ITER is a hugely expensive project, and won't produce a commercially viable power generation system.

In a lot of areas where research is done on things which don't work yet -- rockets, bridges, transmission systems, etc -- there's a general idea of how things might be able to "scale up" to meet the goals.

Is tokamak fusion really in sight of being commercially viable source of energy? If we need unobtanium to make a commercially viable reactor, wouldn't it make sense to wait until the materials are viable before making even larger tokamaks? What do we learn from making these new, bigger, more expensive reactors?

Or are we trying to build ever-bigger spark gap transmitters as a way to make radio better? Maybe we should look at other schemes?

Or, alternatively, we know of a nice, large, gravity-fed fusion reactor fairly nearby, is the engineering simpler to harness energy from that on a large scale?

Sure. Most DSPs don't have floating point. Looks like the AVR has an 8x8 multiply, so that really helps. Most DSPs use 16x16 multiplies, accumulating with a 32 bit or larger accumulator. That's going to take several instructions on an 8 bit micro, but it's certainly feasible for things like audio with low data rates and small FFTs. On the other hand, if you're using an Arduino to do audio FFT for things like a spectrum analyzer, this technique won't help, since you're not interested in picking up a few signals, but all the frequency bands.

Which are findable in other ways also.

Not very usable for things that we need super-fast FFTs for, a gazillion times a second, like LTE.

I wonder if this is just re-discovering compressed sensing.

Oh, I see. The problem is not that pancake flipping itself is hard, that determining the optimal pancake flipping algorithm for a stack is hard. That's believable.

I had something like this was an interview question once. My solution:

Assume we are stacking pancakes with largest at the bottom.

1. Find the largest unsorted pancake
2. Flip that to the top
3. Flip from the bottom-most unsorted pancake. (One additional pancake is now sorted)
4. Repeat until sorted

To me, assuming that you consider "Find the largest unsorted pancake" to be O(N), the algorithm is O(N^2). Number of flips is 2N. Where's my turing award?

So I must be missing something... Is one not able to find the largest unsorted pancake easily? Perhaps you are only able to look at the size of the topmost pancake. The article was unclear.

Smashing all the nuclear sites around the world in the 1880s would not be very disastrous.

The WiMAX network is pretty bad. Coverage is virtually nonexistant, even in cities "with WiMAX coverage" In Austin, there are very few places where WiMAX works ... and seemingly never in places like the airport where you actually want it. If you ever happen to get it working, speeds are marginally better than EVDO.

LTE should work much better, and it will align with the rest of the industry.

We read when we're bored, but what's the point in commenting among the noise?

Engineers manipulate the environment to make it better (more valuable).

Got a desert? Irrigate it and it's much more valuable.

Got a large land mass? Add transportation infrastructure and people can get around easier.

Computing is a new environment that is an extraordinarily awesome environment to be engineered in.

Finance is another complex environment that can be made more valuable with engineering. If the tech companies are really hurting for the smart folks, they'll start paying competitively.

Friends don't tell friends not to go into finance if they think it's in their best interest. It seems like interesting, challenging, profitable work. I don't see why that's wrong.

Do you think that Google has no patents that might apply to you? Do you think that they might have anything that reads on, oh, Bing or your Cloud services? Do you really want to start this battle?

News flash: ARM designs low-performance processors that are also lower power!

Seriously, Slashdot? This is news?

And now ARM is going after high clock rates with deep pipelines. They'll end up with microarchitectures that are are more or less equivalent to x86 ones. Oh, and they're well behind the game when it comes to important architecture features like 64 bit. A 32 bit "server" architecture is a laughable concept.

The real thing that ARM has that x86 doesn't? You can license their core and put it in your SoC, where all the important stuff actually lives.

We see this same ARM article every few weeks. It's the same bull every time. I'm starting to expect that tomorrow I'll see slashdot / slashvertisement articles that "nature's harmonic simultaneous 4-day time cube" has been proven.

Is this the classic head switch with feedback to adjust the output voltage? This kind of voltage regulator has been around for a long time, and is extremely common in embedded devices. You have the head switch there anyway for power collapse, just add some control to the gate voltage. Not terribly efficient, but you get increased R and so decreased V squared over R. Better than no regulation for small increase in area over what you had already (A big head switch).

Perhaps it's yet another case of Academia "discovering" what someone in industry figured out a long time ago...

Now if it's a easy to fabricate buck converter, it might be interesting... we have to have those off-die. But I think fabricating those capacitors and inductors isn't easy.

Are there more people on Itanium VMS than Alpha yet? I hadn't heard that was the case...

FM Radio could interfere with television broadcast channels 5 and 6, or aircraft navigation, since they're right next to each other!

AM Radio could interfere with aircraft beacons, since they're right next to each other!

Please. We've been allocating spectrum for things for a long time. Interference can be monitored and controlled. Do you really think that mobile telephone companies would put up with broadcasters puking all over their spectrum? Or vice versa? Or either putting up with amateur radio interference?

Or, perhaps worst of all, do you think the Hams would put up with someone interfering with their spectrum? They can triangulate secret government projects accidentally using their shortwave spectrum.

Yes, interference happens from all sorts of places. You'll likely find that devices in your adjacent spectrum are less likely to interfere than other sources of interference.