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Comment Summary is patently stupid (Score 2) 144

First off, the SAM3U is based on Cortex-M3 only, which can't run the full 32-bit profile of the ARMv7 instruction set... rather, it is exclusively capable of executing the Thumb-2 instruction set, which are 16-bit instructions with a handful of 32-bit instructions. This is misleading, since it means that conventional ARMv5 or even ARMv7 code targeted towards the Beagleboard (say) will not work on a Cortex-M3 part.

Second of all, why the hell would Intel have something to fear from a 96 MHz Cortex-M3 part? This makes no sense, since this isn't even a segment Intel is actively pursuing. What might be competitive with Intel's offerings could be something like an Cortex-A15 part (which AFAIK there are none of on the market as of now) or even a Cortex-A9 part with some of the low-end Atoms. However, the Cortex-M3 definitely has absolutely nothing to do with any of Intel's offerings, so this clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of how microprocessors work in the market (and how ARM and something like Arduino falls into the real-world marketplace) on the part of the submitter.

Comment So, uh, who here lives in Manhattan? (Score 2) 262

Not surprisingly, the comments on this item are full of unwarranted panic and claims of Big Brother coming to a corner near you. I live in Manhattan, and I would welcome speed cameras and traffic light cameras. These are cameras intended to catch people who are violating traffic law, which makes them an enormous hazard on the crowded streets of the city. Cycling in NYC is basically running the gauntlet (fortunately, Central Park is a bit of a haven for cyclists and pedestrians), and reckless drivers are a hazard every day on the streets as a pedestrian. I really think that some deterrence would be an excellent thing for Manhattan and would encourage people to drive much more safely. I'd say they should go so far as to do the same thing for cyclists who disobey the law, as well.
Math

Submission + - Wired Science News for Your Neurons Mathematical (wired.com)

cloude-pottier writes: What do you do when Zombies attack? Turn to a mathematician to come up with a model for the spread of a zombie infestation, of course! Students at University of Ottawa and Carleton University have published a paper, in a book titled Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress detailing how to model the spread of a zombie population and various complications in managing the spread of the infestation. They even give humans a fighting chance in some cases! The original paper can be found at their professor's website.

Comment Interesting Sensors... (Score 1) 791

While the images seem to be highly decimated, there's definitely two different sensor types being used. One is definitely visible light (the cloudy ones are obvious, but less obvious is the way the water appears in a read/NIR image channel, which I imagine is the range we're looking at). The other is most likely a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). This becomes apparent when looking at ship wakes as well as looking at the structure of the surface of the water. Additionally, the telltale signs of speckle are present in the SAR images.

If you want to see some similar-looking, but civilian-produced images, I'd recommend checking out TerraSAR-X.

While I can't do analysis on the images (they're too highly decimated, have been orthorectified/geocoded, so a lot of the original signal structure has been lost), I'd guess based on artifacts I've seen that the SAR images are decimated by a factor of 4 (though that is just a gut feeling).
Privacy

Submission + - SHA-1 cracking on a budget (hackaday.com)

cloude-pottier writes: One thing that is always amazing is what people manage to pull off on absolutely minimal resources. One enterprising individual went on eBay and found boards with more than half a dozen Virtex II Pro FPGAs, nurse them back to life and build a SHA-1 cracker with two of the boards. This is an excellent example of recycling, as these were originally a part of a Thompson Grass Valley HDTV broadcast system. As a part of the project, the creator wrote tools designed to graph the relationships between components using JTAG as to make reverse engineering the organization of the FPGAs on the board more apparent. More details can be seen on the actual project page. If an individual is able to pull this off for under 500 dollars, it almost makes one wonder what resources the government has available to them to do the same thing...
AMD

In Tests Opteron Shows Efficiency Edge Over Intel, Again 98

Ted Samson writes "In their latest round of energy-efficiency tests between AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon, independent testing firm Neal Nelson and Associates find AMD still holds an edge, but it's certainly not cut-and-dried. Nelson put similarly equipped servers through another gauntlet of tests, swapping in different amounts of memory and varying transaction loads. In the end, he found that the more memory he installed on the servers, the better the Opteron performed compared to the Xeon. Additionally, at maximum throughput, the Intel system fared better, power-efficiency-wise, by 5.0 to 5.5 percent for calculation intensive workloads. For disk I/O intensive workloads, AMD delivered better power efficiency by 18.4 to 18.6 percent. And in idle states — that is, when servers were waiting for their next work load — AMD consistently creamed Intel."

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