend huge amounts on yet more lawyers fees (their's) to address the threat. In response the US lawyers will lick their lips and draw up a hugely expensive plan of action and advise Apple of the need to move forward with it forthwith. End result? Lawyers in both countries buy new holiday villias in the Bahamas. It is great work if you can get it.
As is hinted at in a few of the other commets, for all the pious talk about green data centres, it is all about the bottom line. They won't join a low grade heat generation scheme because it would cost more. It might make a huge amount of environmental sense, but will cut no ice with the beancounters or shareholders. Same reason they don't relocate to really cold places, and why they like Arizona. The cost of power varies dramatically. If you are near a huge hydro-electric system and can negotiate long term big power contracts, you will get very cheap power. (Just look at aluminium smelters.) If you go to some out of the way very cold place, you will find yourself paying many times more for the power. The cost of cooling is less than the cost of the the power that generated the heat - a large system can achieve a heat rejection ratio of about 6:1. That means if the power costs 20% more in the cold place you have lost out. One suspects that all the publicity about cheap cooling is more about trying to put some green gloss on something that would have been done anyway. Geographical diversity of the datacentres means that there was always going to be one somewhere about, so they make the best one can of the location. But that is about it.
This is more likely an interesting interplay between the interests of Intel and MS. The big risk for both of them is ARM/Linux on the Netbook. Windows doesn't run on ARM. Intel abandoned ARM in favour of Atom.
If MS can help Intel improve the user experience on Linux based Atom Netbooks, they can help Intel drive the ARM based Netbooks out of the market. Clearly this is a win for MS. If the ARM based netbooks take hold MS is a very clear loser. They can't regain share of a platform they don't support.
The big issue isn't Silverlight, but Flash. However Adobe don't have any reason to play favourites. Intel could well partner with Adobe to create an optimised for Atom version of Flash. But Adobe are rather inscrutible. Flash on ARM/Linux is one of the keys to the future shape of the netbook ecosystem. Had Adobe not bothered to create a port, ARM/Linux would have been dead in the water.
In the article a very critical point was made, and it seems totally missed by all the usual freetards.
TI have a very specific market for these calculators - they are currently allowed in schools and are accredited for use in exams. It the ability to load them with a new OS becomes widespread there will be no choice but to remove this accreditation. At this point the entire market for the calculators evaporates, and TI will probably simply stop making them. This would be a bad outcome. I have some sympathy for the teachers trying to avoid a classroom full of kids with calculators loaded with cheat sheets. (I have even more sympathy for banning any calculator, even a four function from exams, but that is another argument.)
It is simply life. There is no right answer here. A bunch hobbyist geeks spend vastly too much time breaking the key, and as a result risk destroying the product. You can argue all you like about the ins and outs of the legality, but in the end it is going to be all about what the actual effect is.
Only a few people seemd to have twigged that the copyright is not over the software, it is over the key. The key was obtained by essentially the equivalent of breaking the encryption, and thus probably is subject to the DMCA. And yes, all it is is a number. And, no you can't copyright a number. But you probably can copyright the expression of the key.
If the calculators were dropped from the authorised list for exams, and TI lost a significant market (which I suspect they would) TI would certainly be in a position to sue for damages. And for once, I think they would be in the right to do so.
Deduplication and HPC/science are not a useful fit. You migt have a lot of reduncancy in commerce, but there is no reason to imagine that there is any true duplication of data coming from such sources as remote sensing, the LHC, or other large data sources. It is simply the nature of the beast.
Some HPC related data is the result of deterministic simulation runs, and there comes a point where it is cheaper to re-create the data on demand, on a faster machine, than to store it. But that gap is probably about tens years, so makes little useful dent in the storage needs.
The nature of science data also requires different access patterns. The big reason you need to store science data is in order to mine it, and often the science is in the application of new search and mining methods to old data. Once you get past the value in the most recent data, the entire data set may see a constant buzz of access. However such access is often very predictable, allowing forward fetching of tapes and caching onto disk. So again, different needs to commerce.
It has been obvious (even to Blind Freddy) that Telstra must be split up. And to almost everyone's utter amazment, the proposal from Conroy is almost exactly right. Clearly it isn't his own work.
Basically it addresses the appalling error made when Telstra was first sold off (well sold to the Oz public, who probably thought that they already owned it.) The error being that Telstra retained both retail and wholesale operations in the one company. Most critically it owned the copper in the ground. Cynically one might observe that Telstra was not worth nearly as much on the open market if it didn't retain its near monopoly on infrastructure, so no doubt Treasury was lobbying very hard to ensure that the company wasn't carved up, even though the best outcome for the Oz residents was the converse. So now the only losers will be the poor fools that bought Telstra shares in the first place. They are demanding compensation for the loss in value of their shares should the carve up go ahead. On the basis that although they will have shares in both operations, the sum is worth less than the origional - because it ceases to be able play monopoly bully. It is hard to have much sympathy.
The parallel thread of the 40+ billion dollar fibre rollout however makes less sense if Telstra are carved up. Which might be a good thing, since it is essentially a $2,000 per person tax to provide little more than video on demand services. Which no doubt the punters will have to pay the providers for anyway. So maybe the concomittant good effects of carving Telstra up will free them from the full cost of the fibre rollout, and they can slowly let it die. Which would be the proverbial good thing. It is very possibly one of the worst ideas to have come out of our government in years.
Converging the external network with the internal (storage/compute interconnect) one is something any risk averse manger would regard with horror. They are very different needs. Just about everything above the need to move packets of bytes around is different. Especially the security and reliability issues. But also the patterns of data and provisioning needs are different. So not only would you want an air gap between the networks, almost everything inside the switches is going to focussed on different issues.
One suspects that the reason FCoE has any future is because it provides FC, and everything that entails. It is something people can have the warm fuzzies about, and thus satisfy their risk averse nature. Infiniband makes a great deal more sense if you were scratch starting system design. Or more pertinant; building atop RDMA is a good place to start. Especially with SSD coming into play. But since the vast majority of customers will want stories about seamless upgrade paths from where they are, with understandable risk, FC is not going away any time soon.
OK, it didn't exactly take me long to find this. How is it that there are scores of vacuous sound bite articles out there (including el Reg) that simply spout the same drivel, and never bothered to find out what is going on.
So, listen up. This is interesting stuff.
One, it isn't a new ISA. So worrying about whether it competes with x86, Arm, or anything else is not even asking the right question. There was a prototype of some of the ideas involved that used x86 chips (or Power). Some of the ideas, not all.
There are two key ideas.
First is a new set of language additions to help specify parallelism so that the compiler can create good parallel code. This competes with things like OpenMP. At a cursory look over the language additions they look good. There is an extant compiler that works, and they have tested and measured real workloads, and it looks credible. Of course this would work on any modern multiprocessor, and is intended to. The API (called OSCAR) is defined on C90 C99 and Fortran90. There is a clue here about the intended use of the system.
Secondly, and something that answers the question - "what does an API have to do with power use?", is that the design provides for clock and voltage control, under the control of the API. Which is certainly new. The idea being that if the compiler has scheduled the parallel code, it knows exactly what cores need to run, and even which cores may finish a task earlier, and thus can be throttled back to save power without changing the time to complete the overall task (since power scales as the square of the speed this wins over just powering down when it finishes, which is linear) Clearly this is the point of the alliance. No new ISAs, but new multi-core chip systems, using existing CPU ISAs from the partners - mostly targeted at embedded consumer electronics, all systems implementing the power control functions demanded by the OSCAR API.
They show an example where an 8 core system with this power control enabled sees a 74% reduction on power over not using, it for an MPEG2 video decoding task. This is pretty impressive. The 8 core system is a one chip system done in concert with Hitachi, and no doubt using one of Hitachi's existing CPU cores as its base.
There are some pretty demo systems, one powered by a solar panel, so maybe this is where some of the odd reporting is coming from.
Ah, so the tubes are decatrons.
Web page for the comupter: http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/university/scit/history/witch.html
One they are tubes. Mullard would almost certainly have made them (being a UK located company), and they call them tubes. For a set of pictures look here. http://www.tube-tester.com/sites/nixie/datdekat/Z502S_mul/z502s-mullard.htm
Note the label on the box, Mullard made both valves and tubes. If it doesn't control electron flow it isn't a valve. The fact that our American cousins call everything a tube does not mean that we call everything a valve.
Also, it is, rather counter intinuively, perfectly reasonable to express the memory capacity in bits. Everyone gets taught that a bit is a binary-digit. But this is only half the story. A bit is more formally defined as the amount of information that is stored in a binary digit. There are other units of information, three are usually defined: the bit, the nat, and the ban. These are the binary, natural, and decimal units of information. One bit equals ln(2) nats = 0.683 nats, and about 0.301 bans. Thus a decimal digit contains about 3.32 bits of information. Since the computer had 900 decatron tubes each capable of storing a single decimal number (and thus held 900 bans), it contained 900 * 3.32 = 2998 bits of information. The mistake is converting that to bytes. That isn't a well defined operation. A bytes does hold exactly 8 bits of information (and thus also holds 5.45 nats or 2.409 bans), so it is forgivable, but still wrong. Anyway, the conversion yields 373.5 equivalent bytes of information. So something may have wrong anyway. However, not all of the tubes will have been used for storage, many will have been used as computational elements, so it may be that the number of tubes devoted to actual data storage was more in line with the computation. But I suspect someone just got the number wrong.
A little history. The history of the definition of the bit is fully documented. It was first defined and used by Shannon in his seminal paper on information theory: A Mathematical Theory of Communication, The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948. (He gives credit to his college J. W. Tukey for the term.) It is perhaps one of the very few cases where a common term has its entire etymology and history perfectly understood. I get arguments all the time (mostly from IT people, who somehow think that they own the term) that a bit is, and can only be, what a memory element holds. But the guys that invented and defined the term would disagree.
Read the article. The patent is a design patent. This is nothing like a patent of an invention (utility patent). It works quite differently. You can patent the look of your product. Nothing to do with the functionality or utility of the product, or even if the product has a utility patented.
Well known examples include:
Kodak's yellow film boxes. The yellow colour is patented. You cannot sell film in a box that has the same yellow colour. You can of course paint your house/car in the same colour. Which is one way a design patent is different to a utility patent.
Cocacola bottle. The waisted glass bottle was patented. You could not sell soft drink in a similar shaped bottle.
Trademarks are similar but different, and something can be both trademarked and have a design patent.
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