And guess where IBM got the idea of calling their (then) new machine "The IBM PC"?
There were a number of PC's before IBM got into the fray. The Radio Shack Pocket Computer was often referred to as "The Pocket PC". In this case, PC coulde be said to refer to either Personal Computer or Pocket Computer.
Again: Wintel is it's still the most pervasive example of what is now considered a PC, but it's not the only one.
Try doing a google for "define: PC", then "define: Personal Computer". If you have a Linux/BSD box with kdict, try 'kdict pc'.
Not only does a Corporations act as a psychopath, but the structure of corporations favors borderline psychopaths in upper management as the corporation gets larger.
Similarly, the legal system favors the well heeled psychopath.
In theory, government is responsible for setting the laws of a country such that a corporation's hunger for more and more money and power directs it towards activities which favour the good of society.
Unfortunately, the corporations have now gotten their fingers into the decision making process of the governments. This means that the feedback mechanism meant to limit the damage that corporations can do is now quickly moving into a negative-feedback mode. We're now getting to the point where some of the worst aspects of corporations are now being rewarded rather than discouraged.
Our congress critters don't know the first thing about how this cyberweb thing works and I have zero confidence that whatever bill they settle on won't do more harm than good.
The alternative of allowing ISPs to "double-dip" and charge content providers for transmitting the data that we're paying them to deliver is even worse. Can you imagine what would happen if every web site owner had to pay each of the thousands of ISPs that deliver data to the 'last mile'? It'd be a nightmare.... and then I'd get seriously deteriorated access to the smaller sites that provide the most innovative and interesting content.
In this case, I think I'd rather take my chances with the dogs in congress than the ones on wall street.
DC requires thicker gaugue cable to push the same wattage.
Only because you're generally running at lower voltages... The controlling factor is amperage and watage is v*I, so-- as V gets smaller I must go up. at 48V you're just under 1/2 of US current so you'll only need cable about 40% thicker (r^2 rule).
Thing is that the required guage of wire is also modified by distance, so if you have short distances (like in your average data centre), you don't have to get that thick -- but the advantage of not having to do a an extra 60Hz DC->AC conversion at the UPS followed by the AC->DC conversion at the computer is really nice. That's where the efficiency kicks in.
The high frequency DC/DC converters (to take you from 48V to +5, +12, -12 and whatetever voltage your CPU wants to run at) are far more effecient (and tiny) than their 60Hz cousins.
One thing about running DC thru your house is that DC is far more dangerous.. It's far easier to get a fatal fibrillation (heart stoppage) with DC than with AC. This can be especially worrisome if you have curious kids in the house.
I'm guessing that they got into an argument about DC vs AC, and Tesla called Edison 'A Stupid colonial' or something equally insulting. Calling someone like Edision 'stupid' is likely to be the worst thing you can do. Unforgivable.
If the two of them had settled, there wouldn't be an electric chair at all. Edison 'invented' the electric chair to 'prove' that AC was more dangerous (kinda like the way that Microsoft is trying to 'prove' that Windows is more secure than Linux).
Turns out that it's really difficult to reliably kill someone with AC electricity.... The power cycle acts like a low-tech defibrilator -- so, unless you essentially cook the victim, you run the risk of accidently rescussitating him(her).
Like when they put their DNS servers back online.... I guess that, even with 4K programs, they have some bandwith limitations that a good slashdotting can still exceed.
The first game that I wrote was on a Radioo Shack model I Level I with 4K of memory.
It was a real-time moon lander program with simple graphics, and it's own input-editing code (since it had to read the keyboard 'the hard way' to avoid blocking input).
Given how much can now be done with a single call in Java these days, I'm not going to bet against much of anything.
I'll try running some of the programs later.
Doctors have almost forgotten about some of these because they should only be used as a very last resort.
That, and the fact that they're out of Patent, so they're not as big a profit for the drug companies --- and the flyers about the new drugs are going to tell you all about the problems of the unpatented versions and... unh, de-emphasize the problems with the newer, higher priced, drugs.
oh yeah because mining oil doesnt require any energy o_0
That would also have to be taken into account in the oil used to create the soybeans.
Now some equivalence can be taken from solar energy equivalents... but then that same solar energy could have been directed towards displacing direct use of oil for energy.
In summary, the best place to stop following the chain is where you have generic 'energy' -- whether it's solar, oil, whatever.
You see, soybeans get most of their energy from the sun.
Comercial soybean production also uses oil (or other energy) in the maunufacture of the fertilizer, and running the machinery that does the planting, harvesting and (if necessary) irrigation. You also spend energy shipping it to market. Oh yeah.. insecticides and herbicides should also be included in the energy costs.
After all of that, you might have an energy surplus, but it's not going to be quite as big as it first looks.
Viruses are much simpler than bacteria. Unless you go with intelligent design, I find it hard to see how you could get bacteria without the 'bare' DNA coming into existence first -- and then ultimately mutating into the more complex bacterium.
I agree with the scientist who noted that bare viri would be rather unstable compared to bacterium -- but that would explain why self-replicating viri are essentially extinct today -- they've been beaten out by bacterium, and forced into a parasitic niche.
The really novel thought for me is that cell nuclei may have evolved from a large virus 'melding' with a bacterium.
This would mean that we, like lichen, are a hybred creature -- half bacterium colony, half virus.
And the "intelligent design' people complain about being descendents of the apes.... bwahahaha! we're a walking, talking viral colonoy!
On the University of Alberta MTS system (back in the early '80s), all userids were 4 letters long. I got the userid 'None'. This wasn't a big deal until the Plato system started using the MTS system for printing..... so a couple of things started happening.
The heart of the problem is that when you signed up for plato, the application asked for your MTS id (always 4 letters). Many people who didn't have an account
filled in "none". When Plato saw that a print job was finished, it would send an email to the MTS user associated with the print job. I started getting dozens of emails a day telling me that my print jobs were done.
I complained to the plato consultant.
He fixed the problem by setting the account name for all users with no account and then not sending any emails to the user 'none'. Unfortunately, he didn't quite get the second part right. Now I was getting hundreds of unwanted emails (kinda like today, but filtering software didn't exist way back then).
This time I teased the plato consultant
As a quick fix, he just turned off all emails for the plato system... Unfortunately, this was a new hook that he'd just put in, that consisted of setting the notification ID of all users to 'none' just before it went thru the (non-working) filtering code.
Now I was getting about 100 emails an hour (or, at least, it felt like it).
All I had to say to him by this point was "it's getting worse".
He did, finally get it fixed, but there was one last hitch...
All of the unassigned emails had a destination mailbox name of 'none', so we had to train the operators to deliver all plato emails with a destination of 'none' into a designated 'plato' box. Unfortunately, they didn't just put the plato print jobs there. They also put print jobs that were legitimately mine there as well.
It probably took about 2 months to get everything working properly, but it did ultimately settle down.
However, "evolution" with respect to the origin of life is a theory. It makes sense and there's evidence to support it, but it's yet to actually be proven.
The level of proof required to be accepted as a confirmed theory is far stronger than the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' that is needed in a court of lot but it's not 'absolute certainty'. Absolute certainty would essentially require a first-hand witness. The only first-hand witness to creation is God, and he's not talking.
Back when he was talking, people were too simple to understand (or even have the words for) things like Mitochondrial DNA and stochastic systems and he didn't seem seem interested in teaching it at the time.
The silly thing is I'd bet you that half of the people who voted "yes" on this bill would sign a death warrent that had way less evidence behind it -- and 90% of them probably accepted Bush's "proof" that Iraq had WMDs.
The kids aren't in school to learn Windows. They're ther to learn. Period.
There is a good stack of good educational software available on Linux. If the appas that they need to do their learning are available on Linux, then why use Windows.
One of the things that I see with Windows is that people are afraid of their machine (do one thing wrong and the machine is toast). Things like Linux (or OSX) seem to allow people to play around more with little fear of breaking the system.
Unless you have a really important application with no equivalent on Linux, you shouldn't be afraid to at least look at using Linux. You can test applications like LTSP without having to uninstall the software currently on the boxes, so you're not committing yourself irreversably like you probably would be with a Windows upgrade.
They already have machines running XP, so they should be reasonably high end... Just punch up the ram and add a second hard drive. Way less than $700 to do that. No need to buy a new box.
he doesn't need office, open office runs on windows.
Yeah, but the point of running Windows is to run the MS apps. Once you move from all of the M$ products, then the OS is irrelevant.
Moving away from Windows also means that you get away from many of the MS headaches, like viruses, that require a lot of admin work. One way or another these boxes are going to need admin. If Linux has the (replacement) apps that you need to teach these kids the long-term admin is probably going to be less with Linux.
Caveat: The first month is likely to need a good bit of hand-holding (it would with any change). Make sure that you have the time to help them. If you're running Linux, then set things up so that you can SSH into the site (there are all sorts of ways to do that).
One thing that I like to do is firewall off the system and then set up a box to ssh OUT to my box (with an RSA key) and set up the back tunnel so that I can ssh back in. ('ssh -R12345:localhost:22 -i private_key mybox.mydomain' I can then 'ssh -p 12345 localhost' to get back) The other solution is to only allow SSH in from specific static IPs that I have access to. This cuts down on remote hacks incomming but allows me to do remote admin. (with Linux, you easily do almost anything remotely that you can do on the console).
Which means that we have no idea as to what OS they'll be facing by the time they get out into the 'real world'. In 6-14 years Microsoft won't be providing support for XP, and even Vista is likely to be EOL. In other words, exposing kids to something new in a school (oh my god!) isn't gonna hurt them.
Besides... I could probably use your argument against teaching kids a second language... or even music.
Youth is a good time to teach kids new stuff.. They'll sop it up like sponges and they'll have more tools available to them when they finally get out in the real world.
You did mention $10K in the last line of your post. That might be a bit high ($700/box), but -- then again -- once you include the cost of applications, etc. it Just might not be that far off. I wouldn't be that surprised to see you get up into the $5K range, though. That's a fair chunk of change for a school that probably can't afford to buy new books for it's library.
There's probably way more difference between Windows 95 and XP than between Ubuntu and XP. You're better off getting kids working with a 'modern' system, than leaving them on a system that only gets emergency support from it's manufacturer.
Besides -- If these kids can use both Windows and Linux (it's almost impossible to avoid exposure to MS these days), then they will be more capable when they get out to the real world than kids who only know Windows.
Having had access to Linux could get some of these kids jobs straight out of school that they wouldn't otherwise have access to.
part of the point is that upgrading to XP might include trashing half the machines -- that's gonna get over $1K pretty quick.
Does that "one grand" include the cost of upgrading all of the applications too?
Moving to Linux would mean free (and easy) access to loads of applications.
edubuntu is probably a good place to start.
The students really don't care that much about what OS they're running as long as they have applications that let them do the classwork.
If you're running Linux, then you immediately have access to development suites that would cost thousands more for an equivalent under Windows.
It's a good bit easier to armour a pack of Linux boxes against kids -- For example, you could set up a net boot which doesn't allow root logins. This is also a good solution for older systems with small hard drives. The money saved on software upgrade costs could be put into adding memory to the older boxes. (128M is a good minimum for reasonable performance)
Hey! Look ma, no viruses!
you could still allow dual-boot for teachers who wanted specific Windows programs.
remote admin for Linux boxes is pretty easy. It means that I don't have to be physically there to support the system.
I usually only allow remote login from a couple of machines with static addresses that I have access to. It means that I don't have to worry about attacks from random addresses.
It's not like they'd have a full-time admin for Windows either -- and Windows tends to require more babying to stay stable.
In my experience, once people get over the initial hump of learning what apps do the things that they like to do, Linux is almost zero support. It just... works!
You could give kids (and staff) a login-anywhere capability... The Windows solutions for this seem somewhat broken.
Slashdot Mirror
There were a number of PC's before IBM got into the fray. The Radio Shack Pocket Computer was often referred to as "The Pocket PC". In this case, PC coulde be said to refer to either Personal Computer or Pocket Computer.
Again: Wintel is it's still the most pervasive example of what is now considered a PC, but it's not the only one.
Try doing a google for "define: PC", then "define: Personal Computer". If you have a Linux/BSD box with kdict, try 'kdict pc'.
PC stands for Personal computer. Althought the vast majority of PCs are Wintel, not all are.
Similarly, the legal system favors the well heeled psychopath.
In theory, government is responsible for setting the laws of a country such that a corporation's hunger for more and more money and power directs it towards activities which favour the good of society.
Unfortunately, the corporations have now gotten their fingers into the decision making process of the governments. This means that the feedback mechanism meant to limit the damage that corporations can do is now quickly moving into a negative-feedback mode. We're now getting to the point where some of the worst aspects of corporations are now being rewarded rather than discouraged.
In this case, I think I'd rather take my chances with the dogs in congress than the ones on wall street.
Only because you're generally running at lower voltages... The controlling factor is amperage and watage is v*I, so-- as V gets smaller I must go up. at 48V you're just under 1/2 of US current so you'll only need cable about 40% thicker (r^2 rule).
Thing is that the required guage of wire is also modified by distance, so if you have short distances (like in your average data centre), you don't have to get that thick -- but the advantage of not having to do a an extra 60Hz DC->AC conversion at the UPS followed by the AC->DC conversion at the computer is really nice. That's where the efficiency kicks in.
The high frequency DC/DC converters (to take you from 48V to +5, +12, -12 and whatetever voltage your CPU wants to run at) are far more effecient (and tiny) than their 60Hz cousins.
One thing about running DC thru your house is that DC is far more dangerous.. It's far easier to get a fatal fibrillation (heart stoppage) with DC than with AC. This can be especially worrisome if you have curious kids in the house.
I'm guessing that they got into an argument about DC vs AC, and Tesla called Edison 'A Stupid colonial' or something equally insulting. Calling someone like Edision 'stupid' is likely to be the worst thing you can do. Unforgivable.
If the two of them had settled, there wouldn't be an electric chair at all. Edison 'invented' the electric chair to 'prove' that AC was more dangerous (kinda like the way that Microsoft is trying to 'prove' that Windows is more secure than Linux).
Turns out that it's really difficult to reliably kill someone with AC electricity.... The power cycle acts like a low-tech defibrilator -- so, unless you essentially cook the victim, you run the risk of accidently rescussitating him(her).
Like when they put their DNS servers back online.... I guess that, even with 4K programs, they have some bandwith limitations that a good slashdotting can still exceed.
It was a real-time moon lander program with simple graphics, and it's own input-editing code (since it had to read the keyboard 'the hard way' to avoid blocking input).
Given how much can now be done with a single call in Java these days, I'm not going to bet against much of anything.
I'll try running some of the programs later.
That, and the fact that they're out of Patent, so they're not as big a profit for the drug companies --- and the flyers about the new drugs are going to tell you all about the problems of the unpatented versions and ... unh, de-emphasize the problems with the newer, higher priced, drugs.
You broke something badly in that last sentence.
That would also have to be taken into account in the oil used to create the soybeans.
Now some equivalence can be taken from solar energy equivalents... but then that same solar energy could have been directed towards displacing direct use of oil for energy.
In summary, the best place to stop following the chain is where you have generic 'energy' -- whether it's solar, oil, whatever.
Comercial soybean production also uses oil (or other energy) in the maunufacture of the fertilizer, and running the machinery that does the planting, harvesting and (if necessary) irrigation. You also spend energy shipping it to market. Oh yeah.. insecticides and herbicides should also be included in the energy costs.
After all of that, you might have an energy surplus, but it's not going to be quite as big as it first looks.
I agree with the scientist who noted that bare viri would be rather unstable compared to bacterium -- but that would explain why self-replicating viri are essentially extinct today -- they've been beaten out by bacterium, and forced into a parasitic niche.
The really novel thought for me is that cell nuclei may have evolved from a large virus 'melding' with a bacterium.
This would mean that we, like lichen, are a hybred creature -- half bacterium colony, half virus.
And the "intelligent design' people complain about being descendents of the apes .... bwahahaha! we're a walking, talking viral colonoy!
Deep Throat didn't become publicly known until last year. He retired about a year before Nixon resigned.
The heart of the problem is that when you signed up for plato, the application asked for your MTS id (always 4 letters). Many people who didn't have an account filled in "none". When Plato saw that a print job was finished, it would send an email to the MTS user associated with the print job. I started getting dozens of emails a day telling me that my print jobs were done.
I complained to the plato consultant.
He fixed the problem by setting the account name for all users with no account and then not sending any emails to the user 'none'. Unfortunately, he didn't quite get the second part right. Now I was getting hundreds of unwanted emails (kinda like today, but filtering software didn't exist way back then).
This time I teased the plato consultant
As a quick fix, he just turned off all emails for the plato system... Unfortunately, this was a new hook that he'd just put in, that consisted of setting the notification ID of all users to 'none' just before it went thru the (non-working) filtering code.
Now I was getting about 100 emails an hour (or, at least, it felt like it).
All I had to say to him by this point was "it's getting worse".
He did, finally get it fixed, but there was one last hitch...
All of the unassigned emails had a destination mailbox name of 'none', so we had to train the operators to deliver all plato emails with a destination of 'none' into a designated 'plato' box. Unfortunately, they didn't just put the plato print jobs there. They also put print jobs that were legitimately mine there as well.
It probably took about 2 months to get everything working properly, but it did ultimately settle down.
No thanks. I like to be able to find my email.
I just wish I had some mod points to give you for that one, thougn.
The level of proof required to be accepted as a confirmed theory is far stronger than the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' that is needed in a court of lot but it's not 'absolute certainty'. Absolute certainty would essentially require a first-hand witness. The only first-hand witness to creation is God, and he's not talking.
Back when he was talking, people were too simple to understand (or even have the words for) things like Mitochondrial DNA and stochastic systems and he didn't seem seem interested in teaching it at the time.
The silly thing is I'd bet you that half of the people who voted "yes" on this bill would sign a death warrent that had way less evidence behind it -- and 90% of them probably accepted Bush's "proof" that Iraq had WMDs.
There are a good number of Windows fans here (and a decent number of Windows shills too). (s)He won't get a one-sided answer.
The kids aren't in school to learn Windows. They're ther to learn. Period.
There is a good stack of good educational software available on Linux. If the appas that they need to do their learning are available on Linux, then why use Windows.
One of the things that I see with Windows is that people are afraid of their machine (do one thing wrong and the machine is toast). Things like Linux (or OSX) seem to allow people to play around more with little fear of breaking the system.
Unless you have a really important application with no equivalent on Linux, you shouldn't be afraid to at least look at using Linux. You can test applications like LTSP without having to uninstall the software currently on the boxes, so you're not committing yourself irreversably like you probably would be with a Windows upgrade.
They already have machines running XP, so they should be reasonably high end... Just punch up the ram and add a second hard drive. Way less than $700 to do that. No need to buy a new box.
Yeah, but the point of running Windows is to run the MS apps. Once you move from all of the M$ products, then the OS is irrelevant.
Moving away from Windows also means that you get away from many of the MS headaches, like viruses, that require a lot of admin work. One way or another these boxes are going to need admin. If Linux has the (replacement) apps that you need to teach these kids the long-term admin is probably going to be less with Linux.
Caveat: The first month is likely to need a good bit of hand-holding (it would with any change). Make sure that you have the time to help them. If you're running Linux, then set things up so that you can SSH into the site (there are all sorts of ways to do that).
One thing that I like to do is firewall off the system and then set up a box to ssh OUT to my box (with an RSA key) and set up the back tunnel so that I can ssh back in.
('ssh -R12345:localhost:22 -i private_key mybox.mydomain' I can then 'ssh -p 12345 localhost' to get back) The other solution is to only allow SSH in from specific static IPs that I have access to. This cuts down on remote hacks incomming but allows me to do remote admin. (with Linux, you easily do almost anything remotely that you can do on the console).
Which means that we have no idea as to what OS they'll be facing by the time they get out into the 'real world'. In 6-14 years Microsoft won't be providing support for XP, and even Vista is likely to be EOL. In other words, exposing kids to something new in a school (oh my god!) isn't gonna hurt them.
Besides... I could probably use your argument against teaching kids a second language... or even music.
Youth is a good time to teach kids new stuff.. They'll sop it up like sponges and they'll have more tools available to them when they finally get out in the real world.
You did mention $10K in the last line of your post. That might be a bit high ($700/box), but -- then again -- once you include the cost of applications, etc. it Just might not be that far off. I wouldn't be that surprised to see you get up into the $5K range, though. That's a fair chunk of change for a school that probably can't afford to buy new books for it's library.
Besides -- If these kids can use both Windows and Linux (it's almost impossible to avoid exposure to MS these days), then they will be more capable when they get out to the real world than kids who only know Windows.
Having had access to Linux could get some of these kids jobs straight out of school that they wouldn't otherwise have access to.