I'm rediscovering it. I remember reading about this in some flashy, superlative Popular Science article, from the early/mid 2000s. So I was quite excited to click on the link and see that shape again.
I ran to the mailbox for these. Sad day. And yet, as others have said, “It felt inevitable.”
Popular Science was never the bastion of journalistic integrity, and yet this leaves me worried about print publishing in general. If a periodical can’t make it, what happens to print news?
Print news is only a matter of time, right? The US daily newspaper circulation declined 30% between 2016 and 2020.
UK newspapers are dropping 10-20% in circulation in 2023 -alone-. Most of our magazines are already dead or extremely low quality.
Japan is doing well though. The Yomiuri Shimbun is published twice daily and has a morning circulation of 7 million. Magazines and periodicals are very much alive, including 500+ page manga magazines and the weekly Famitsu gaming magazine.
To add color to this. The reason being is because a lot of the old C++ libraries and code no longer function so pushing for .NET applications helps bring them into the 21st century. Also, I think it’s more because of the fact that C# is very familiar to C/C++ developers. However, I believe the true target architecture should be Linux and there’s some work in this area. GNU Radio, Gqrx, Qradiolink.
It just depends on where you are looking. There’s plenty of OSS for SDR (it’s in the kernel, btw) on Linux. Windows you’re going to get closed source 80% of the time. Mac, forget about it.
What would people want this to look like? Is there a backlog anywhere of stuff people would want?
Edit: I was thinking maybe something that reads from an rtl or airspy, or maybe soapy? Then takes requests for channels over websockets from a wasm front end, then have the demod wasm side? And a waterfall streamed as a video to aid in making the channel selection? It would save bw to put demod server side, but this way clients could use custom demods if they want.
The perceived stagnation in the field is because you can’t multiplex an SDR stream. One user can control the radio at a time. You can not listen on more bands than your radio can receive at once. Capping out at 192hz band audio sampling on most hardware. Which means you can read a wide signal but you can only read one area of the spectrum at a time.
You would need more radios. If you added more radios you would need antenna that worked across the various bands people would want to listen in on. Those can create “cross-talk” to other antenna close-by. There’s not a simple solution to this. Nor does the novelty of it warrant solving this problem.
I think something like FlightAware where users sample their own radios at frequencies and submit them to a service that can aggregate the spectrum in real-time is the only real way to provide a web-based “tune to any radio frequency” SDR.
An airspy can digitize 12MHz of bandwidth at once. Even without a gpu you can spit out easily over a dozen digitally subtuned channels. The bandwidth for all that raw signal data going out would be the problem. Only one person can control where that 12MHz is centred, but people can pick where in it they want to listen just like they do with websdr now.
Even a $30 RTL-SDR dongle can record 2Mhz of bandwidth reliably. I've recorded hours of signals just in case it sometime later becomes interesting, and it all lives in a little corner of my hard drive.
Damn! Yes, you would need to have one user center the spectrum read and you can mux the output to users wanting specific bands but I had no idea an airspy had such a wide audio capture.
Edit: I looked it up. You are indeed correct. 10MSPS IQ output. 10Mhz panorama spectrum view. That’s ridiculous! I just bought one.
I think the boxy one, the r2 not the mini, had some hacky way to get 80msps but it didn't specify how that made it over usb or why that wasn't the normal operational mode.
> To me it's the same if a driver cuts in front of me and then slams on their brakes, there was nothing I could have done about crashing into them no matter how safely I was driving.
It shouldn't be. The risk to you is much greater if you hit another car, than if you hit a pedestrian.
Addtionally, while you are right that a car can't stop on a dime, speeds have a large influence on the size of coin needed for a car to come to a complete stop. And I think we both know that they are not linear.
Over the decades, posted speed limits in North America have only increased.
> It shouldn't be. The risk to you is much greater if you hit another car, than if you hit a pedestrian.
True but the idea to me is the same for this particular situation, it is something running in front of a moving vehicle with little to no chance to do anything about it as a driver.
You are right for speeds and too many people drive too fast in an urban setting, but even a reasonable driving at 20-30 mph can still cause damage.
All I am trying to say here is everyone take responsibility for their own actions and don't assume that just because you are a pedestrian that cars are going to get out of your way since they may not physically be able too. Same for drivers, don't assume you have the right away because you are in a car.
1) While, I can't personally speak (much) to walking around Dallas, I can speak quite a bit to walking around Austin, Texas. Walking around on a day that is 110º is doable, because the humidity is rarely ever that high, when the temp is.
2) Shade trees lower the temperature for the air under them, by as much as ten degrees.
I'm not arguing there shouldn't be trees,at at least where I'm at in DFW there's tons of them, I'm just arguing that dropping the temp from 110F to 100F still doesn't change the fact walking around in even 100F at decently high humidity will render most people a sweaty mess in a block. We had weeks where the heat index was around 120F this summer.
Even just sitting around outside in a shady backyard with lots of vegetation, a pool, and umbrellas we were still sweating profusely this last summer.
Ok, but you're still going to be a sweaty mess just walking a few blocks when its 110F and 50% humidity, and probably not going to walk even a few blocks in that kind of heat when you can otherwise traverse that with air conditioning.
And maybe elders should be excluded for the same reason!
That is: Why do we exclude people under 18 from voting? Because we think they don't have the mental tools to understand policy well enough to make an informed decision. Well, if seniors don't have the mental tools anymore, should they be allowed to vote?
And this is even stronger with holding office. You can vote at 18, but you can't be a representative until 25, or a senator until 35. Why? Because you need to be old enough to (hopefully) have some judgment. Well, what if you're too old to have judgment?
So, yeah, excluding seniors from office would in fact be reasonable. Or at least requiring an annual mental competency test.
Unfortunately, we'll never get it without a state-driven constitutional convention, because those with the most power in Congress are highly correlated with those with the highest age.
Remember that much of our current system has been a slow increase of the "popular" vote, from landholders to men to adults. At some point it'll go to "everyone above the age of 0" but let's not ignore that kids will at first vote the way their parents do, and then vote the exact opposite for awhile.
I don't think we need to assume that actual children will someday vote. It's not punitive to say that we should have some age threshold into adulthood and its responsibilities. There are so many facets of society that necessitate some degree of protection of young people that it isn't unfair or unrealistic to also create a barrier around their full participation in our Democratic society.
The Church, which is certainly something of a gerontocracy, excludes the elderly Cardinals from Papal elections too. It's not intrinsically unjust anymore than excluding the very young is.
To be fair, that limit is 80 and likely has more to do with not forcing elderly Cardinals to travel (many would and even still do out of a feeling of duty; it's basically literally the only "job" a Cardinal has that's not just him being a bishop).
Currently, bishops are generally expected to submit their resignation to the pope upon turning 75 years old, although the pope may elect to retain the bishop.
Early last month, I found myself turning to Yandex in a search for the out of print manual for a 1980s mobile radio. Google had nothing. Yandex had almost nothing. But it was enough to piece together an answer.
You can frame this as a lack of political willpower, but that won’t get you closer.
China will have spent far less per commuter, in this process. Whether you want to chalk it up to the lack of certain standards in China, or onerous regulations in the US, doesn’t matter. End result will be the same. Just like Europe is not a fair comparison for the US, neither is China, or Siberia, for that matter.
But also, something something lucky ten thousand.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
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