Aasemoon'z Cluster

A shielded transformer is a two-winding transformer, usually delta"star connected and serves the following purposes: Voltage transformation from the distribution voltage to the equipment's utilization voltage. Converting a 3-wire input power to a 4-wire output thereby deriving a separate stable neutral for the power supply wiring going to sensitive equipment. Keeping third and its multiple harmonics away from sensitive equipment by allowing their free circulation in the delta winding. Softening of high-frequency noise from the input side by the natural inductance

In addition to voice connectivity, digital cellular wireless networks such as GSM and its enhancement, GSM-EDGE, can now provide increased data speeds up to a (theoretical) limit of 384ﾠKbps. Third generation mobile networks, such as CDMA2000 and WCDMA or UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Standards) and TD-SCDMA (China only) are currently being deployed worldwide. These systems offer services such as video streaming, Internet browsing and, by using a technique called High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), they can in theory deliver downlink speeds up to 14,4 Mbps.

This year's annual New York press briefing by the Edison Electric Institute, the organization representing investor-owned utilities, naturally was devoted to the smart grid, the hot topic of the day. Most notable, actually, was the absence of anything really new to report, which confirmed expectations that the smart grid will begin to prove itself next year at the earliest--or not. This was not the first EEI briefing devoted to smart grid prospects. Last year's briefing was devoted almost entirely to the smart meter avalanche, and a year or two before that much was made of Xcel Energy's SmartGridCity experiment in Boulder, Colorado. I reminded EEI president Thomas Kuhn of the Boulder briefing and pointed out that the experiment appears now to have been a failure. Kuhn did not dispute that and said it appears the problem in Boulder was that the target population was just too affluent: Despite the known green-mindedness of Boulderites, a major factor in Xcel's selecting the small city for its smart grid test run, it seems most of them do not care all that much about the modest monetary savings they stand to make from paying attention to electricity usage signals.

In 1975, future Hall of Famer Roger Staubach had the football but little else in a playoff game against the Minnesota Vikings. Behind by four points at midfield with 24 seconds to go, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback closed his eyes, threw the ball as hard as he could, and said a Hail Mary. (For you soccer fans, this would be like David Beckham taking a shot on goal from midfield late in injury time.)

In 1975, future Hall of Famer Roger Staubach had the football but little else in a playoff game against the Minnesota Vikings. Behind by four points at midfield with 24 seconds to go, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback closed his eyes, threw the ball as hard as he could, and said a Hail Mary. (For you soccer fans, this would be like David Beckham taking a shot on goal from midfield late in injury time.)

A common requirement in digital-dominated mixed-signal verification is the need for purely event-driven models that imitate Spice or AMS blocks at low fidelity but high speed. Resolved record types are commonly used for this modeling style in VHDL-based flows. Unfortunately, SystemVerilog defines only one resolved net type, the logic type. A second, non-standard net type, wreal, has been borrowed from Verilog-AMS and, with proprietary extensions, added to some implementations of SystemVerilog. wreal is a single real value with a small, fixed set of resolution functions. It solves only a subset of the problems commonly encountered in event-driven analog modeling. In contrast, the ADMS_signals approach is completely general and extensible while still conforming strictly to the IEEE SystemVerilog standard. The stored data type can be any type that is legal in SystemVerilog, including arrays and structs (nested to arbitrary depth) and even class instances (objects). The resolution function is a user-supplied SystemVerilog function. Different networks in the same design hierarchy may be given distinct stored type and resolution function.

Microsoft Surface is a prime example of how natural user interfaces can change the way we interact with computers. As designers and developers, one challenge with creating natural user interfaces for multi-touch devices such as Microsoft Surface or Windows 7 is getting around the old ways of thinking and old habits for interface design. Joshua Blake from InfoStrat decided to tackle this problem by creating SurfaceCube. SurfaceCube is a simple 3-D puzzle game for Microsoft Surface which he designed to illustrate as many as the Surface Interaction Guidelines as possible. I had the opportunity to sit down with Joshua and discuss SurfaceCube and the thinking behind some really interesting design decisions that makes it stand out as a natural user interface. We also briefly discuss Joshua’s upcoming book about natural user interfaces and multi-touch development, Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight, due Fall 2010 (since recording this interview, the book titled was updated). As a special offer to Channel 9 readers, you can use the following coupon to order the book through the Manning Early Access Program and read the chapters as Josh writes them. Coupon code channel9y is good for 35% off Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight when ordered through manning.com, and expires on April 24, 2010.

The World Wide Web Consortium has launched a new specification called "XProc," which provides a standard framework for composing XML processes.  It streamlines the automation, sequencing, and management of complex XML processes, the standards body said.  The "XML Pipeline Language" spec was developed to provide a framework for managing enterprise-level business processes.

(Nanowerk News) While the laws of physics weren’t made to be broken, sometimes they need revision. A major current law has been rewritten thanks to the three-port transistor laser, developed by Milton Feng and Nick Holonyak Jr. at the University of Illinois.

In this demo we showcase efforts in MSR to collaborate with external researchers to explore the application of new technologies, specifically Dryad and DryadLINQ, to big data research problems in science. We also highlight our efforts to provide software and services to academics across the world, through the release of Dryad and DryadLINQ free of charge to the research community, along with associated programming guides, user documentation, and code libraries. Dryad is a general-purpose distributed computing engine, more flexible than MapReduce or Hadoop!, that was designed to simplify the task of implementing distributed applications on clusters of Windows computers. DryadLINQ is an abstraction layer which simplifies the process of implementing Dryad-based applications. Microsoft Research is acutely aware of the ubiquity of big data and the challenges this presents. We are offering researchers the tools, resources and collaboration to explore this new area.

This has to have a blog post. =) I've been listening to this album for the past couple of days more or less non-stop... and I love it. Very nice collection of "bass-driven sounds from all over the world". Totally recommended. Check it out! =)

AVATAR is by far the most expensive, technically challenging and visually stunning film to date. AVATAR has raised the bar on what is possible from an effects perspective and of course, most of the work and money was because of the software. Weta Digital is the New Zealand effects company that James Cameron used to bring AVATAR alive. Weta Digital also worked on other visually awesome films such as King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Weta Digital used more than just one software package. They used half a dozen pieces of software to make AVATAR, as well as some custom built software and applications of its own. Much of the work went into building the virtual world of Pandora, and Weta had to create a virtual camera for James Cameron to use to scout locations and film in the virtual world. Here we take a look at the software that was used to make the movie.

Recent advances in the size and performance of FPGAs, coupled with advantages in time-to-market, field-reconfigurability and lower up-front costs, make FPGAs ideally suited to a wide range of commercial and defense applications [6]. In addition, FPGAs generality and reconfigurability provide important protections against the introduction of Trojan horses during semiconductor manufacturing process[8]. As a result, FPGA applications increasingly involve highly-sensitive intellectual property and trade-secrets, as well as cryptographic keys and algorithms [7].

In Stack Machines, Expression Evaluation, and the Magic of Reverse Polish, I showed how expressions can be evaluated by rewriting them in reverse Polish and translating this into machine-code instructions for a stack machine. I demonstrated with a stack-machine interpreter that I'd written as part of a working model of a Pascal compiler. But as well as expressions, the compiler needs to compile assignments and jumps, so — in my progress towards explaining the compiler — I'm going to extend the machine code so it can handle these. I'll demonstrate by interpreting a program that calculates five factorial.

Let’s face it. Most of the gear you use at work or play has multicore processors in it. Your laptop has them (the CPU itself has two cores, and the dedicated graphics processor has many more). That game console in the living room has still more, and even a high-end smartphone typically has a CPU and graphics core on a single chip. Out of sight but definitely not out of mind–particularly if they cease working–are the servers and high-throughput network routers, all which have numerous multicore processors in them. The multiple cores in these devices work in concert to provide quick responses to user queries or to manage the smooth flow of data throughout the office.

Complex computer models can involve thousands of variables. But paradoxically, adding more variables can sometimes make them easier to work with.

Later this month, Carnegie Mellon's CMDragons small-size robotic soccer team will be competing again at RoboCup, to be held in Singapore. CMDragons has tended to find their edge in their software as opposed to their hardware. Their latest software advantage will be their new "physics-based planning", using physics to decide how to move and turn with the ball in order to maintain control. Previous control strategies simply planned where the robot should move to and shoot from, assuming a ball placed at the front center of the dribbler bar would stay there. The goal of Robocup is to create a humanoid robotic soccer team to compete against human players in 2050. Manuela Veloso, the professor who leads the Carnegie Mellon robotic soccer lab, "believe[s] that the physics-based planning algorithm is a particularly noteworthy accomplishment" that will take the effort one step closer to the collective goal.

Starting from Visual Studio 2010 F# is full member of .NET Framework languages family. It is functional language with syntax specific to functional languages but I think it is time for us also notice and study functional languages. In this posting I will show you some examples about cool things other people have done using F#.

"An industrial assembly line includes a factory, workers, and a conveyor system," said NYU Chemistry Professor Nadrian Seeman, the study's senior author. "We have emulated each of those features using DNA components." The assembly line relies on three DNA-based components. The first is DNA origami, a composition that uses a few hundred short DNA strands to direct a very long DNA strand to form structures to any desired shape. These shapes are approximately 100 x 100 nanometers in area, and about 2 nm thick (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter). DNA origami serves as the assembly line's framework and also houses its track. The second are three DNA machines, or cassettes, that serve as programmable cargo-donating devices. The cargo species the researchers used are gold nanoparticles, which measure 5 to 10 nanometers in diameter. Changing the cassette's control sequences allows the researchers to enable or prevent the donation of the cargoes to the growing construct. The third is a DNA "walker," which is analogous to the chassis of a car being assembled. It moves along the assembly line's track, stopping at the DNA machines to collect and carry the DNA "cargo." As the walker moves along the pathway prescribed by the origami tile track, it encounters sequentially the three DNA devices. These devices can be switched between an "on" state, allowing its cargo to be transferred to the walker, and an "off" state, in which no transfer occurs. In this way, the DNA product at the end of the assembly line may include cargo picked up from one, two, or three of the DNA machines. "A key feature of the assembly line is the programmability of the cargo-donating DNA machines, which allows the generation of eight different products," explained Seeman.

Synopsys, Inc., has unveiled the DesignWare Ethernet Quality-of-Service (QoS) Controller IP which implements the new IEEE specifications for audio video bridging (AVB) features. The DesignWare Ethernet IP solution supports the new IEEE 802.1AS and 802.1-Qav version D6.0 specifications. These specifications enable efficient networking of streaming audio video (AV) applications through IEEE 802.1 networks found in consumer electronics, automotive AV and professional sound system products. Synopsys' DesignWare Ethernet QoS Controller, which supports 10/100/1G data transfer speeds, allows designers to develop system-on-chips (SoCs) that deliver time-synchronized, low-latency audio and video over Ethernet networks with exceptional quality-of-service while retaining compatibility with legacy networks.