Imagine that the Earth is a perfect sphere. Put several thousand robot cars on its surface. Each car has a constant velocity. How often will the cars collide? Now make them flying cars. Each car flying at a randomly chosen altitude between 0 and 50,000 feet.
Real computers aren't named after some Danish nob with a sword.
Real computers are designed in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Real computers have high-speed interleaved main memory, and lots of it. Cache is for losers who can't afford a real memory system.
There was CP/M-86 and the UCSD p-System. Both of which were substantially better than PC-DOS. The problem was that PC-DOS was cheaper than the competing operating systems, so people bought it.
PC-DOS 1.X was a warmed over port of CP/M-80, and the Microsoft development tools (Hey Bill!) were complete pieces of shit. I quickly gave up on PC-DOS and switched to the UCSD p-System, which had a Pascal compiler and operating system that actually worked. The UCSD p-System later died of self-inflicted wounds.
Traditionally, residential lines have been subsidized by business lines and toll charges on long distance calls. That has been changing with the split-up of AT&T and the partial deregulation of the telephone business. From what I have seen in my area (Verizon), the phone company has laid off most of the older, experienced, union workers and replaced them with a smaller number of cheaper contractors. Copper loops are being replaced with SLCs (subscriber line concentrators) in new construction. Inter-office trunks are on high-speed fiber optic cable instead of copper. They have replaced almost all of their old switches with modern digital switches. All of this should have substantially reduced their labor and maintenance costs on residential lines.
I did a full installation of Visual Studio 6.0 on a Windows 2000 Workstation system and it did install IIS. I believe it was the installer for Visual InterDev 6.0 that installed a bunch of server-type software on the system.
Unless things have changed recently, the store does not have to pay for unsold CDs. They are returned to the distributor for credit. There is usually a grace period in between when the store receives the CDs and when they have to pay for them. This allows the distributors to ship 5 billion copies of the latest boy band CD to your local CD store without the store having to pay for them up front. The store pays for the CDs that are actually sold and returns the excess to the distributor. This is how the record companies killed vinyl LPs. They stopped accepting returns of unsold records, forcing the retail stores to assume all of the financial risk for unsold merchandise.
IIS has the bad habit of getting installed by piggybacking on the installation of other software. I've seen this happen when a ftp server or Visual Studio is installed. Maybe you didn't want IIS, but you get it anyway.
Re:imagine if other utilities did this
on
Broadband Crackdown
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Telephone service is not a privilege. The telephone companies are regulated common carriers and are required by law to offer service to the public on a non-discriminatory basis. The conditions under which service can be refused or terminated are set by state and federal law and regulations, not the whim of some telco executive.
The same can be said for other regulated common carriers, such as gas and electric companies.
You can find good stuff at government auctions of excess property. In the Washington, D.C. area you might try NASA/GSFC in Greenbelt, Maryland. They usually have an auction every year to clear out the warehouse. Military bases are a good place to get stuff.
A survey by his office, he wrote, "has revealed that as much as 3 to 7 percent of the judiciary browser's traffic consists of streaming media such as radio and video broadcasts, which are unlikely to relate to official business."
In spite of the author's characterization, using streaming media is not necessarily the same thing as downloading Metallica mp3s from Napster and watching live horny coeds.
There are legitimate business uses for streaming audio and video, something that the control freaks in the Administrative Office of the Courts may not understand.
Re:What about the audio?
on
HDTV Over IP
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· Score: 2
The Shuttle uses 32 kbps delta modulation for its air-to-ground voice communication links. See this page for some references. This allows the Shuttle to multiplex 2 voice channels (2 x 32 kbps) and 128 kbps of telemetry into a 192 kbps telemetry downlink. There are newer audio encoding techniques that provide better fidelity, but this stuff was designed in the 1970s. Delta modulation has the advantage of being resistant to degradation caused by bit errors and bit slips in the RF link. It is also is easy to encode and decode, allowing simple and reliable hardware to be used.
Re:TV over Internet still a fair ways away
on
HDTV Over IP
·
· Score: 2
They are using IP multicast. NASA already uses IP multicast to distribute high data rate telemetry streams from ground stations to control centers and other end users over NASA networks.
And assemblers were for wimps with bad memories:-).
My father used to work for a news wire service, back in the era of Baudot (5-level) teletypes. He could read and edit a news story directly from the punched paper tape.
I used to use CP/M. I even wrote my own BIOS to install it on my computer, which is what you had to do to install the generic version of CP/M on a computer. Digital Research supplied the BDOS (Basic Disk Operating System), CCP (Console Command Processor) and a sample BIOS.
CP/M didn't have paths (neither did MS-DOS 1.X), just the USER command. Slashes were used for options, some of the command syntax was patterned after some old DEC operating systems, such as RT-11 V2 and RSX-11 (MCR era). Remember PIP?
CTRL-Z was the EOF marker and CR/LF was the line terminator. Files lengths were a multiple of the sector size.
Backslash instead of slash in paths... / for options instead of - (remember switchchar?..someone took it out) CR/LF instead of NL. ^Z as EOF. blah, blah. I wonder how many of these are deliberate?
Most of those things were inherited from CP/M, a popular operating system for 8080 and Z-80 microprocessors. MS-DOS was originally an 8086 clone of CP/M.
I was looking through some storage cabinets at work last week. I found several DEC RL02 cartridge disks in one of the cabinets. These were removable disk packs, about the diameter of a pizza and several inches thick, that could store a whopping 10 megabytes. They were used in a top-loading DEC RL02 disk drive that was attached to a PDP-11/24. We used the PDP-11/24 as a multi-user software development system, with up to 8 programmers simultaneously writing, compiling and testing their code (FORTRAN and MACRO-11) on a system with 512KW (1MB) of RAM and 20MB of disk storage. The system was very responsive. The operating system (RSX-11M) was written in carefully tuned assembly language. The average Palm organizer of today has more RAM and a faster CPU.
The USAF has been using concrete bombs to attack Iraqi air defense installations. The concrete bombs destroy the target without causing collateral damage to civilians in the area.
I once saw a methane (natural gas) powered refigerator in a local store. It didn't use any electricity, just a connection to a tank of methane. Does anyone know how these work?
If they had documented their work properly, someone could have figured out how to read that tape, even after they kicked the bucket.
It probably was properly documented.
The problem is that there are many ways that documentation can be lost or destroyed. Budgets get cut, contractors change, programs are cancelled, organizations are eliminated, moved or reorganized, people leave, retire or die. There are also the cost and space requirements of storing
large volumes of documents for years or decades. Even if the documents still exist, you have to find someone who knows that they exist and where they can be found.
There is a high probability that the computers, software and tape drives used to write the tapes no longer exist.
When is the last time that you saw a 7-track, 556 bpi, 1/2 inch, digital tape drive? This was a common data format in the 1970s. Do you have an IBM 360 or UNIVAC computer along with the appropriate operating system and applications software?
I was around when Skylab was reactivated in the late 1970s. NASA had a difficult time finding the needed documentation and software for the reactivation, even though Skylab had been shutdown for less than ten years. They were saved by the "pack rats" that had kept copies of obsolete software and documentation, even though the material should have been destroyed. They were also lucky that the necessary hardware still existed, as it was still in use for the support of newer spacecraft.
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Imagine that the Earth is a perfect sphere. Put several thousand robot cars on its surface. Each car has a constant velocity. How often will the cars collide? Now make them flying cars. Each car flying at a randomly chosen altitude between 0 and 50,000 feet.
Space is big. Really, really big. The probability of two satellites colliding is almost zero.
No, because there are a disturbingly large number of people who really believe that Bill Gates invented the PC.
Real computers are designed in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Real computers have high-speed interleaved main memory, and lots of it. Cache is for losers who can't afford a real memory system.
There was CP/M-86 and the UCSD p-System. Both of which were substantially better than PC-DOS. The problem was that PC-DOS was cheaper than the competing operating systems, so people bought it. PC-DOS 1.X was a warmed over port of CP/M-80, and the Microsoft development tools (Hey Bill!) were complete pieces of shit. I quickly gave up on PC-DOS and switched to the UCSD p-System, which had a Pascal compiler and operating system that actually worked. The UCSD p-System later died of self-inflicted wounds.
Traditionally, residential lines have been subsidized by business lines and toll charges on long distance calls. That has been changing with the split-up of AT&T and the partial deregulation of the telephone business. From what I have seen in my area (Verizon), the phone company has laid off most of the older, experienced, union workers and replaced them with a smaller number of cheaper contractors. Copper loops are being replaced with SLCs (subscriber line concentrators) in new construction. Inter-office trunks are on high-speed fiber optic cable instead of copper. They have replaced almost all of their old switches with modern digital switches. All of this should have substantially reduced their labor and maintenance costs on residential lines.
I did a full installation of Visual Studio 6.0 on a Windows 2000 Workstation system and it did install IIS. I believe it was the installer for Visual InterDev 6.0 that installed a bunch of server-type software on the system.
Unless things have changed recently, the store does not have to pay for unsold CDs. They are returned to the distributor for credit. There is usually a grace period in between when the store receives the CDs and when they have to pay for them. This allows the distributors to ship 5 billion copies of the latest boy band CD to your local CD store without the store having to pay for them up front. The store pays for the CDs that are actually sold and returns the excess to the distributor. This is how the record companies killed vinyl LPs. They stopped accepting returns of unsold records, forcing the retail stores to assume all of the financial risk for unsold merchandise.
IIS has the bad habit of getting installed by piggybacking on the installation of other software. I've seen this happen when a ftp server or Visual Studio is installed. Maybe you didn't want IIS, but you get it anyway.
Telephone service is not a privilege. The telephone companies are regulated common carriers and are required by law to offer service to the public on a non-discriminatory basis. The conditions under which service can be refused or terminated are set by state and federal law and regulations, not the whim of some telco executive. The same can be said for other regulated common carriers, such as gas and electric companies.
You can find good stuff at government auctions of excess property. In the Washington, D.C. area you might try NASA/GSFC in Greenbelt, Maryland. They usually have an auction every year to clear out the warehouse. Military bases are a good place to get stuff.
Device drivers and HAL (hardware abstraction layer).
The Shuttle uses 32 kbps delta modulation for its air-to-ground voice communication links. See this page for some references. This allows the Shuttle to multiplex 2 voice channels (2 x 32 kbps) and 128 kbps of telemetry into a 192 kbps telemetry downlink. There are newer audio encoding techniques that provide better fidelity, but this stuff was designed in the 1970s. Delta modulation has the advantage of being resistant to degradation caused by bit errors and bit slips in the RF link. It is also is easy to encode and decode, allowing simple and reliable hardware to be used.
They are using IP multicast. NASA already uses IP multicast to distribute high data rate telemetry streams from ground stations to control centers and other end users over NASA networks.
Remember, AMD and Linux are good, Intel and Microsoft are bad. Why think when the collective can do it for you?
My father used to work for a news wire service, back in the era of Baudot (5-level) teletypes. He could read and edit a news story directly from the punched paper tape.
CP/M didn't have paths (neither did MS-DOS 1.X), just the USER command. Slashes were used for options, some of the command syntax was patterned after some old DEC operating systems, such as RT-11 V2 and RSX-11 (MCR era). Remember PIP?
CTRL-Z was the EOF marker and CR/LF was the line terminator. Files lengths were a multiple of the sector size.
Most of those things were inherited from CP/M, a popular operating system for 8080 and Z-80 microprocessors. MS-DOS was originally an 8086 clone of CP/M.
There was an old version of Xenix that would run on an XT. Not sure where you could find a copy today.
I was looking through some storage cabinets at work last week. I found several DEC RL02 cartridge disks in one of the cabinets. These were removable disk packs, about the diameter of a pizza and several inches thick, that could store a whopping 10 megabytes. They were used in a top-loading DEC RL02 disk drive that was attached to a PDP-11/24. We used the PDP-11/24 as a multi-user software development system, with up to 8 programmers simultaneously writing, compiling and testing their code (FORTRAN and MACRO-11) on a system with 512KW (1MB) of RAM and 20MB of disk storage. The system was very responsive. The operating system (RSX-11M) was written in carefully tuned assembly language. The average Palm organizer of today has more RAM and a faster CPU.
The USAF has been using concrete bombs to attack Iraqi air defense installations. The concrete bombs destroy the target without causing collateral damage to civilians in the area.
I once saw a methane (natural gas) powered refigerator in a local store. It didn't use any electricity, just a connection to a tank of methane. Does anyone know how these work?
It probably was properly documented. The problem is that there are many ways that documentation can be lost or destroyed. Budgets get cut, contractors change, programs are cancelled, organizations are eliminated, moved or reorganized, people leave, retire or die. There are also the cost and space requirements of storing large volumes of documents for years or decades. Even if the documents still exist, you have to find someone who knows that they exist and where they can be found.
There is a high probability that the computers, software and tape drives used to write the tapes no longer exist. When is the last time that you saw a 7-track, 556 bpi, 1/2 inch, digital tape drive? This was a common data format in the 1970s. Do you have an IBM 360 or UNIVAC computer along with the appropriate operating system and applications software?
I was around when Skylab was reactivated in the late 1970s. NASA had a difficult time finding the needed documentation and software for the reactivation, even though Skylab had been shutdown for less than ten years. They were saved by the "pack rats" that had kept copies of obsolete software and documentation, even though the material should have been destroyed. They were also lucky that the necessary hardware still existed, as it was still in use for the support of newer spacecraft.