SCSI doesn't do that crap on real computers, just on PCs. When I wrote a SCSI driver for a 680X0 UNIX system, everything was done with logical blocks, not cylinders, heads and sectors. It made things so much simpler.
SCSI has its own problems. Expensive cables, termination hassles, broken firmware, a physical interface that seems to get redesigned every year.
IDE needs to die, along with the cylinder/head/sector kludges in the PC BIOS and operating systems. I've had so many problems with disagreements between the BIOS, partition table, operating system and hard drive about how cylinders/heads/sectors are mapped to the actual blocks on the disk drive. Sometimes the BIOS just locks up or produces garbage when it tries to auto-detect a large IDE drive.
Why not address everything with logical blocks? We could use a 64-bit block address. Obliterate all references to cylinders, heads and sectors.
Replace the 18" ribbon cables with something more modern, such as a hot pluggable, very high speed, serial interface. Something like Firewire.
Read a good book on thermodynamics. There are several popular treatments available. I recommend The Refrigerator and the Universe by Martin Goldstein and Inge F. Goldstein.
...is it that hard to conceptualize of a machine of some sort that could utilize the very flow of energy across in in either direction? if such a device was sensitive enough, you could conceivably get power any time, as no two temperatures are ever exactly the same.
This sounds like a version of Maxwell's demon, who, like Dracula, gets killed by a brave scientist every time someone tries to resurrect him.
While attending one of the periodic briefings on business ethics given by my employer, a Fortune 50 corporation, I was told that corporate policy protected whistleblowers from retaliation. Any manager found guilty of retaliating against a whistleblower would be reprimanded or terminated.
When the presenter asked for questions, I asked him if he could name one manager that had been reprimanded or terminated on the grounds of retaliation against a whistleblower. He said that he would get back to me with an answer. I am still waiting, many months later.
NASA managers have a great deal of influence over the personnel decisions of contractors. They can get someone fired or transferred by simply telling the contractor that they never want to see Joe Blow's face again. They can also express their deep unhappiness that Joe Blow is no longer around, and that fact might influence the performance rating, which translates into dollars, given to the contractor at the end of the current rating cycle.
The electoral system has several benefits. It gives political power to small states and increases the probability that some candidate will have a majority of votes.
I believe "VHS quality" is directly related to the video bandwidth. A video tape recorder (VTR) has two important qualities, bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio. A broadcast quality NTSC signal uses about 4.2 MHz of bandwidth. A video signal has three components, luminance, chroma and audio. Luminance is what you see on an old black & white television set, brightness, ranging from black to white. Chroma contains the color information, hue and saturation. Television signals devote more bandwidth to luminance than chroma, the idea being that chroma doesn't need as much resolution as luminance. A consumer grade VTR isn't good enough for broadcast quality NTSC. How do they put NTSC video on a VHS VTR? They cut corners by reducing the bandwidth used for luminance and chroma, and accept a poorer signal-to-noise ratio. This mean that compared to the original signal, the output of a VHS VTR has less resolution or detail in the luminance and chroma plus more noise. The chroma is the most obvious casualty of this process. VHS throws away about 50% of the luminance and even more of the chroma.
T1s are hideously overpriced in most areas. Modern technology has made them much cheaper to provision but the rates have not dropped to reflect the lower costs. We will never have cheap bandwidth while the telephone companies control the market for high speed data lines.
They are providing no additional benefit but think they are entitled to additional money.
What do you expect from a cable company?
They are used to a world where they control the content and everyone has to pay rates based on perceived value, not cost. You are just another set of eyeballs, a passive consumer of product.
I picked up a copy of "De Re Metallica", a very old and classic book on mining and metallurgy. Originally written in Latin, it was translated into English by Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (Herbert's wife). Not knowing much about Hoover, I was surprised to see his name on the book.
Why don't we use the same test that the INS gives to people who apply for citizenship? A prospective voter should have a basic knowledge of the history of the United States and the structure and function of the govrnment. See this page for a Washington Post article on the INS test, including sample questions.
Some major liberal justices are about to retire, and if you look at the cases of the past, the ones where freedom has won (and abortion is the most obvious of these), the decisions have been 5-4.
So freedom is defined as the right to kill unborn children? How about infanticide and euthanasia?
I happen to be pro-choice, because I believe that a foetus is not a human being until it can survive outside the womb. However, I recognize that good arguments can be made for other positions on the issue.
I feel more comfortable with a conservative justice that interprets the Constitution according to its plain reading, than with a liberal justice that treats the Constitution as a springboard for social engineering and who believes that the parts that he finds objectionable are obsolete and can be ignored.
Yup, except for the war on drugs, the Republicans are pretty libertarian.
If you look past your preconceptions and prejudices, you might be surprised. William F. Buckley, an extremely influential conservative, said that The War on Drugs is Lost, and that we need to take a different approach to the problem.
As for the other issues that you mentioned, many Republicans disagree about the proper role of the federal government. The Republican Party is not monolithic. There are libertarians, evangelical Christians, small business owners, gun owners, pro-lifers, isolationists, social conservatives, economic conservatives and many other groups. The same is true of the Democratic Party. You have to look at both parties and pick the one you feel most comfortable with.
Any time someone says that the X party is in favor of, or opposes, a specific issue, you can bet that the truth is more complicated.
I'm a Republican and a card carrying member of the ACLU and the NRA.
The problem with recording music off the radio is that most stations butcher the audio in an attempt to sound louder and brighter than the competition. Plus you have brain damaged DJs who insist on talking over the beginning and end of the tracks they play.
The recording medium is random access. You can record and play at the same time. On the ReplayTV, you can skip ahead 30 seconds almost instantly.
The capacity is much larger than a video tape. This allows the box to record all of the shows that you might be interested in.
The combination of the software and the program guide allows you to do things like record all episodes of Star Trek, or any movies that feature Natalie Portman.
TV, on the other hand, gets revenue through advertising. Neither ReplayTV nor TiVo chops out commercials, so digitally distributed recordings have the commercials in place. every time it's passed around and watched, the commercials are watched too.
Nobody is going to "pass around" a recording made on a TiVo or ReplayTV box, unless someone wants to go to the trouble of dumping it to tape on an external VCR. The files on the hard disk can't be copied by the user.
The engine was the Dynajet, which hasn't been manufactured for a long time. Some pictures of pulse jet powered model airplanes can be found here, including some using the Dynajet.
Contrast the performance of NASA since 1971 with the performance of NASA 1961-1969. We went from never having sent a man to orbit to having people spend DAYS on the Moon in 8 years.
There was much more money available in the Apollo era, both for equipment and people. The attitude was "What do you need to get the job done on a fast track schedule?" When Nixon became President, lots of people were laid off, many facilities were closed, the survivors took major cuts in pay and budgets were slashed. The budgets have continued to be squeezed since then. I tell the people that I work with that we are playing a real-life game of Survivor.
If I remember correctly, Steve said that the Intel version of Photoshop had been optimized to use the MMX instructions. Still, when I look at FP performance, I am interested in the speed of the general purpose, double precision instructions that are going to be generated by a C or FORTRAN compiler, not oddball multimedia intructions.
But is little-endian (LSB first) really backwards? That's how bytes are sent over a
serial port (low bit first).
Asynchronous serial interfaces send the data LSB first. All of the synchronous serial interfaces, that I have written software for, send the data MSB first.
CBS was promoting a field sequential color system, which received FCC approval and began limited operation in 1951. It soon died and was replaced with RCA's system, color NTSC, in 1953. RCA did hardware, CBS did not. The original NTSC system used three electron guns and a shadow mask CRT. Sony invented the single gun Trinitron CRT. NASA later used a field sequential color system for Apollo and other manned missions.
PC hardware is cheap and fast, but it isn't consistent or standardized. Some of it is broken by design.
I recently bought some games (Diablo, Starcraft) that run on both the Mac and PC. I quickly noticed that the color rendition on the Mac looked much better than what was displayed on the PC. The Mac versions looks good without any tweaking of the computer. The PC versions looks terrible, even with the gamma setting cranked up to the maximum value. I've seen similar problems with Doom and Quake on PCs. I'm not sure if it is a problem with the operating system, device drivers or video cards. The Mac has the advantage that it was designed as an integrated system, and Apple has to keep all those graphic arts people happy. On the PC there are multiple companies designing the hardware and software components. I wonder if they ever talk to each other. The video card driver in my PC allows the user to tweak the gamma, but somehow this setting is ignored by the DirectX video drivers used by many games. I wonder how game developers keep their sanity when they have to deal with broken drivers and non-standard hardware, not to mention the endless combinations of operating system versions and DLLs. It makes a standardized console platform look very attractive.
Why is it so hard to do graphics on a PC?
By the way, I see the same problems with graphics on PCs running Linux. So it isn't just a problem with Microsoft software.
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SCSI has its own problems. Expensive cables, termination hassles, broken firmware, a physical interface that seems to get redesigned every year.
Why not address everything with logical blocks? We could use a 64-bit block address. Obliterate all references to cylinders, heads and sectors.
Replace the 18" ribbon cables with something more modern, such as a hot pluggable, very high speed, serial interface. Something like Firewire.
True, but since the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency, a gamma ray photon has about 10**11 times the energy of a microwave photon.
This sounds like a version of Maxwell's demon, who, like Dracula, gets killed by a brave scientist every time someone tries to resurrect him.
While attending one of the periodic briefings on business ethics given by my employer, a Fortune 50 corporation, I was told that corporate policy protected whistleblowers from retaliation. Any manager found guilty of retaliating against a whistleblower would be reprimanded or terminated. When the presenter asked for questions, I asked him if he could name one manager that had been reprimanded or terminated on the grounds of retaliation against a whistleblower. He said that he would get back to me with an answer. I am still waiting, many months later.
NASA managers have a great deal of influence over the personnel decisions of contractors. They can get someone fired or transferred by simply telling the contractor that they never want to see Joe Blow's face again. They can also express their deep unhappiness that Joe Blow is no longer around, and that fact might influence the performance rating, which translates into dollars, given to the contractor at the end of the current rating cycle.
A geek bites the heads off of chickens, a nerd looks like a chicken.
The electoral system has several benefits. It gives political power to small states and increases the probability that some candidate will have a majority of votes.
I believe "VHS quality" is directly related to the video bandwidth. A video tape recorder (VTR) has two important qualities, bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio. A broadcast quality NTSC signal uses about 4.2 MHz of bandwidth. A video signal has three components, luminance, chroma and audio. Luminance is what you see on an old black & white television set, brightness, ranging from black to white. Chroma contains the color information, hue and saturation. Television signals devote more bandwidth to luminance than chroma, the idea being that chroma doesn't need as much resolution as luminance. A consumer grade VTR isn't good enough for broadcast quality NTSC. How do they put NTSC video on a VHS VTR? They cut corners by reducing the bandwidth used for luminance and chroma, and accept a poorer signal-to-noise ratio. This mean that compared to the original signal, the output of a VHS VTR has less resolution or detail in the luminance and chroma plus more noise. The chroma is the most obvious casualty of this process. VHS throws away about 50% of the luminance and even more of the chroma.
T1s are hideously overpriced in most areas. Modern technology has made them much cheaper to provision but the rates have not dropped to reflect the lower costs. We will never have cheap bandwidth while the telephone companies control the market for high speed data lines.
What do you expect from a cable company?
They are used to a world where they control the content and everyone has to pay rates based on perceived value, not cost. You are just another set of eyeballs, a passive consumer of product.
I picked up a copy of "De Re Metallica", a very old and classic book on mining and metallurgy. Originally written in Latin, it was translated into English by Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (Herbert's wife). Not knowing much about Hoover, I was surprised to see his name on the book.
Why don't we use the same test that the INS gives to people who apply for citizenship? A prospective voter should have a basic knowledge of the history of the United States and the structure and function of the govrnment. See this page for a Washington Post article on the INS test, including sample questions.
So freedom is defined as the right to kill unborn children? How about infanticide and euthanasia?
I happen to be pro-choice, because I believe that a foetus is not a human being until it can survive outside the womb. However, I recognize that good arguments can be made for other positions on the issue.
I feel more comfortable with a conservative justice that interprets the Constitution according to its plain reading, than with a liberal justice that treats the Constitution as a springboard for social engineering and who believes that the parts that he finds objectionable are obsolete and can be ignored.
If you look past your preconceptions and prejudices, you might be surprised. William F. Buckley, an extremely influential conservative, said that The War on Drugs is Lost, and that we need to take a different approach to the problem.
As for the other issues that you mentioned, many Republicans disagree about the proper role of the federal government. The Republican Party is not monolithic. There are libertarians, evangelical Christians, small business owners, gun owners, pro-lifers, isolationists, social conservatives, economic conservatives and many other groups. The same is true of the Democratic Party. You have to look at both parties and pick the one you feel most comfortable with.
Any time someone says that the X party is in favor of, or opposes, a specific issue, you can bet that the truth is more complicated.
I'm a Republican and a card carrying member of the ACLU and the NRA.
The problem with recording music off the radio is that most stations butcher the audio in an attempt to sound louder and brighter than the competition. Plus you have brain damaged DJs who insist on talking over the beginning and end of the tracks they play.
Nobody is going to "pass around" a recording made on a TiVo or ReplayTV box, unless someone wants to go to the trouble of dumping it to tape on an external VCR. The files on the hard disk can't be copied by the user.
The engine was the Dynajet, which hasn't been manufactured for a long time. Some pictures of pulse jet powered model airplanes can be found here, including some using the Dynajet.
There was much more money available in the Apollo era, both for equipment and people. The attitude was "What do you need to get the job done on a fast track schedule?" When Nixon became President, lots of people were laid off, many facilities were closed, the survivors took major cuts in pay and budgets were slashed. The budgets have continued to be squeezed since then. I tell the people that I work with that we are playing a real-life game of Survivor.
If I remember correctly, Steve said that the Intel version of Photoshop had been optimized to use the MMX instructions. Still, when I look at FP performance, I am interested in the speed of the general purpose, double precision instructions that are going to be generated by a C or FORTRAN compiler, not oddball multimedia intructions.
Asynchronous serial interfaces send the data LSB first. All of the synchronous serial interfaces, that I have written software for, send the data MSB first.
Because the architect said "Trust me, I know what I'm doing."
CBS was promoting a field sequential color system, which received FCC approval and began limited operation in 1951. It soon died and was replaced with RCA's system, color NTSC, in 1953. RCA did hardware, CBS did not. The original NTSC system used three electron guns and a shadow mask CRT. Sony invented the single gun Trinitron CRT. NASA later used a field sequential color system for Apollo and other manned missions.
I recently bought some games (Diablo, Starcraft) that run on both the Mac and PC. I quickly noticed that the color rendition on the Mac looked much better than what was displayed on the PC. The Mac versions looks good without any tweaking of the computer. The PC versions looks terrible, even with the gamma setting cranked up to the maximum value. I've seen similar problems with Doom and Quake on PCs. I'm not sure if it is a problem with the operating system, device drivers or video cards. The Mac has the advantage that it was designed as an integrated system, and Apple has to keep all those graphic arts people happy. On the PC there are multiple companies designing the hardware and software components. I wonder if they ever talk to each other. The video card driver in my PC allows the user to tweak the gamma, but somehow this setting is ignored by the DirectX video drivers used by many games. I wonder how game developers keep their sanity when they have to deal with broken drivers and non-standard hardware, not to mention the endless combinations of operating system versions and DLLs. It makes a standardized console platform look very attractive. Why is it so hard to do graphics on a PC?
By the way, I see the same problems with graphics on PCs running Linux. So it isn't just a problem with Microsoft software.