Assuming that you cover the walls with this stuff, you still have to worry about the floor, ceiling, windows, doors, ventilation ducts, plumbing and electrical wiring, plus any holes or gaps in the shielding. Then there is telephone, LAN and video wiring to worry about.
A large number of operating systems do not support POSIX, support an incomplete subset, or have a broken implementation.
If it isn't in ISO/ANSI C, it isn't standard or portable.
It's still true when you are dealing with new/custom hardware or complex systems. How many systems get built or procured? Each customer site gets one. Hardware engineering needs one. Software engineering needs one. Managers who are trying to save money will often try to reduce the number of systems. Hardware and software engineering can share the same system. Maybe, but you can't test software when the hardware engineers are installing, testing and debugging their engineering changes. Even worse is shipping the one and only engineering machine to a customer site. How do we test software changes? Buy a bunch of plane tickets and send a team to the unlucky customer site?
The switching power supply in the Apple II was a sealed metal box about the size of a brick. It had no moving parts or air vents.
You wouldn't want to disperse the power supply components. There are electrical safety concerns. A switching power supply does not have a mains transformer to isolate the circuits from the AC mains and to limit current. That's why they are usually packaged in a grounded metal enclosure without any holes large enough for fingers. Another reason is that it is generally good engineering practice to keep wires as short as possible. This helps prevent RFI, spurious oscillations and noise pickup.
I believe the EU has introduced regulations that set minimum standards for the power factor of switching power supplies sold in the EU. Maybe the US should follow suit. I've read that some older buildings have had power distribution problems that are aggravated by the use of a large number of PCs with poor power factor correction in their power supplies.
The problem is, at those low voltages, that you would have to install copper bus bars to distribute the power. It can be done in an industrial setting, but it isn't practical for homes or offices.
Even in their current state, they are a huge improvement, both in size and efficiency, over the linear power supplies that they replaced.
The power supply in my S-100 bus Z-80 computer weighed about 20 kg. Apple was one of the first microcomputer companies to use switching power supplies.
The C implementation of Hello World calls fputs instead of write().
write(2) is a system call on UNIX systems, not a part of the C language or the C standard library. It has no place in a portable C program. You might as well argue that the program should have use DosWrite() (OS/2 system call) or $QIO (VMS system call).
One of Microsoft's bad habits is the way they develop a product in response to a perceived threat, market the product until the threat is neutralized, and then discontinue the product. The result is a gaping hole in the marketplace where Microsoft nuked a competitor.
I've seen other companies buy a competing product just so they can kill it.
Should copyright law be used as a tool to suppress information? What if I am a rich, but terrible, writer of fantasy epics. Should I be able to buy the copyrights to the Lord of the Rings, and then prohibit anyone from printing the books?
Depends. More platters means the disk can dispatch more reads and write in parallel. (Each platter has it's own head.)
Only one head is active at a time, and they are all attached to a single positioning mechanism. That eliminates any parallelism.
It also takes a measurable amount of time to switch heads. Every time the drive switches heads, it must tweak the head positioner to move the head over the currently selected cylinder. Track densities are so high that each surface must have embedded servo data for head positioning. You can't assume that all heads are simultaneously positioned on the same cylinder.
Any Macintosh owner who uses Apple's.Mac services for email needs outgoing port 25 unblocked. That's a large number of people, most of whom are not geeks.
There are also plenty of people who need to use their employer's mail servers for work-related email.
The incompatibility was IBM's fault. Whoever wrote the original BIOS for the IBM PC, used a bunch of Intel reserved interrupt vectors for various BIOS functions. The reserved vectors were not used by the 8086/8, they were used in later Intel processors. If you can find an original Intel 8086/8 data book, the reserved vectors are clearly listed.
CD quality? I'd be happy if my radio produced FM quality. The typical American broadcaster takes a nice, clean audio signal and then proceeds to mutilate it beyond recognition with a "modulation optimizer" before feeding it to the transmitter. These devices ensure that the transmitter is run at 100% modulation, or greater, all the time, in every audio band. The result is badly distorted audio without the slightest trace of dynamic range. If they will not broadcast a clean FM signal, why should we expect them to broadcast a clean digital signal?
The 486 was a huge advancement over the 386. Take a look at the instruction cycle counts of the two chips, plus it had the first integrated FPU in the x86 series. Unfortunately, because of the 486SX (SX = sucks), programmers were unable to rely on the presence of hardware floating-point.
I just happened to be looking at a tree when it was struck by lightning. I saw a side of the tree trunk glow red for a fraction of a second when the lightning hit the top of the tree. That sort of energy can cause the water/sap to flash to steam, blowing off the outside of the tree.
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Assuming that you cover the walls with this stuff, you still have to worry about the floor, ceiling, windows, doors, ventilation ducts, plumbing and electrical wiring, plus any holes or gaps in the shielding. Then there is telephone, LAN and video wiring to worry about.
A large number of operating systems do not support POSIX, support an incomplete subset, or have a broken implementation. If it isn't in ISO/ANSI C, it isn't standard or portable.
The ECC logic is broken on the current stepping of the Alderwood chipset.
It's still true when you are dealing with new/custom hardware or complex systems. How many systems get built or procured? Each customer site gets one. Hardware engineering needs one. Software engineering needs one. Managers who are trying to save money will often try to reduce the number of systems. Hardware and software engineering can share the same system. Maybe, but you can't test software when the hardware engineers are installing, testing and debugging their engineering changes. Even worse is shipping the one and only engineering machine to a customer site. How do we test software changes? Buy a bunch of plane tickets and send a team to the unlucky customer site?
It's called the "second-system effect".
Try Kermit 95 from Columbia University. It has the all the bells and whistles, and the kitchen sink.
Actually, it looked like a golden brick.
You wouldn't want to disperse the power supply components. There are electrical safety concerns. A switching power supply does not have a mains transformer to isolate the circuits from the AC mains and to limit current. That's why they are usually packaged in a grounded metal enclosure without any holes large enough for fingers. Another reason is that it is generally good engineering practice to keep wires as short as possible. This helps prevent RFI, spurious oscillations and noise pickup.
I believe the EU has introduced regulations that set minimum standards for the power factor of switching power supplies sold in the EU. Maybe the US should follow suit. I've read that some older buildings have had power distribution problems that are aggravated by the use of a large number of PCs with poor power factor correction in their power supplies.
The problem is, at those low voltages, that you would have to install copper bus bars to distribute the power. It can be done in an industrial setting, but it isn't practical for homes or offices.
The power supply in my S-100 bus Z-80 computer weighed about 20 kg. Apple was one of the first microcomputer companies to use switching power supplies.
Try again, puny mortal.
write(2) is a system call on UNIX systems, not a part of the C language or the C standard library. It has no place in a portable C program. You might as well argue that the program should have use DosWrite() (OS/2 system call) or $QIO (VMS system call).
I've seen other companies buy a competing product just so they can kill it.
Should copyright law be used as a tool to suppress information? What if I am a rich, but terrible, writer of fantasy epics. Should I be able to buy the copyrights to the Lord of the Rings, and then prohibit anyone from printing the books?
ATSC HDTV is broadcast at 19 Mbps. Network feeds (less compression) are about 45 Mbps. Uncompressed HDTV is 1.5 Gbps.
Announced does not mean available.
There's a thunderstorm out there with your name on it :-).
Do you mean this white paper? Your URL is broken.
Only one head is active at a time, and they are all attached to a single positioning mechanism. That eliminates any parallelism. It also takes a measurable amount of time to switch heads. Every time the drive switches heads, it must tweak the head positioner to move the head over the currently selected cylinder. Track densities are so high that each surface must have embedded servo data for head positioning. You can't assume that all heads are simultaneously positioned on the same cylinder.
There are also plenty of people who need to use their employer's mail servers for work-related email.
The incompatibility was IBM's fault. Whoever wrote the original BIOS for the IBM PC, used a bunch of Intel reserved interrupt vectors for various BIOS functions. The reserved vectors were not used by the 8086/8, they were used in later Intel processors. If you can find an original Intel 8086/8 data book, the reserved vectors are clearly listed.
CD quality? I'd be happy if my radio produced FM quality. The typical American broadcaster takes a nice, clean audio signal and then proceeds to mutilate it beyond recognition with a "modulation optimizer" before feeding it to the transmitter. These devices ensure that the transmitter is run at 100% modulation, or greater, all the time, in every audio band. The result is badly distorted audio without the slightest trace of dynamic range. If they will not broadcast a clean FM signal, why should we expect them to broadcast a clean digital signal?
The 486 was a huge advancement over the 386. Take a look at the instruction cycle counts of the two chips, plus it had the first integrated FPU in the x86 series. Unfortunately, because of the 486SX (SX = sucks), programmers were unable to rely on the presence of hardware floating-point.
I just happened to be looking at a tree when it was struck by lightning. I saw a side of the tree trunk glow red for a fraction of a second when the lightning hit the top of the tree. That sort of energy can cause the water/sap to flash to steam, blowing off the outside of the tree.
Obviously, he must be a drooling moron. just like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. and Ted Turner.