Ack. Ack. Thank you, HN. Nearly 13 years enjoying HN - certainly more times a day than I care to admit. Always nervous to tell people what a great forum it is, for fear of reducing the SNR. Remarkable that, even more than a decade on, it continues to be my homepage. Thank you PG and those that have fostered HN to be the great place that it is.
To be honest, don't. People want to tell others about the great websites and it ALWAYS ends up ruining things. Reddit is going downhill major time and it is simply because it got popular, thus more of the population joined. Which magically lead to lowering of the content and also agendas being pushed (because it is popular, there is more motivation to do that). Even happens to quality subreddits as well.
Prototype uses a 2032 battery (as seen in some photos) and can run the display continuously for several days. If you run it more realistically with the device going to sleep you gain alot more run time.. When taken to production, battery life is very much a consideration. Worth bearing in mind that the version being shown is a prototype, and the partners involved have a lot of experience in low power computing.
I'm a little surprised by the striking similarities between Octocat and the "Octonauts" (www.octonauts.com) - a cartoon in the UK that my two kids are mad about.
I'm trusting that these copyright/design right concerns have been contemplated at least - not least because of the similarity in name as well as in design.
(See the google images link for a collection of octonauts: http://goo.gl/Xek21)
If the Octonauts wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Octonauts) is correct, the show's airing was 2 years after the founding (and copyrighting of the octocat) of GitHub
The Wikipedia page also notes that the Octonauts are based on books published in 2006, 2 years before the founding of Github.
While I am not a lawyer, I do not think there is very much similarity between the two. Github's Octocat is half-octopus, half-cat. The Octonauts are 8 nautical animals (including an octopus and a cat).
Not really that similar, big heads and round ears. The artist who drew the octocat has plenty of other characters in the same style: http://www.idokungfoo.com/
How to shrink a basestation into a Raspberry Pi. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCcKgrzbix4 It's not the handset, but rather the basestation. But the concept is similar. I saw this working. It works. And there are open-source versions of the handset software too, although not as mature as OpenBTS.
Actually what these guys don't mention is that the Raspberry Pi is plugged into a relatively huge USRP, because that kind of blows their whole "Look how tiny it is" PR out of the water.
The host part of OpenBTS is not just call control(Freeswitch or Asterisk provides most of the call control part).
OpenBTS is a software defined radio and really does most of the processing in software. The USRP provides the radio interface, up/down conversion between baseband and carrier frequencies and the analog/digital conversion.
The USRP just sends/receives those samples without caring or knowing about GSM. Samples are processed in software on the host, where the GSM stack is implemented.
No, OpeBTS does the GSM related DSP. You get a stream of I/Q samples from the USRP, which is more or less just the digitalization of the baseband. OpenBTS carves the time slots and "frames" out of this, does the GMSK de-modulation and similar stuff.
Note that the lower layers of GSM is very different from e.g. ethernet. Once you get past all the very gory stuff up to layer 2, the concepts are pretty much the same though.
