The problem with a box provided by the cable operator is that its features are going to be tailored to meet the desires of the cable operator, not the end user. That's how we've ended up with crappy digital cable decoders that have program guides that devote more space to ads than programming, no s-video or component outputs, no reliable and standardized means of remote control, and slow/buggy software. The cable operator wants a zillion cheap boxes that integrate into their overall business strategy, which places little or no value on what any particular subscriber might want.
Then obviously you couldn't have copied all the data to the "current" medium in the first place.
Not true. The data could have been collected and recorded on the current media by multiple field sites, which may no longer exist, may have upgraded their recording equipment, or be too busy with current data collection projects to dupe media. You can easily end up with many thousands of tapes in a warehouse and insufficient equipment and time to copy them to new media before they rot. That's assuming you can get the funding for the work in the first place.
I still have some archival Kodak Gold Ultima CD-Rs for saving important data. Unfortunately, Kodak stopped making them and exited the CD-R business because of declining prices. Kodak did some fairly extensive testing to characterize the expected lifetime of their CD-Rs. I worry that CD-Rs will follow the path of floppy disks. When they are expensive, the disks are of high quality. When the price declines to a certain point, manufacturers offshore production, eliminate QA and cut as many corners as possible to stay price competitive, leading to media that is utter crap.
There were some well publicized problems with Sun systems using NFS with UDP checksums disabled by default to improve speed. The NFS filesystems were getting corrupted by bad UDP packets.
Even with checksums enabled, all you are doing is reducing the probability of an undetected error. I've seen corrupted packets with valid 8-bit checksums and 16-bit CRCs. They aren't common but they do happen.
This teaches kids that school is is a strange sort of jail for children and that people in authority are total idiots, and this attitude takes a very long time to unlearn.
They aren't?
Sometimes I think if they wanted to be honest about the purpose of most schools, they would install razor-wire fences and guard towers on the perimeter of each school.
Clear Channel may only own 10% of the radio stations, but that can be misleading. A 50kW FM station in a top 50 market is worth a lot more, and has a much larger audience, than a 500W AM station in a rural area.
The floppy disk is lost in the dustbin of time, but I remember playing Zork on a PDP-11/03 running RT-11. It had 56kB of memory and two 8" floppy disks. Infocom was the only games publisher that I can think of that released games on such a wide variety of systems.
I remember seeing a movie, I believe it was European, presented at the Spokane, Washington World's Fair in 1974. Each seat in the theater had a set of buttons that allowed the viewer to vote on which way the film should continue when it reached a branch point. The film would pause while the audience voted. After the votes were tabulated, the film would continue with the segment that the audience had selected.
GSM is rather old. TDMA is going away in the USA. CDMA is going to be around for a while. Most of the new standards are based on new and updated versions of CDMA.
The standard mentioned in the article is a mix of TDMA and CDMA. It uses CDMA in a half-duplex fashion, with transmission lengths limited to predefined time slots.
Conduction and convection are not going to work in a vacuum, but radiation works just fine. This is electromagnetic radiation, like light and radio waves, so it does not need a medium.
Exhaustive testing, however you wish to define that, can reduce the number of defects in the code, but it isn't going to eliminate them in a complex system. The number of defects found per unit of test time follows a predictable curve, where each new defect found requires more test time. It's like accelerating to the speed of light, the closer you get to 0 defects, the more test time is needed.
That's assuming the faults get fixed. I've seen buildings with the new fancy computerized fire alarm systems where alarms for sensor and wiring faults get ignored for months.
A critical part of any effort to launch rockets is range safety. This ensures that the rocket either follows a safe trajectory or the flight is terminated (boom). Part of getting a license is convincing the government that your launch operations are not going to be a hazard to your fellow human beings. The more powerful the rocket, the more danger it poses to other people.
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The problem with a box provided by the cable operator is that its features are going to be tailored to meet the desires of the cable operator, not the end user. That's how we've ended up with crappy digital cable decoders that have program guides that devote more space to ads than programming, no s-video or component outputs, no reliable and standardized means of remote control, and slow/buggy software. The cable operator wants a zillion cheap boxes that integrate into their overall business strategy, which places little or no value on what any particular subscriber might want.
I've seen the same problem, the audio and video drift out of sync. The quick workaround is to press pause and then play. This resyncs the streams.
Even if you have a working reel-to-reel player, you may find out that replacement heads are insanely expensive or not available.
Not true. The data could have been collected and recorded on the current media by multiple field sites, which may no longer exist, may have upgraded their recording equipment, or be too busy with current data collection projects to dupe media. You can easily end up with many thousands of tapes in a warehouse and insufficient equipment and time to copy them to new media before they rot. That's assuming you can get the funding for the work in the first place.
I still have some archival Kodak Gold Ultima CD-Rs for saving important data. Unfortunately, Kodak stopped making them and exited the CD-R business because of declining prices. Kodak did some fairly extensive testing to characterize the expected lifetime of their CD-Rs. I worry that CD-Rs will follow the path of floppy disks. When they are expensive, the disks are of high quality. When the price declines to a certain point, manufacturers offshore production, eliminate QA and cut as many corners as possible to stay price competitive, leading to media that is utter crap.
Even with checksums enabled, all you are doing is reducing the probability of an undetected error. I've seen corrupted packets with valid 8-bit checksums and 16-bit CRCs. They aren't common but they do happen.
Right, and kill off the children and old people in your area with the gross amounts of air pollution produced by burning wood.
I think CP/M-86 came with an assembler, just like CP/M-80. What's more, it actually worked, unlike many releases of MASM.
They aren't?
Sometimes I think if they wanted to be honest about the purpose of most schools, they would install razor-wire fences and guard towers on the perimeter of each school.
Clear Channel may only own 10% of the radio stations, but that can be misleading. A 50kW FM station in a top 50 market is worth a lot more, and has a much larger audience, than a 500W AM station in a rural area.
The floppy disk is lost in the dustbin of time, but I remember playing Zork on a PDP-11/03 running RT-11. It had 56kB of memory and two 8" floppy disks. Infocom was the only games publisher that I can think of that released games on such a wide variety of systems.
I remember seeing a movie, I believe it was European, presented at the Spokane, Washington World's Fair in 1974. Each seat in the theater had a set of buttons that allowed the viewer to vote on which way the film should continue when it reached a branch point. The film would pause while the audience voted. After the votes were tabulated, the film would continue with the segment that the audience had selected.
The operating system that is used to manage the switch is not necessarily the same thing as the operating system used by the switch software.
The standard mentioned in the article is a mix of TDMA and CDMA. It uses CDMA in a half-duplex fashion, with transmission lengths limited to predefined time slots.
Conduction and convection are not going to work in a vacuum, but radiation works just fine. This is electromagnetic radiation, like light and radio waves, so it does not need a medium.
Don't confuse a research project with tested and certified operations software.
Yes, they do have their own chip fabrication facilities. The NSA has had one at Fort Meade for many years. I'm sure there are others.
The water/steam is recycled. The turbine exhaust is used to preheat boiler feed water. It is cooled, treated and recycled.
Exhaustive testing, however you wish to define that, can reduce the number of defects in the code, but it isn't going to eliminate them in a complex system. The number of defects found per unit of test time follows a predictable curve, where each new defect found requires more test time. It's like accelerating to the speed of light, the closer you get to 0 defects, the more test time is needed.
You need programmers with a good background in real-time and concurrent programming, who understand the hazards and how to avoid them.
That's assuming the faults get fixed. I've seen buildings with the new fancy computerized fire alarm systems where alarms for sensor and wiring faults get ignored for months.
They were doing their job, cutting budgets and payroll costs. Oh, you wanted the system to operate reliably too?
I'm also a big fan of watchdog timers. The process that periodically resets the timer can make all sorts of health and sanity checks.
A critical part of any effort to launch rockets is range safety. This ensures that the rocket either follows a safe trajectory or the flight is terminated (boom). Part of getting a license is convincing the government that your launch operations are not going to be a hazard to your fellow human beings. The more powerful the rocket, the more danger it poses to other people.
Just think if we did this for the selection of President of the United States. We could have Arnold the bodybuilder fighting John Kerry the ex-SEAL.