I think that it is naive at best to consider Reed Hastings for doing this for 'greed' alone. Now that Netflix had established themselves as a leader in online video distribution and more than just a niche geek thing, he knew he wasn't going to get the cheap deals again from the studios like he might have before. Again, take for example the Dreamworks deal that happened recently. People are complaining about Netflix having good current streaming content (myself included), so they did what they thought would provide more value to the customer and went with this deal. However Dreamworks want 25 million per picture available on Netflix. And you know that other studios are going to want a sweetheart deal like that. This would inevitably mean the good deal that was Netflix was going to have to raise prices to be able to afford content.

Now I, like everyone else, can grumble about the price increase, but I feel that their hands were tied and can accept it. Netflix is trying to improve their product, but they knew that it was going to cost them more. Like any business, one way or another, these costs are passed onto the customer.

No problem. It actually is probably one of my favorite movies/books and has a pretty good twist for an ending. I won't spoil it but if you like movies with twist endings like the sixth sense, then this is one worth checking out. The movie does a pretty good job of representing the book too.

That is certainly a 'whoosh' for you. This is a quote from the movie/book Fight Club, where the main character did this for his job.

What I am thinking of isn't the once a month tornado warning. This would be a commercial, followed by some guy saying 'this is a test of the emergency broadcast system...' and then there would be a tone for about 20 seconds, with more talking about how that was only a test and if it were real, you would have been given more instruction. That commercial is the specific one that I was thinking of.

slightly off topic, but I remember when I was younger there would be tv 'commercials' on Saturdays which would have these on. To give a time reference, this would have been during the very early 80's. (i know...get off my lawn, yada yada yada...) and it would have been in Michigan, but I am guessing it would have been a nationwide sort of thing. But now to think of it, I haven't seen one of these in ages! I am guessing they must have changed the requirements on this or something. Does anyone remember when the last time they saw one or what happened that they actually stopped this? Or is it possible that it still goes on, but now its just sandwiched between infomercials late at night?

While I somewhat agree with you, I haven't followed it too closely. However, I believe that Greg mentions what some limitations are of SAR and that would be the real time processing to make it viable for field use. I think how things were done before was that you had several radar images taken by a single radar that had physically been moved at some small increment apart. Now here, he has several antennas so that all he as to do is electronically switch between antennas in his array to capture the images. This would reduce the time for the total image capture while still getting the physical separation required to be able to create a SAR image.

Computing has also improved to a point where an off site computer is no longer required to compute the resultant image which I think was/is done with satellite images.

And I think I read this in the attached article that was there is still some work to be done on the resolution of the images from this application. I could see how this could be difficult since there is still some finite delay time between image captures from the individual antennas. I would imagine this would cause the object of interest to be more disperse in the resultant image. Usually SAR images are done on static objects, so I myself don't know what the impact would be on the added difficulty of a moving target on a SAR image. I think I read that they were using a difference algorithm between images to detect the motion of the object.

Finally, I think that Greg may be down playing the difficulty of 'seeing' through the wall. He uses percent to show how much attenuation the transmitted and reflected signal experiences, but being an RF guy myself, am used to dB. It sounded like it would be about 30 dB of attenuation each direction through the wall. That doesn't even account for free space path loss. To go through the wall twice, you lose 60 dB of transmit power. Additionally, not all object will reflect the power completely. Assume maybe you lose another 20 dB due to imperfect reflection (admittedly a guess) then we are now up to 80 dB of the initial power lost that was transmitted to be able to make a reliable return from the object that is an imperfect RF scatterer. Looking at his rig, it didn't look like he was using too large of a transmitter, so that would put a lot of work on the receiver to detect these signals. He is correct when saying though that he can just use amplifiers to get the signal to a usable level, but at the same time you would like to have a larger SNR on the receive signal since it would make each radar snapshot clearer.

That is probably the extent of my knowledge on SAR imaging, and I am no expert. I just know enough to be dangerous :)

The person who designed the radar was posted before, but this was about his PhD project. Here is the link and you too can build your own SAR (as long as you can read his cat scratch of notes on his blog)

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/06/18/1350259/diy-synthetic-aperture-radar

Also on his blog, you will see similarities to what he developed for his PhD and what he is working on now.

http://www.mit.edu/~gr20603/Dr.%20Gregory%20L.%20Charvat%20Projects/Synthetic%20Aperture%20Radar%20(SAR).html

Oh, and I am not a groupie. I happen to actually know Greg.

I got it! I got,got it. I got the number off the wall...

Some things that come to mind....

ADCs samples with more bits (12 bits vs 8 bits). This is would be important to someone who cared about getting better dynamic range from an analog signal. It is roughly a 6 dB improvement per bit. (effectively a bit less when considering non-ideal things such as clock jitter). Possible applications would be SW defined radios

Clock speed is faster than current Arduinos. If you were running something that was computationally intense and had a small window to complete this computation, this would be beneficial. A project that I am working on now could benefit from this. I would like to to do FFTs in a really short time span. This would help here.

While I am not familiar with the exact architecture here, if it has 32 bit address fields, it probably has 32 bit computational registers too. Again, this could be beneficial if you have need precise computations in your application. Again, when doing something like FFTs, or digital filtering, round off errors could be problematic with smaller registers. In general, more bits means less round off error.

These would be the first things that come to mind for my applications. I am sure others will provide more, especially if they are more familiar with the architecture.

As an ex submariner, I will add my $0.02. I would agree that the food on the sub wasn't too bad. It was certainly better than some of the other mess halls that I had eaten in, and I would attribute it to a few factors. The first one being was that I was probably never out to sea for more than three weeks between port visits. When we would visit a port we would always bring on fresh produce, milk, and meats. Also, the cooks only have to cook for about 120 men. This would mean that they could almost take their time and not rush to get the food out. And usually, the captain knew everyone on the ship, including the cooks, by name. If the captain likes your cooking, it looks good for you and your performance reviews. You mix all of these things together (pun intended), and I would say that you have all of the makings of usually* pretty good food.

*I say usually, because when we are in port, and if the cook got sh!tfaced the night before, he probably isn't going to have is A game that day when cooking. But hey, we were sailors after all.

Nice. I just read "Guards, Guards", where they mention this sort of logic. I haven't made it through all of his books yet. (man, there's a bunch!). My chances of reading them all, however, are a million- to-one.

As a better answer to the two others who posted, I will give an example. C and C++ (and others) start array indexing from zero.If you have a 10 element array, in C/C++ you would access the last element as myarray[9]. You know that you have 10 elements, and if you are not careful you might try to index the last element as myarray[10]. This will generally cause errors in you program and you hope the compiler can catch them for you. In languages like C/C++, this could even be a hidden error since if you are not careful with your pointers, you could access data outside of the array and the program would keep on chugging along without throwing an error since the compiler may not be able to catch the error. If you are lucky, you will be a runtime error, but that can be difficult to track down.

this type of error is generally called a fence post error.

It is a similar idea. The RF energy will tend to travel on the outside of the person rather than on the inside. The phenomena is usually called RF burn. Wikipedia calls it microwave burn, but that is the first time that I have heard it called that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_burn

I know what you mean. I have a box of all the games that I have bought over the years, most of which I have never finished. I installed Max Payne a few months ago and started playing it again, and I still haven't finished it. I actually had to look in that box last night and I saw the instruction manual for SimCity 300 and was half tempted to look for the CD to install and play again :)

I think you sort of alluded to why publishers have taken this approach now, much to the disappointment of us hardcore gamers. We, as serious gamers, are not buying enough games for one reason or another. In my case, it's a matter of free time. For others it might be a matter money and $50 to $60 for a title might be too much to spend.

Marketing departments are always looking for additional revenue sources. From their standpoint, we serious gamers have no serious business growth to them, so they need to find a way to grow the company more. Enter the casual gamer. This would be their new target audience for growth. If they can create games on a smaller budget, have it be over and done with in 10 hours of game play, and create a more consistent revenue stream (meaning that they buy another game after they finish the previous game) then it's a win for them.

The optimist in me would still like to think that they would make AAA titles for us serious gamer types, but reality has usually proven me wrong.