Posts by Gideon 1
86 posts • joined Friday 3rd July 2009 16:40 GMT
Motorola and Nokia have shown how fickle the mobile biz is, one minute you're top of the heap making huge profits, next you are losing money on every phone you sell.
Smart meters monitor voltage? Why?
You don't need smart meters to reduce demand peaks. Smart appliances monitor the mains FREQUENCY as it drops when the generators are overloaded. Voltage is automatically adjusted by the substation changing transformer winding tap.
Overstated
The PC bios has been disassembled and clean room rebuilt many times. Having the source code can help to find weaknesses, but a black hat still needs to look at the machine code dump to confirm one. In any case, if they were trying to make it very secure, they ought to publish it for others to analyse for weaknesses, obscurity is not security.
Re: RE: 100 amp 3-phase supply installed
Decent metalworking lathes are typically run from a single to three phase invertor these days. You do not need or even want the high power availability of pukka three phase, if the tool catches in the workpiece your lathe will be in bits. Inverter drive also has the benefits of continuously variable speed, and soft start.
Posted in Apple to ditch Intel – report
Re: @ frank ly - @ M Gale
The butler tells the housekeeper to tell the servants to go shopping? No, the vendors come to the tradesmans entrance to drop off their goods. You cannot possibly know a typical Rolls Royce owner...
It would be very embarrassing for Apple if the court ordered that their execs be imprisoned for a month if they ever set foot on British soil, the media worldwide would enjoy that. It's hard to see what else the court could do.
It gives them so much to hope for with a very small outlay. Fantastic value. Also, don't assume all pensioners are poor.
Having employees strongly motivated by money in the intelligence community would be a security risk.
Jury of Your Peers
A Jury of Your Peers is an outdated form of justice, where a Lord would be tried before a jury of Lords, avoiding being automatically found guilty by a jury of serfs. A juries are now selected from lists of voters.
Posted in LOHAN breathes fire in REHAB
Re: Is that vacuum still vacuum?
Maybe the Aerotec motor won't even sustain a smolder in the vacuum?
Posted in LOHAN breathes fire in REHAB
Is the vacuum maintained during the delay between the igniter firing and the motor burn? The smolder could slowly reduce the vacuum to the point where the motor burns properly, which won't happen at altitude and could lead to an in-flight failure.
Our chip shops (Edinburgh) sell deep fried battered spicy haggis as well as the standard (premium?) stuff similarly attired. Would like to see it in spicy batter with curry sauce, mmm.
Posted in YouView recommends radio hams' pet peeve
Works both ways
I hope the powerline networking kit is also immune to 100+ Watts of HF modulated carrier transmitted nearby, hehe.
"Write information on them too many times and you'll only be able to read them after that."
No, it will progressively get smaller as the flash blocks wear out. When the number of usable spare blocks drops to zero, you will need to delete (erase) data off the SSD before you can store anything new.
The bigger problem is that the filing indexes are also stored in flash, and when you run out of spare blocks to store them, the entire SSD can fail. The vendors tend to over provision the spare blocks to mitigate against this, but how successful has this strategy been?
Re: Why hasn't anyone considered using goats?
Goats are browsers, not grazers. They'll eat all your plants, bushes, trees, and washing on the line before jumping into the next garden to do the same, leaving the grass to grow. If you want grazers, try sheep or geese.
Yep, yet again.
I had this, the update even corrupted the installer files, preventing uninstall. Nuked .net entirely with the dotnetfx_cleanup_tool, it's amazing how much quicker the machine boots without .net.
Re: Solar ignition!
...or launch when going dark, to get ascent footage during daylight. You could even use the same camera.
Erm, Douglas Adams isn't likely to be telling them to drop DRM anytime soon, he's dead.
Thought it was 1 April again...
I work in a consultancy doing endless embedded microcontroller designs. We typically choose between something like an MSP430 from TI for the lowest power consumption, an ARM variant for decent performance, or a DSP like the Blackfin for high performance. Customers often have different processors which we are happy to work with, but they're not Intels. Intel are in old designs or used by people who don't really do embedded and stick a micro sized PC into their product.
By the way, many smart meters use MSP430s rather than PICs or ARMs.
Grass detector?
Green/not green?
There's another contender...
Have you seen the Nanotron NanoLoc devices? Uses chirp spread spectrum to get range information.
Of course two independant GPS receivers fix will wander relative to each other; they are free to use different satellites. Differential GPS involves generating corrections for individual satellites, not subtracting two GPS receiver fixes.
Re: Skills Gap
...or even have to pay them more than the manager overseeing the project: Managers are easy to find, good techie skills aren't.
Re: Re: Tightening a connector?
That's just one of many reasons why you shouldn't use a GPS 1PPS output for anything requiring accurate timing. Use a proper GPS timing receiver that has a high accuracy clock built in that is directly compared against the measured GPS position/time solution, and will also tell you the difference to any other time signal of you feed it.
Atomic clocks are not stable. They are long term accurate, but need to be phase locked to a quartz crystal oscillator to produce a short term stable output. Chaos theory etc.
Tightening a connector?
60 nanoseconds at the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s) would be nearly 18 metres. Taking into account the relative propagation speed of a signal in a typical coaxial cable at 0.7 they would need to take out 12 metres of cable. A poor connection might introduce resistance and a slow rise time, but if they are basing this measurement on the timing pulse output from a GPS receiver then they deserve the results they got.
Making adjustments based on assumptions invalidates the raw data. You need to find better raw data. The whole climate 'science' thing is a huge load of assumptions constructed into a computer model which can then be tweaked by more assumptions into producing whatever result you want, which is then presented as fact. The CRU are in deep trouble, not just because of their behaviour towards others interested in the topic, but with their sloppy methods and record keeping. The suspicion is that their scientific rigour was so poor not even they could replicate their results.
It's marketing blurb. Potential losses could bankrupt both the provider and their hardware suppliers.
Rise of the virtual machines
means you can fail lots of customers at once.
Newbie
Welcome to the wonderful world of embedded processors. We use a new and different architecture in every second or third project. If you don't like it, stick to desktops.
Austrailia tried it
and it didn't work.
Try reading Pavlovics "Final Comments". He blithely assumes you can obscure your own algorithms. This is what makes the paper silly junk science.
Obscurity is security when it is a
one time pad. Other methods depend on the effort the attacker has to put into cracking it. Obscuring the algorithm doesn't put much impediment in the way of the attacker.
Not a game
Security is not a game, so game theories aren't relevant. The consequences of the code being cracked are normally far worse than that of a game, and relying on likelyhood of an attacker working it out rather than having to use brute force is poor given the potential consequences of aa successful crack.
Obscurity will only delay an attacker, they will use better tools to unpick the algorithm, like researchers used a scanning electon microscope on MiFare cards.
Maths fail
The figure of 132kg per mile is the whole cable. Cable is mostly insulation, so the copper weight is a lot less than that. A lot of the cable is older stuff laid in the 1970s and is hair thin.
Much like feed-forward amplifier distortion cancellation techniques, it is fine in theory but doesn't deliver much in practice because real world semiconductors don't completely conform to their simplified mathematical models and have non linearities and distortion and noise. That's before even considering local reflections, intermodulation in other transmitters on the same tower, splatter from rusty supports forming diode junctions, etc etc etc. It can be achieved across a room, but it's far more difficult to get the performance required for a real 35km radius cell.
Hobsons choice
Either pay Apple and get nothing, or pay for Motorola and at least get something for your money.
Re: I can imagine...
Most gliders have only two wheels.
Duh?
What is the point in specific camo when you announce your presence by arriving by helicopter?
De ja vue, anyone?
Sounds like IBM before they just about went bankrupt.
Posted in ARM-based MacBook Air test sample spied
A for Apple, for ARM, or ATOM?
Could still be Sandy Bridge.
TCAS
...uses a combination of GPS and radio signal time-of-flight transponders. While the distances involved with road traffic are far less than aviation, the speeds are far less too. GPS and radio transponders can update many times per second. As I said, it's all been done before.
TCAS
The aviation industry had this solved years ago: Traffic Collision Avoidance System.
GPS based collision avoidance systems fitted to all new vehicles and motorbikes would cover most potential situations, leaving the cameras/lasers to look out for pedestrians or vehicles without the system fitted. Bikers would have a strong survival interest in fitting it to their bikes.
"Waiting for something 'tangible' to happen"...
Like a plane crash.
Posted in Seagate triples up heads/platter ratio
3? 2
Why triple? Double would be the obvious first step. Probably April fool.
Elephant in the room?
"saves engineering time" and because most AGPL projects are of no use to the company
No, Google use open source when it suits their commercial purposes, and ban it if it's license threatens their core revenue stream. If it isn't double standards, then it is at least being economic with the truth about why they're banning it.
Nope
2048 bit PKE isn't 'real' encryption, it is only a 'good' cypher. Real encryption is OTP.
