Unhandled Perception

The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled to become operational in 2010, will require about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its onboard systems. And Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, scheduled to be delivered to customers in 2010, requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its avionics and onboard support systems.

These are impressive amounts of software, yet if you bought a premium-class automobile recently, ”it probably contains close to 100 million lines of software code,” says Manfred Broy, a professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich, and a leading expert on software in cars. All that software executes on 70 to 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of your car.

That’s a lot of code. I can’t imagine the test procedures that are in place…

Link:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/…

Link:
http://www.toplessrobot.com/…

If you want to build one:
http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Most-Useless-Machine/

Found at:
http://d.yimg.com/gg/u/…

In those predigital days, communications channels — such as phone lines or radio bands — were particularly susceptible to the electrical or electromagnetic disruptions known as “noise.” Shannon proved the counterintuitive result that no matter how noisy a channel, information could be sent over it error free. All you needed was a way to add enough redundancy to the information so that errors could be corrected. He also demonstrated that there was a hard limit on how efficient those error-correcting codes could be — a minimum amount of extra information that would guarantee near-zero error. Since longer codes take longer to send, a minimum code length implied a maximum transmission rate — the Shannon limit. Finally, Shannon proved that codes approaching that limit must exist. But he didn’t show how to find them.

Link:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/…

An estimate of US consumers’ data consumption places the figure at 3.6 zettabytes per year. But most of that comprises pixels temporarily thrown onto the screen, not bytes permanently written to media.

Link:
http://arstechnica.com/media/…

Decent summary of some good tech, geeky, stuff that came out in 2009.

Link:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356325,00.asp

Link:
http://www.livescience.com/technology/…

3/4? You’re kidding.

A little piece of Internet history has now been laid to rest, as CompuServe was shut down for good just before this Fourth of July weekend. After some 30 years of service, CompuServe’s new owner has finally pulled the plug, leaving us to reminisce about the days when the Internet was young and we were still using modems whose speed was measured in baud.

Link:
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/…

Wolfram Alpha is backed by Stephen Wolfram, the noted scientist and author behind the Mathematica computational software and the book, A New Kind Of Science. The service bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine,” which is a mouthful. I’d call it a “fact search engine” or perhaps an “answer search engine,” a term that’s been used in the past for services designed to provide you with direct answers, rather than point you at pages that in turn may hold those answers.

Do a search on Wolfram Alpha, and if it has matching data, it presents a ton of information on a single page, from figures to charts. For example, a search for “newport beach” not only shows the current temperature and forecast but also provides easy access to historical temperatures, which also get charted:

Will this be revolutionary? Is this just hype that will go nowhere? We’ll see. Hopefully Wolfram will send me an invite so I can check it out

Read more and chek out some screenshots:
http://searchengineland.com/…

Wolfram:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

[ted id="481"]

Another great TED talk. Watch this and then check out the other TED talks.

Google’s big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there’s a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers–each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

They show the inside of a Google module data-center – very smart designing.

Link:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

OLED-Info is a comprehensive resource for OLED professionals, and for people who want to learn more about this exciting new technology.

OLED Info are giving away an OLED-Info Kodak Photo frame (valued around $800) just for spreading to word about their website or following them on Twitter.

I have talked with the owner of the site for many years and always loved an application he wrote called AdsenseLog. I wish him luck with another great website which should become the leading resource for OLED information.

So, pass the word and get entered to win a very cool prize.

Link:
http://www.oled-info.com

The contest:
http://www.oled-info.com/oled-info-…