Some of the early ATMs used synchronous modems on leased lines. They also used IBM communications protocols (SNA, SDLC, EBCDIC) to talk to the bank's mainframe. This was all standard stuff if you owned an IBM mainframe. It was completely incompatible with consumer-grade hardware/software. I believe DES was used in many ATMs.
It wouldn't surprise me. I watched a documentary on the many sinkings of VLBCs (very large bulk carriers). For reasons that puzzle me, the news rarely covers the sinking of cargo ships. Airplane crashes get much more coverage.
Local residential service is subsidized by local business service and long distance access charges. That hasn't been AT&T's business since the breakup. They are selling long distance services to residences and businesses. The RBOCs are the ones who kept the local loops.
Volume and cheap labor. There is a huge difference in unit cost between shipping hundreds of CD-Rs a day and one or two CD-Rs a week. You also need an ordering and fulfillment process designed for low overhead. It costs many corporations more than $50 to process a single order. That isn't a problem if you are selling $100,000 of merchandise per order and have reasonable margins. It's also why some sales people will not return your phone calls if they know that you just want to buy a single low-end computer.
It's the IT group's job to support the users, not to dictate what hardware and software they will use, because it might save a few bucks or make their life simpler. If I'm more productive with a Mac, deal with it. Don't tell me that I have to use the officially blessed Dell/Microsoft piece-of-shit because it's "policy".
The price ($50) seems reasonable to me. AOL is sending out millions of CDs as advertisements. They aren't even trying to recover their costs, which are low on a per CD basis.
If I charged you my costs for burning a CD and mailing it to you, the materials cost would be low, probably less than $5 for a CD, mailer, label and postage. The labor costs would be considerably higher than the materials cost. I have to record the order, burn a CD, package it, address it, deliver it to a shipping agent, and record/process the payment. $50 an hour isn't an unreasonable labor charge for a full-time professional employee. Consultant rates would be even higher.
If you look at government programs that distribute documents and software to the public, many are required by law to cover their operating costs by adding a distribution charge. These charges can be surprisingly high, even though they are just recovering the government's costs in distributing the material. Processing orders can also be expensive for a corporation. Those costs are usually recovered in higher prices for the merchandise.
Another proof of the superiority of CDMA over GSM for cheating:-). GSM uses a modulation scheme that is easy to detect with relatively simple electronics. CDMA phones output a signal that looks like wideband white noise at a very low power level. It's difficult to detect or jam.
Artech House, a publisher of books on subjects like radar systems design, has done this for a while. Their older and more obscure titles are printed on demand. They call it "In Print Forever".
I wish more publishers did this. I'm always running across references to classic texts that have been out of print for decades. Usually I can find a used copy on the Internet, but some are difficult to find and/or very expensive.
The maximum bit rate for a single ATSC HDTV stream is about 19 Mbps. If you want to support more than one TV/STB, you need enough bandwidth for multiple streams. You could use up 100 Mbps with three TVs and a fast Internet connection (40 Mbps).
Re:Not that FUD-dy.
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It should cost $100 to call 911, billed directly on the phone bill. If your call turns out to be an emergency your fee is refunded. If not, then you just paid for your stupidity.
In many communities, there is no non-emergency number for police/fire dispatch. If you call the local station, they will tell you to call 911, because they have centralized all of their assets in the 911 operations center.
Some communities have added a three digit number (311) for non-emergencies. See here for more information.
One of the recent episodes of the TV show x-play showed some ridiculous examples of physical modeling and costuming in video games. Many characters had huge breasts that must have contained helium bladders to keep them upright, plus a titanium support structure built into their costume. They reminded me of Frank Frazetta's cover illustrations for Conan the Barbarian.
EMI could also get off their collectives asses and invest money in new artists and recordings, instead of relying on their aging back catalog.
I have many classical/opera recordings from the 1950s and 1960s that were reissued on CD. It's nice to have access to those old performances, but where are the new performances and recordings? Most labels seem to be unwilling to spend money on anything that doesn't offer a good possibility of an immediate profit.
I would pay money for NBC to stay at home and let some other network, like the BBC, cover the games. They have completely screwed up the coverage of the games for decades. The worst part is that they have bought the exclusive broadcast rights, so it's watch their drek or watch nothing.
Failure to report a loss is a very bad idea. I worked at an installation where the security officer routinely removed pages from classified documents, just to keep us on our toes. If you didn't detect and report the missing pages, you were in big trouble.
You've never worked for the government have you?:-)
I've seen many cases where computers were used for 20+ years. Why replace something that works? In many cases, an old computer that was designed to do a specific job still works better than a modern replacement built from standardized components.
There are standards that have been around for decades and have preserved upward compatibility. Well-written FORTRAN programs (no jokes from the peanut gallery) from the 1960s can be compiled and run on modern machines. At one time, there was a strong movement to standardize high-level languages so that an application could be compiled and run on any computer. The idea was that an applications programmer should be able to write usable programs without knowing or caring about the operating system and other machine dependent trivia. That idea seems to have been lost with the advent of microcomputers and the rise of operating system monocultures such as MS Windows and UNIX.
Another problem is the advent of the GUI. Give a user, or even a programmer, a text-oriented application today and be prepared for much wailing and gnashing of teeth. As someone who started writing programs on mainframes, it doesn't bother me, but I've seen users look at me like I'm some kind of Martian when I give them a command-line program to solve a problem, even though it is supplied with step-by-step documentation on how to use it.
Where are we today? I don't believe that there has been much progress made in recent years. You can write portable programs in COBOL, FORTRAN and Ada. ISO Pascal and ANSI BASIC seem to be near extinction. Portable programs are theoretically possible in C, but the pitfalls and temptations are many. I'm not a database programmer, but I would hope that there is a portable subset of SQL that would support the portable use of RDBMS. Why should I know or care that the system is using Oracle or SQL Server?
The RBOCs were given half of the available cellular frequencies, just for being the existing wireline monopoly. Not only that, the cellular frequencies, just like all other radio frequencies, are licensed on the condition that the license holder will comply with FCC regulations and operate in the public interest. Licenses are not property. The FCC has the power to revoke licenses and reallocate frequencies.
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Some of the early ATMs used synchronous modems on leased lines. They also used IBM communications protocols (SNA, SDLC, EBCDIC) to talk to the bank's mainframe. This was all standard stuff if you owned an IBM mainframe. It was completely incompatible with consumer-grade hardware/software. I believe DES was used in many ATMs.
See this list of marine casualties for 2003.
Local residential service is subsidized by local business service and long distance access charges. That hasn't been AT&T's business since the breakup. They are selling long distance services to residences and businesses. The RBOCs are the ones who kept the local loops.
It didn't crash, it generated alarms. An alarm is like an error message.
You completely ignored payment processing and record keeping.
Volume and cheap labor. There is a huge difference in unit cost between shipping hundreds of CD-Rs a day and one or two CD-Rs a week. You also need an ordering and fulfillment process designed for low overhead. It costs many corporations more than $50 to process a single order. That isn't a problem if you are selling $100,000 of merchandise per order and have reasonable margins. It's also why some sales people will not return your phone calls if they know that you just want to buy a single low-end computer.
It's the IT group's job to support the users, not to dictate what hardware and software they will use, because it might save a few bucks or make their life simpler. If I'm more productive with a Mac, deal with it. Don't tell me that I have to use the officially blessed Dell/Microsoft piece-of-shit because it's "policy".
If I charged you my costs for burning a CD and mailing it to you, the materials cost would be low, probably less than $5 for a CD, mailer, label and postage. The labor costs would be considerably higher than the materials cost. I have to record the order, burn a CD, package it, address it, deliver it to a shipping agent, and record/process the payment. $50 an hour isn't an unreasonable labor charge for a full-time professional employee. Consultant rates would be even higher.
If you look at government programs that distribute documents and software to the public, many are required by law to cover their operating costs by adding a distribution charge. These charges can be surprisingly high, even though they are just recovering the government's costs in distributing the material. Processing orders can also be expensive for a corporation. Those costs are usually recovered in higher prices for the merchandise.
This sort of thing is a common problem in small businesses.
Another proof of the superiority of CDMA over GSM for cheating :-). GSM uses a modulation scheme that is easy to detect with relatively simple electronics. CDMA phones output a signal that looks like wideband white noise at a very low power level. It's difficult to detect or jam.
It might improve society if a few CEOs and accountants were executed.
I wish more publishers did this. I'm always running across references to classic texts that have been out of print for decades. Usually I can find a used copy on the Internet, but some are difficult to find and/or very expensive.
The maximum bit rate for a single ATSC HDTV stream is about 19 Mbps. If you want to support more than one TV/STB, you need enough bandwidth for multiple streams. You could use up 100 Mbps with three TVs and a fast Internet connection (40 Mbps).
In many communities, there is no non-emergency number for police/fire dispatch. If you call the local station, they will tell you to call 911, because they have centralized all of their assets in the 911 operations center.
Some communities have added a three digit number (311) for non-emergencies. See here for more information.
Why not, there have been several major central office fires that were not detected until they had destroyed most of the equipment and building.
One of the recent episodes of the TV show x-play showed some ridiculous examples of physical modeling and costuming in video games. Many characters had huge breasts that must have contained helium bladders to keep them upright, plus a titanium support structure built into their costume. They reminded me of Frank Frazetta's cover illustrations for Conan the Barbarian.
FLOPS are easy, low latency, high bandwidth communications paths are hard.
I have many classical/opera recordings from the 1950s and 1960s that were reissued on CD. It's nice to have access to those old performances, but where are the new performances and recordings? Most labels seem to be unwilling to spend money on anything that doesn't offer a good possibility of an immediate profit.
I would pay money for NBC to stay at home and let some other network, like the BBC, cover the games. They have completely screwed up the coverage of the games for decades. The worst part is that they have bought the exclusive broadcast rights, so it's watch their drek or watch nothing.
Failure to report a loss is a very bad idea. I worked at an installation where the security officer routinely removed pages from classified documents, just to keep us on our toes. If you didn't detect and report the missing pages, you were in big trouble.
World chess champions have not been noted for their mental stability.
It may not be slower, and may well be faster, if you have a multi-channel memory controller. YMMV. BMSMA.
I've seen many cases where computers were used for 20+ years. Why replace something that works? In many cases, an old computer that was designed to do a specific job still works better than a modern replacement built from standardized components.
Another problem is the advent of the GUI. Give a user, or even a programmer, a text-oriented application today and be prepared for much wailing and gnashing of teeth. As someone who started writing programs on mainframes, it doesn't bother me, but I've seen users look at me like I'm some kind of Martian when I give them a command-line program to solve a problem, even though it is supplied with step-by-step documentation on how to use it.
Where are we today? I don't believe that there has been much progress made in recent years. You can write portable programs in COBOL, FORTRAN and Ada. ISO Pascal and ANSI BASIC seem to be near extinction. Portable programs are theoretically possible in C, but the pitfalls and temptations are many. I'm not a database programmer, but I would hope that there is a portable subset of SQL that would support the portable use of RDBMS. Why should I know or care that the system is using Oracle or SQL Server?
The RBOCs were given half of the available cellular frequencies, just for being the existing wireline monopoly. Not only that, the cellular frequencies, just like all other radio frequencies, are licensed on the condition that the license holder will comply with FCC regulations and operate in the public interest. Licenses are not property. The FCC has the power to revoke licenses and reallocate frequencies.