I can't imagine why anyone designing a new game machine would want to use PC processors and operating system software, even WinCE. Why pay the price of high power consumption, mediocre performance and high cost? I would use a fast and efficient RISC CPU, DVD drive, custom silicon for audio and graphics, and a tight real-time OS kernel. It's a game machine, not a general purpose computer.
Are you saying that the police are deterred from coming to arrest you because of your beliefs/color/ethnicity based upon some vague notion that you have teflon coated bullets?
The idea is to make it as difficult as possible for the police or any other group of organized thugs to violate the civil/human rights of a group based on their beliefs/color/ethnicity. They may kill you anyway but the point is to make it very hazardous to their health.
What if the police officer is coming to arrest me because I have incorrect political or religious beliefs or the wrong skin color or ethnicity?
It really pisses me off when Europeans preach about their gun-free utopia. Where the hell were the Europeans when Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and other undesirables were being liquidated? The French police, may they all burn in Hell, enthusiastically rounded up French Jews and delivered them to their executioners. If my family had been living in Europe, I wouldn't be alive today.
Re:FireWire = i.LINK = IEEE 1394 = free?
on
Is firewire dying?
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· Score: 1
The IEEE policy on patents allows them to be used in IEEE standards if the patents are licensed at a reasonable rate and without discrimination.
Just one quick question: Does anybody here ever use an RS-422 serial port to do anything? RS-422 is the standard which officially supercedes RS-232. But nobody uses it, or even supports it with a straight face. Yes, it's technically superior; no, nobody cares.
RS-422 is popular in certain applications. It is widely used in high-speed synchronous serial connections. RS-232 can't hack it at high speeds. Where I work, we use RS-422 with twinax cable for most of our high-speed serial connections. A full-duplex interface uses four twinax cables, one each for Tx Data, Tx Clock, Rx Data and Rx Clock. The cabling and patch panels are expensive. The cost is justified by the reliability and performance, esp. over long cable runs.
Any time you deal with a large corporation or government agency they are going to dictate the terms. The terms will be written by lawyers who will do everything they can to promise nothing, disclaim all responsibility and force you to waive any rights that you might have.
It is the same situation with license agreements for software. In the USA, the UCC and common law give consumers rights for purchased goods. The software industry does not want you to have any rights or remedies.
Frequency hopping is a form of spread spectrum. The other common variety is direct sequence.
Both are used for military and civilian applications. Many data communications devices in the ISM (Industrial/Scientific/Medical) bands use frequency hopping or direct sequence spread spectrum. They both provide frequency reuse, resistance to interference and security against casual eavesdropping.
Spread spectrum does not repeal Shannon's law. You don't get something for nothing.
Microsoft's policy appears to be that they will only support non-X86 versions of NT if someone else funds the port and the maintenance. That's what killed the earlier non-X86 ports. It seems that Compaq decided that they weren't selling enough Alpha NT boxes to justify the cost of keeping NT Alpha alive. Microsoft doesn't think that NT Alpha is important enough to pay for it out of their own pocket.
Some of the IBM laptops have passwords on the motherboard and hard drive that can't be erased. If you forget the password, IBM can't help you. The motherboard and/or hard drive must be replaced. This makes the laptop useless to a thief.
It may not be PC, but there are differences in the aptitudes of men and women. That doesn't mean that a woman can't be a great programmer, physicist or mathematician, it just means that, as a group, women are less likely to have the aptitude for these fields. As with anything, there is a substantial amount of overlap, many women would make excellent programmers and many men have no aptitude for programming. The differences become more pronounced when you look at the ends of the distribution. Some of this is cultural and social, but biology should not be ignored because it clashes with the "world as it should be".
A better question might be what are the desirable skills of a programmer? Software engineering is increasingly a group activity, which calls for a different set of skills than those of the "hacker". The emphasis has shifted to working in teams and closer interaction with the user/customer. This requires strong social skills, an area where many male programmers are deficient.
The last head of my software engineering department was a woman. I don't know if she was a great coder, but she was a great leader, manager and politician.
We have never been able to positively identify where the sound came from exactly, but we are pretty sure it was the RAM. It was not the power supply and there was no harddrive in the system.
It was probably the bypass capacitors for the RAM. DRAMs produce large current spikes when they are accessed and capacitors can behave like electrostatic speakers.
You can get a geiger counter with a PC interface for $150 at Aware Electronics. A radiation source can be obtained by disassembling a $10 ionization smoke detector.
With a little bit of software, you have genuine random numbers.
I don't think OTPs are as impractical as some people say. I can put 1.44 MB of random numbers on a floppy disk and hand deliver it or send it via registered mail to my correspondent. That will encrypt a lot of email. The U.S. Government routinely uses registered mail for classified documents and keying material.
by 2001 i expect that koffice, gnumeric, abiword etc.. are mature enought that most companys will seriously consider to switch typical desktops.. with the knowledge that the switch might be a little bit painful first but afterwards they will never have to pay the m$ tax again..
I wouldn't bet money on it. I work for a Fortune 50 company that has been brainwashed by Microsoft. They have standardised on Windows 95/98/NT, Office 97 and MS Mail. They are currently rolling out Exchange to replace MS Mail. The Mac users were shipped off to political reeducation camps several years ago.
The company appears to be happy to pay inflated prices for Microsoft bugware. I can understand Windows and Office on the desktops, but why use Microsoft's junk on the servers?
The Poles (Marian Rejewski and others) were the first to crack Enigma. They were assisted by the Polish purchase of a commercial version of the Enigma and by documents provided by the French intelligence service. The Poles read German Enigma traffic between 1933 and 1938. They provided the French and British with the details of their accomplishments in 1939. The British would have had a very difficult time with Enigma if the Poles hadn't given them the results of their efforts.
Plutonium is one of the most deadly substances around.
Please stop spreading this myth.
Plutonium is a mildly radioactive metal that is also chemically toxic. A short article can be found here. There are many chemicals that are far more toxic than plutonium.
Anti-nuclear activists would get more respect if they made scientifically sound arguments. Most of the anti-Cassini material appears to be written by people who flunked high school physics and chemistry.
They changed it from FORTRAN to Fortran, but I still use FORTRAN for the older versions of the language.
I still think it is the best language for number crunching in physics and engineering. The only problem is that not enough money is invested in new Fortran compilers. Fortran has become a niche language.
C++ has all the modern bells and whistles for general purpose programming by professional programmers. I think it is too complicated for many people who don't need all of its features.
When I look at K&R's C book and compare its size to the latest edition of Stroustrup's C++ book, I wonder if the costs outweigh the benefits.
Some of us don't trust C++ for a number of reasons.
The available compilers and libraries are not compatible with each other or the ANSI standard.
Much of the compiler and library documentation is terrible.
You can't look at a page of C++ code and get a good idea of its time/space requirements. Operator overloading is not a feature.
I know a number of scientists and programmers who do research on the physics of the ionosphere. They write all their software in FORTRAN-77. It lets them do their work without having to learn the language and operating system of the day.
4) Stick a pin through his coax. This will make his radio's finals explode the next time he tries to transmit. This is, of course, destruction of personal property, 100% illegal, and I don't condone it. But some people can be real pricks, and the other three might not work.
Bad idea. In some parts of the USA that might result in getting shot as a prowler/trespasser.
My neighbor has one of those radios, Im not sure what its called, but a 2 way radio.. anyway, whenever he talks, i can hear him very loud out of my surround sound system speakers, my headphones, and any other speaker, I was just wondering if this could be dangerous for my PC.... if so, who do I tell? the FCC? its annoying to wake up in the middle of the night cause of his blasting voice over all my speakers! heh
Here's an idea...
Why not box up your POS stereo equipment and ship it back to the manufacturer with a demand that they fix it so that it isn't susceptible to RF interference. It isn't your fault, but most consumer electronics equipment is designed by penny pinching morons who would rather save a dollar or two by not adequately shielding and filtering their products.
Those of us who legally operate radio transmitters get blamed for the design faults of the crap they sell to consumers. Even when our transmitters are in perfect condition. I have been blamed by neighbors for all sorts of problems, even when I haven't transmitted a signal for weeks. Any glitch in their TV or stereo gets blamed on the nearest CB or amateur radio operator. It's easier than thinking.
If you are experiencing interference in audio equipment, it is caused by poor shielding and filtering in your equipment.
If you are experiencing interference with TV or radio equipment, it is probably due to design defects in the front end (RF input) or shielding of your TV or radio.
Interference problems that are caused by transmitter defects are relatively rare. The vast majority can be traced back to design shortcuts in the equipment experiencing interference.
Congress and the FCC have been too chicken (read as coopted by the consumer electronics industry) to issue standards for interference susceptability in consumer electronics equipment.
A voice encryption device needs a vocoder (voice coder/decoder). A vocoder converts analog voice to digital 1s and 0s. Most/many vocoders use a model of the human vocal tract to encode speech. Instead of transmitting a digitized waveform, the vocoder transmits the parameters of the vocal tract model. This approach results in much lower bit rates than general purpose waveform digitization. GSM and CDMA portable phones use vocoders.
Phil Karn, KA9Q, has a web page where you can listen to samples of various voice encoding techniques.
For digital data, you skip the vocoder and pipe the data into the ECC (error correction code) encoder and modem.
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It's probably made of core-ten steel. The rust is a protective coating for the underlying metal. The stuff is popular with sculptors.
I can't imagine why anyone designing a new game machine would want to use PC processors and operating system software, even WinCE. Why pay the price of high power consumption, mediocre performance and high cost? I would use a fast and efficient RISC CPU, DVD drive, custom silicon for audio and graphics, and a tight real-time OS kernel. It's a game machine, not a general purpose computer.
The idea is to make it as difficult as possible for the police or any other group of organized thugs to violate the civil/human rights of a group based on their beliefs/color/ethnicity. They may kill you anyway but the point is to make it very hazardous to their health.
It really pisses me off when Europeans preach about their gun-free utopia. Where the hell were the Europeans when Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and other undesirables were being liquidated? The French police, may they all burn in Hell, enthusiastically rounded up French Jews and delivered them to their executioners. If my family had been living in Europe, I wouldn't be alive today.
The IEEE policy on patents allows them to be used in IEEE standards if the patents are licensed at a reasonable rate and without discrimination.
RS-422 is popular in certain applications. It is widely used in high-speed synchronous serial connections. RS-232 can't hack it at high speeds. Where I work, we use RS-422 with twinax cable for most of our high-speed serial connections. A full-duplex interface uses four twinax cables, one each for Tx Data, Tx Clock, Rx Data and Rx Clock. The cabling and patch panels are expensive. The cost is justified by the reliability and performance, esp. over long cable runs.
The Second Amendment isn't about hunting deer.
Why do private citizens need handguns? If less of you did, less people would get shot.
Some people need to be shot.
It is the same situation with license agreements for software. In the USA, the UCC and common law give consumers rights for purchased goods. The software industry does not want you to have any rights or remedies.
Both are used for military and civilian applications. Many data communications devices in the ISM (Industrial/Scientific/Medical) bands use frequency hopping or direct sequence spread spectrum. They both provide frequency reuse, resistance to interference and security against casual eavesdropping.
Spread spectrum does not repeal Shannon's law. You don't get something for nothing.
Microsoft's policy appears to be that they will only support non-X86 versions of NT if someone else funds the port and the maintenance. That's what killed the earlier non-X86 ports. It seems that Compaq decided that they weren't selling enough Alpha NT boxes to justify the cost of keeping NT Alpha alive. Microsoft doesn't think that NT Alpha is important enough to pay for it out of their own pocket.
Some of the IBM laptops have passwords on the motherboard and hard drive that can't be erased. If you forget the password, IBM can't help you. The motherboard and/or hard drive must be replaced. This makes the laptop useless to a thief.
A better question might be what are the desirable skills of a programmer? Software engineering is increasingly a group activity, which calls for a different set of skills than those of the "hacker". The emphasis has shifted to working in teams and closer interaction with the user/customer. This requires strong social skills, an area where many male programmers are deficient.
The last head of my software engineering department was a woman. I don't know if she was a great coder, but she was a great leader, manager and politician.
It was probably the bypass capacitors for the RAM. DRAMs produce large current spikes when they are accessed and capacitors can behave like electrostatic speakers.
With a little bit of software, you have genuine random numbers.
I don't think OTPs are as impractical as some people say. I can put 1.44 MB of random numbers on a floppy disk and hand deliver it or send it via registered mail to my correspondent. That will encrypt a lot of email. The U.S. Government routinely uses registered mail for classified documents and keying material.
I wouldn't bet money on it. I work for a Fortune 50 company that has been brainwashed by Microsoft. They have standardised on Windows 95/98/NT, Office 97 and MS Mail. They are currently rolling out Exchange to replace MS Mail. The Mac users were shipped off to political reeducation camps several years ago.
The company appears to be happy to pay inflated prices for Microsoft bugware. I can understand Windows and Office on the desktops, but why use Microsoft's junk on the servers?
The Poles (Marian Rejewski and others) were the first to crack Enigma. They were assisted by the Polish purchase of a commercial version of the Enigma and by documents provided by the French intelligence service. The Poles read German Enigma traffic between 1933 and 1938. They provided the French and British with the details of their accomplishments in 1939. The British would have had a very difficult time with Enigma if the Poles hadn't given them the results of their efforts.
You are off by several orders of magnitude. The bare sphere critical mass of Pu-239 is about 10 kg.
There is about 5000 kg of Pu-239 in the environment as a result of fallout from nuclear testing.
RTGs use Pu-238, a plutonium isotope that is about 250x more active than Pu-239.
Please stop spreading this myth.
Plutonium is a mildly radioactive metal that is also chemically toxic. A short article can be found here. There are many chemicals that are far more toxic than plutonium.
Anti-nuclear activists would get more respect if they made scientifically sound arguments. Most of the anti-Cassini material appears to be written by people who flunked high school physics and chemistry.
I still think it is the best language for number crunching in physics and engineering. The only problem is that not enough money is invested in new Fortran compilers. Fortran has become a niche language.
C++ has all the modern bells and whistles for general purpose programming by professional programmers. I think it is too complicated for many people who don't need all of its features.
When I look at K&R's C book and compare its size to the latest edition of Stroustrup's C++ book, I wonder if the costs outweigh the benefits.
The available compilers and libraries are not compatible with each other or the ANSI standard.
Much of the compiler and library documentation is terrible.
You can't look at a page of C++ code and get a good idea of its time/space requirements. Operator overloading is not a feature.
I know a number of scientists and programmers who do research on the physics of the ionosphere. They write all their software in FORTRAN-77. It lets them do their work without having to learn the language and operating system of the day.
Bad idea. In some parts of the USA that might result in getting shot as a prowler/trespasser.
Here's an idea...
Why not box up your POS stereo equipment and ship it back to the manufacturer with a demand that they fix it so that it isn't susceptible to RF interference. It isn't your fault, but most consumer electronics equipment is designed by penny pinching morons who would rather save a dollar or two by not adequately shielding and filtering their products.
Those of us who legally operate radio transmitters get blamed for the design faults of the crap they sell to consumers. Even when our transmitters are in perfect condition. I have been blamed by neighbors for all sorts of problems, even when I haven't transmitted a signal for weeks. Any glitch in their TV or stereo gets blamed on the nearest CB or amateur radio operator. It's easier than thinking.
If you are experiencing interference in audio equipment, it is caused by poor shielding and filtering in your equipment.
If you are experiencing interference with TV or radio equipment, it is probably due to design defects in the front end (RF input) or shielding of your TV or radio.
Interference problems that are caused by transmitter defects are relatively rare. The vast majority can be traced back to design shortcuts in the equipment experiencing interference.
Congress and the FCC have been too chicken (read as coopted by the consumer electronics industry) to issue standards for interference susceptability in consumer electronics equipment.
A friend told me that the use of nickel catalysts in fat hydrogenation has poisoned people in some countries.
As far as I can tell, PGP phone is dead. There is an old beta on the web, but nothing since then.
Phil Karn, KA9Q, has a web page where you can listen to samples of various voice encoding techniques.
For digital data, you skip the vocoder and pipe the data into the ECC (error correction code) encoder and modem.