Comment How to call Bruce (Score 5, Informative) 2219
You dial 1-510-4PERENS. Email is probably better, though. bruce@perens.com .
They are throwing out "network transparency"
Except that they aren't. Because X has not had true network transparency for over a decade. It does the same screen-scraping that RDP does, but just in a horribly inefficient way. X doesn't even have proper security, which is why remote sessions are tunneled through SSH. If you think that is efficient, you are probably the type of person that runs an IPSEC tunnel through the Tor network for fun just so you can check your email. The only advantage X has going for it is convenience. Remoting just works with no extra configuration required, just an X server (on the client, yay confusing X terminology). There are much better ways to do remoting. We can do better for linux, and Wayland provides the opportunity to engineer something good, without needing to hold on to legacy baggage.
Let's see:
This was my first reaction too. However, reading the article (I know, I must be new here) clears it up,
There are two reasons birds might fly in a V formation: It may make flight easier, or they’re simply following the leader. Squadrons of planes can save fuel by flying in a V formation, and many scientists suspect that migrating birds do the same. Models that treated flapping birds like fixed-wing airplanes estimate that they save energy by drafting off each other, but currents created by airplanes are far more stable than the oscillating eddies coming off of a bird. “Air gets pretty darn wiggy behind a flapping wing,” says James Usherwood, a locomotor biomechanist at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London in Hatfield, where the research took place.
Just as aerodynamic estimates would predict, the birds positioned themselves to fly just behind and to the side of the bird in front, timing their wing beats to catch the uplifting eddies. When a bird flew directly behind another, the timing of the flapping reversed so that it could minimize the effects of the downdraft coming off the back of the bird’s body.
“From a behavioral perspective it’s really a breakthrough,” says David Lentink, a mechanical engineer at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who was not involved in the work. “Showing that birds care about syncing their wing beats is definitely an important insight that we didn’t have before.”
And from the actual research article,
Many species travel in highly organized groups. The most quoted function of these configurations is to reduce energy expenditure and enhance locomotor performance of individuals in the assemblage. The distinctive V formation of bird flocks has long intrigued researchers and continues to attract both scientific and popular attention. The well-held belief is that such aggregations give an energetic benefit for those birds that are flying behind and to one side of another bird through using the regions of upwash generated by the wings of the preceding bird, although a definitive account of the aerodynamic implications of these formations has remained elusive.
We conclude that the intricate mechanisms involved in V formation flight indicate awareness of the spatial wake structures of nearby flock-mates, and remarkable ability either to sense or predict it. We suggest that birds in V formation have phasing strategies to cope with the dynamic wakes produced by flapping wings.
So, it's a little bit of a behavioral science study...is saving energy why they do it, or is saving energy just a happy consequence? And it's also a bit of a mechanism study...to gain the most aerodynamic benefit requires adjustment of the wing and position to meet the updrafts, so how well do the birds do this?
You could do this using FRS walkie talkies, as long as they have microphone and earphone connections. Or analog telephones. It's been tested multiple times on ham FM walkie talkies. Anything that carries voice should work. The bandwidth is only 1.25 kHz and I think the low end starts at about 700 Hz.
MOS is only for people who want to pay a lot of money. Of the automated processes, the one available to us isn't validated for less than 4K bps codecs.
It would be a great improvement to MOS if there was an open version of POQLA. But the actual customer base for the codec have never even heard of MOS and thus we aren't volunteering to write that. The folks who want to put it in expensive government support systems yet aren't willing to help with testing don't get our sympathy.
We avoid some techniques that would make the noise performance worse. The HF version of the codec doesn't vector quantitize, and doesn't do any delta coding between frames. The current FEC is Golay and we are investigating low-density parity codes.
There is a lot yet unheard about the Ratheon codec, regarding its actual noise performance and how well the listener can distinguish different speakers.
Adding features does not necessarily increase functionality -- it just makes the manuals thicker.
