Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Seriously? (Score 1) 92

by tallackn (#59244578) Attached to: The Heat Death of 5G
Yeah. It hurts my brain to see someone so uninformed on the technology get an article on the front page like this. I know the moderators are not technical, but come on. A simple google search or two would validate this.
Wireless Networking

The Heat Death of 5G (digitstodollars.com) 92

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Yes, 5G is coming and data rates will improve, but we, the mobile industry, still have a lot of work to do. We could regale you with litanies of woe about roaming and hand-offs, or belabor the small cell backhaul density logjam. But perhaps the best example of roadblocks to 5G is much easier to grasp -- Heat. 5G phones get hot. Really hot. Probably not hot enough to ignite your battery (probably), but enough to generate a definite burning sensation in your pants pockets. At Mobile World Congress in February, we spoke with an engineer from Sony who was demo'ing a phone (behind glass) that was clocking 1 Gbps speeds. Wow, fast. We asked the engineer why it was not going faster and he said "It overheats." A good solid answer, from a nuts-and-bolts-and-antenna person. We will wager any amount that at next year's show, no one on the floor will be as open about this problem.

The big improvement in data rates for 5G will only come with mmWave radios. This is a whole new spectrum band that allows for really high data rates (again, let's set aside the whole densification issue for now). The trouble is that mmWave radios generate a lot of heat. To greatly oversimplify, mmWave frequencies are pretty close to microwave frequencies, as in the thing we use to reheat our lunches. From some of our very recent industry conversations we know that the handset industry is using a tried-and-tested method for dealing with this problem -- ignoring it and hoping it goes away. The whole issue strikes us as one of those issues where middle management really does not want to raise the subject with senior management who have wrapped themselves so tightly around the 5G flagpole. "Uh boss, your pants are literally on fire."

Submission + - The Graffiti Drone (vice.com)

Submitted by tedlistens
tedlistens writes: KATSU is known for his adventurous and speculative vandalism, but his new project is not fake or hypothetical, though it does elevate his work to new heights. He has developed a system to attach a spray can to a quadcopter, creating one of the world's first graffiti drones. The drone is capable of spraying canvases or walls hundreds of feet high, granting the artist access to spaces that were previously inaccessible. At the Silicon Valley Contemporary art fair, which opened Thursday, KATSU is showing a series of drone-painted canvasses—and preparing to take the drone out on the town. "There are a lot of disadvantages to drones, you know. It’s not like, ‘oh, I’ll slip off the edge of this bridge and die’," he tells the Center for the Study of the Drone at Motherboard, which also has a video. "Its like, ‘I might have the drone drift off and I might kill someone.’"

Submission + - Are You Apocalypse Useful?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Young people, when choosing a profession, are often told to "do what you love." That's why we have experts in such abstruse fields as medieval gymel. If there's a worldwide catastrophe in which civilization is interrupted, how useful would that profession be? In a post-apocalypse world, medical doctors would be useful, as would most scientists and engineers. Bad news for Slashdotters is that decades without computers would render computer science and related professions useless. What do you consider to be the most useful and mostly useless post-apocalypse professions? Should everyone be required to study a few apocalypse-appropriate subjects?

Submission + - UN report reveals odds of being murdered country-by-country (economist.com) 4

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: A new UN report (link to data) details comprehensive country-by-country murder rates. Safest is Singapore, with just one killing per 480,000 people in 2012. In the world’s most violent country, Honduras, a man has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered during his lifetime. The Economist includes an intriguing 'print only interactive' (see the PDF) and has some tongue-in-cheek tips on how to avoid being slain:
>First, don’t live in the Americas or Africa, where murder rates (one in 6,100 and one in 8,000 respectively) are more than four times as high as the rest of the world.
Next, be a woman. Your chance of being murdered will be barely a quarter what it would be were you a man. In fact, steer clear of men altogether: nearly half of all female murder-victims are killed by their partner or another (usually male) family member. But note that the gender imbalance is less pronounced in the rich world, probably because there is less banditry, a mainly male pursuit. In Japan and South Korea slightly over half of all murder victims are female.
Then, sit back and grow older. From the age of 30 onwards, murder rates fall steadily in most places.

Comment Isn't the qutoe from a SF novel? (Score 1) 332

by tallackn (#9026889) Attached to: Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water
I remember reading a SF novel many years ago about a brown dwarf star that was passing through our solar system. On the surface of this small and ultra dense star life had evolved. They were little (compared to us) worm thingies that could travel along the "magnetic" fields that covered the surface.

They evolved very quickly, infact they lived in a "much faster" time than humans, with their life span being just minutes in our time.

Anyhow, eventually they saw a "new star" around their planet (brown dwarf) which as a human ship come to visit it and study it as it passed through our star system.

Now, I could be right off track here, but from memory, it was these little things that called us "big ugly bags mostly water" when they were visiting our ship.

But, my memory is never reliable at the best of times, so I could be compeltly wrong with this. Anyone know?

What was the name of this novel by the way? Does anyone know that?
User Journal

Journal Journal: Woo hoo! My first accepted submission.

Journal by tallackn

Yay! Finally!!! A story I submitted has been accepted. :)

2003-01-08 23:31:56 3D Gadget Printer (articles,news) (accepted)

Hope it actually shows up somewhere now. (chuckle)
User Journal

Journal Journal: Where the hell did this come from?

Journal by tallackn

I'll be damned. A journal. I wonder how many years this has been here without me noticing.

And I wasted all that time installing blog software to keep a journal, and there was one right here all along. Doh! :-)

Slashdot Top Deals

Mausoleum: The final and funniest folly of the rich. -- Ambrose Bierce

Close