Posts by Steve Todd 2645 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2007
AND repeat. Do try to read the thread before chipping in. There are many things that even a consumer grade DSO can do that your old analog scope can't. 8 bit DACs are plenty good enough for a lot of uses and you are comparing new vs used equipment (what did the analog scope cost new, and what will a fault cost to repair?)
Storage type CRT tubes date back a long way. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-View_Bistable_Storage_Tubes_(Tektronix)
As an aside, my uncle used an early CAD system that worked using storage tubes. They managed to run 8 CAD workstations off a single UNIVAC mini with only 64K of storage. The down side was that the tubes were the biggest that Tektronix had ever made, they weren't very reliable and cost £20K to replace.
With any instrument you need to understand its limits and peculiarities. You can get surprisingly good results even from low budget DSOs (for example see http://www.cube.co.za/~tva/workbench/atten-ads1102cml/atten-ads-1102cml-review.xhtml ), but you normally get what you pay for. The problem with the higher end scopes is that they are low volume items, and add-on modules are even lower volume, so of course they are going to be expensive. Remember, in real terms, what those old analog scopes used to cost new and you'll see that the DSO is a real bargain.
If you want to analyse comms protocols on a budget then you can do interesting things with cheap FPGA dev boards (ALTERA FPGAs let you capture and analyse signals on every pin so they become pretty competent logic analysers).
Kind of depends if you've learned how to use them (OK, and the model in question doesn't have crap firmware). Being able to do things like setting the correct timebase, trigger and gain by pressing one button is vastly superior in a DSO, as is being able to capture and record several thousand screens full of data at a time. Spotting glitches? Put the DSO into persistent display mode and you'll get an effect like the decaying phosphor image of an analog scope. Things like pass/fail comparisons against recorded waveforms are also out on the analog scape.
Analog scopes can still do useful work, but DSOs are displacing them for good reasons.
You don't seem to understand the Lightening port. It ONLY outputs digital signals. Your dock needs its own DAC, so sound quality is as high as you're prepared to pay for.
My personal route is phone->Airplay->Apple TV->TOS Link->DAC Magic->HiFi. That's neither silly money nor LoFi. Everyone else is free to choose a solution that fits their budget & taste.
So a 3+ screen Windows workstation is cable free and uses less space than a small cylinder plus ONLY the modules you need? Get real JEDADIAH, space and cables are so far off the bottom of the list of possible issues compared to a PC that most folks won't notice them.
It annoys me, the number of people that claim they can build an equivalent or faster machine for half the money, who then list a bunch of consumer grade parts that lack a lot of the functionality of the Apple device.
Ignoring everything else for the moment, you want to put together a machine for professional use without licenses and without support? Really?
Next, no the 4770 isn't equivalent to a Xeon E5. It lacks features like ECC RAM support and has a smaller cache to start with. At best it's a wash in terms of performance between the two, and that's compared to the BASE model Mac Pro. You also don't get SSD connected directly to the PCIe bus (peak speeds of around 1G/sec compared to 540M/sec over SATA3), nor is the GPU spectacular compared to the D500 or D700 options (which also use ECC RAM, as does the entry level D300).
Next, where are all the expansion ports and IO? Dual 1G Ethernet, 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4. 6 Thunderbolt ports (each of which allow you to connect multiple PCIe devices), up to 6 monitors etc.
Finally how big is the box, and how much noise does it make? I'm guessing that it's nowhere near quiet.
Standard PC/Windows keyboards and mice work just fine thanks (they've been doing that with the Mini for a while now), you can connect standard Displayport monitors (DVI/HDMI is a simple third party cable), the ONLY expensive cable is if you want to use Thunderbolt, and that's expensive because it has active parts at each end of the cable.
Where do you get this "cannot be upgraded" crap from? The RAM is socketed, internal disks are standard parts and the video lives on daughter cards. Everything else is designed to be connected by Thunderbolt. These things are designed to handle 4K video as they stand (on 3 separate 4K screens even). You were thinking of moving to 8K in the near future?
Yes, graphic designers, photogs, video editors etc, non of them are professionals. Everyone has a data centre to keep their rack mounted kit in, and no one in an office uses a Xeon workstation do they (says he looking at one under his desk that hasn't had more than a disk upgrade in its life)
as to how Bond liked to leave his women.
The books generally don't have much to do with the films (Moonraker being the worst, where the only similarity was the name of the villain), and their whole attitude would be unacceptable today but as Lewis said, they are works of fiction not a life guide.
You think a touch based graphical O/S is going to be as lightweight as CP/M? Of course not. A decently powerful multi-tasking O/S is going to take up CPU cycles. Part of the trick of iOS is to offload much of the screen rendering to the GPU, and those WinCE machines didn't have a GPU worth a damn.
Was that the technology was up to the task pre-iPhone. The original iPhone was borderline on what it was possible for CPU/GPU/battery tech of the time to handle. RIM didn't believe that what Apple were claiming was even possible. Everything had to align before touch interfaces were ready for main-stream phone use.
In order to handle low visibility landings the airport needs a category IIIa (30 metre decision height, 200 metres visibility) or b (0-15metre DH, 75 metres visibility) ILS system, and the aircraft need an Automatic Landing System. They also still need to be able to see well enough to taxi (that would be class IIIc, but no one has that yet).
You honestly are trying to claim that your DESKTOP PC writes 2TB/day to disk? Most desktop systems are heavily biased towards reads rather than writes, and the big differentiator here is the speed of reads (ie. near zero access time and 3 times the sustained throughput of spinning rust).
Try using an SSD based system sometime, and do a proper analysis of your usage patterns to see what will and won't work.
How do you ensure that everyone is running to exactly the same time standard?
Exchanges have always been about bid and offer. Someone either bids a price that they want to pay or offers a price they want to sell at. The price will change until someone hits the deal, ie they commit to the price of the other party. First one in gets the deal, so the precise time the deal is hit becomes important. The issue with your solution is that it doesn't deal with multiple parties all hitting at the same price.
Yes, it is a silly idea. Think about it from the point of view of a fresh graduate. Do you go in to a company which will teach you skills that are freely transferable to most other companies out there, or one that will teach you stuff that is pretty much ONLY used by them, and is very old tech. You'll get SOME uptake, but it's not going to attract the best and the brightest.
You can spend huge sums putting new machines in to run old software, and it's the maintainability of the software that's the issue here. The trend has been towards making software LESS efficient, but that as a byproduct of making it easier to document and maintain. There is a limited supply of developers who understand CICS/COBOL still, and little new uptake. There's a big cost and little apparent benefit in migrating to something more modern (say UNIX/C++), but it's something the bank is going to have to do unless it wants to paint its self into a corner when it comes to staff skills.
Probably means they have shed loads of CICS/COBOL/ISAM code and IBM assembler that no one understands any more and is hard to maintain. Buying a faster mainframe is probably not the best way to go in this case (something like a clustered Power 7+ Server and Oracle RAC would probably be a better and more robust solution for general ledger/real time payments).
As it happens I'm an ex-banker. I spent 10 years working for the cash management division of one if the largest investment banks in the world. For 15 years before that I was a contractor, working for everything between a flight booking company through a water utility to the research division of a large pharmaceutical company. I think I'm pretty well qualified to say what is or isn't a complicated environment.
The high level system diagram of the bank's IT environment ran to a page of A2 IIRC, and that was with a small font. They had a whole system responsible just for cataloging the systems that they had, the technologies that they used, the systems that they connected to and their level of compliance with IT rules.
You've described a small part of the functionality of a general ledger. That is connected to MANY other systems (for example links to SWIFTNET, FPS, credit management, reporting, direct debits etc.) ONE of those links is to to ATM network. The failure could have been due to anything from network, through hardware, the interaction of existing bugs or release management (though one would hope that they weren't releasing new software on what was expected to be one of the busiest days of the year).
You honestly want ads from every store in the mall? You get to choose which companies you are interested in. Companies can group together under a single common app, but you get to choose if you are interested or not. Thats why it's not the big deal that the haters seem to be trying to make out.
In case you didn't read the article, beacons only transmit an ID. The ID contains a 128 bit GUID and a location code. The GUID launches any app that is installed and has registered that ID. You CAN'T use it to distribute fake vouchers as the voucher is created by the owning store's app, that the iPhone owner has to install.
The Surface 2 is ARM powered, just like the iPad Air, but with a less powerful SoC. The Surface 2 Pro uses a Haswell, just like the MacBook Air, but with a poorer battery life, an optional extra keyboard and only two working screen angles you can set it to. The Pro is more expensive than an equivalently spec'd MacBook.
Version 1 is at best beta quality, incomplete and full of bugs
Version 2 fixes most of the bugs
Version 3 adds the missing features and is what the customers actually wanted.
Version 4 adds new, flashy stuff and breaks it.
Version 5 fixes the problems with version 4 and is again what was wanted.
Version 6 has a whole new UI (for poorly explained reasons), and is once again broken.
Version 7 fixes version 6
etc.
So you should get in at version 3 and then upgrade every other version.
From the share price it would seem that investors are coming back in droves.
The price isn't even unusual for a company of its size. The financial number to look at is something called PE ratio, the ratio of share price to earnings per share. Historical PE ratios have averaged around 10-20 for stock market listed companies. Above 20 is regarded as overpriced, below is underpriced. Apple are currently at about 13.
With any market there is a well known pattern of sales for a new product. You can see the effect for iPods quite nicely. First it is new technology and expensive, then the average price falls and volume increases as the market matures, and finally the market shrinks as it is replaced by something new. Given that the market (and Apple's sales) are still increasing then we still haven't hit maturity for both smartphones and tablets, and it will be some time past that point until Apple have a problem, ASSUMING they never invent a single other new product.
Purely from a power point of view bluetooth wins. It would need work from both ends to make audio stream over LE, and the data rate may be a bit of an issue (peak is 270k bits/sec over a 1M bit channel). I'm still trying to work out if device paring or advertised services would be the easiest option for users.
"Both Apple's products and most hearing aids use a 2.4 GHz signal, which could make any linkup with Bluetooth much easier."
That's kind of like saying both vans and bicycles run on roads, so it should be easy to make a bike that can carry furniture. About the only thing they're likely to have in common at the moment is the aerial, and I wouldn't count on that. You'd need a completely new bluetooth or WiFi radio in order for the two to work with each other, and I'm more inclined to the idea that Apple would be using AirPlay which would imply Wifi.
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