Maybe not now, but I can remember when the first franchises were awarded, and they were exclusive. It was also a catalyst for gross corruption in local government. The money train was coming to town, and most local politicians were eager to jump on board. Those early system builders enjoyed decades worth of monopoly rents, with no real threat of competition.
I've seen resistors (thermal noise) and zener diodes (junction breakdown noise) used as noise sources. The trick is to keep external non-random signals out of the circuit.
My favorite is the "battle short" switch. Often seen on military hardware. It overrides all of the protective circuits that might take the system off-line during critical operations.
My pet peeve is switches that offer no visual indication of their state when the power is out. This is important when you are trying to turn off a room full of equipment during a power failure. Besides removing load, it helps prevent damage to the equipment when the power is restored.
Take the stick out of your ass. If the Social Security Administration wants to throw a periodic awards banquet or party for employees who have done outstanding work for the government and the nation, what's wrong with that? Is it a crime to recognize and reward outstanding performance?
It would just create a slow leak, nothing catastrophic. I'd be more worried about getting hit by a piece of orbital debris, which can have much more kinetic energy than a bullet.
Why not? They already have a firearm on the Soyuz. It's part of their survival kit in case they land off-course and have to deal with unfriendly and hungry wildlife.
Anyone who is a public figure can expect their past to be closely scrutinized. Why should King get a free pass for a PhD thesis that had large sections that were plagiarized from other people's work? I thought plagiarism was supposed to be a mortal sin in academia.
As an example, the Washington, D.C. fire department uses a digital trunked radio systems on frequencies between 852 MHz and 860 MHz. That is right in the middle of the 800 MHz cellular band (824-849 MHz, 869-894 MHz). A cheap jammer is going to nuke the whole band.
It's more educational to do it with MSI TTL and wire-wrap. You learn something about power distribution/filtering, race conditions, fan-in and fan-out, etc. All of the analog things that you need to know in the real world.
Even if you think that it's OK to jam cell phones, how do you deal with the problem that the jammer is not selective? There are other radio services, including police and fire, that use frequencies in the same bands as those used by cell phones. Personally, I hope that the FCC drops a 10-ton ACME wrecking ball on anyone who operates a jammer in the USA.
My father, who worked for a news wire service many years ago, said that after a while you learned how to read punched paper tape by eye. This was handy when you were writing a story, punching it to tape for later transmission, and needed to make a correction. You could back up the tape and use the delete key to erase text by overpunching it with all ones. Now you know why ASCII DEL is 0x7f. The world's first word processor?
I looked up the actual price for an RT-1523B radio, which is a vehicle mounted VHF SINCGARS radio used by the U.S. Army. It's $7226, not $80K. I don't know where the numbers in the article came from.
Have you priced mil-spec parts? They are damned expensive due to low production volumes, inspection, testing, and documentation. They also have to meet tougher specs than commercial grade parts. I haven't seen any commercial radios that would meet all of the mil-spec requirements. It would cost too much money to design and build them to that standard. That said, the military has bought a lot of commercial grade radio equipment (VHF/UHF HTs for example), on the theory that they are good enough for most situations and they are cheap enough to buy in large quantities and issue to the average soldier.
The military usually uses disposable batteries. They have better energy density than rechargeable batteries and they avoid all the problems of managing, monitoring and recharging a bunch of rechargeable batteries. Another benefit is that their lifetime is more predictable. A fresh battery will last N hours, every time.
A large portion of that cost is making the radio conform to military specifications for ruggedness, reliability, extreme environmental conditions, etc. It has to work in all possible conditions and also be "soldier proof". You wouldn't believe the amount of abuse that they are subjected to. The manufacturer is making a reasonable profit, it's very expensive to design, build, and support mil-spec hardware. It's not the sort of business to go into if you want to get rich quick.
That's why many modern tactical radio systems use frequency-hopping or direct-sequence spread spectrum techniques to make it difficult to jam or DF (direction finding) the radios on the net. Even with older FM radios, keeping power to a minimum and using proper radio discipline can reduce the risk to friendly forces. The signal from a direct-sequence spread spectrum transmitter can be below the noise floor when viewed on a spectrum analyzer.
Many early computers worked with decimal numbers, even in memory addresses. For an example, see the IBM 1620. Base memory for the system was 20,000 decimal digits.
What about OS/8? It used mass storage organized in 12-bit words. There use to be a wide variety of word-addressed systems that were not designed around 8-bit bytes and block sizes that were 2^N.
I know it's a losing battle, but a byte isn't always 8-bits. That's why we have the octet.
The use of powers of 2 for RAM sizes is a side-effect of digital circuit design techniques, in particular, binary addresses and address decoders. Mass storage devices are not subject to the same constraints. They deal in streams of bits, which can be segmented in arbitrary ways by the drive's firmware.
I'm disappointed that Seagate caved on this issue. They didn't do anything wrong. They are being punished for the illiteracy of the average computer user.
I don't think so. Nuclear weapons are feeble in comparison to natural disasters. One small asteroid (1 km diameter) impact can generate three times as much energy as all of the nuclear weapons in the world at the peak of the cold war.
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Maybe not now, but I can remember when the first franchises were awarded, and they were exclusive. It was also a catalyst for gross corruption in local government. The money train was coming to town, and most local politicians were eager to jump on board. Those early system builders enjoyed decades worth of monopoly rents, with no real threat of competition.
I've seen resistors (thermal noise) and zener diodes (junction breakdown noise) used as noise sources. The trick is to keep external non-random signals out of the circuit.
My favorite is the "battle short" switch. Often seen on military hardware. It overrides all of the protective circuits that might take the system off-line during critical operations.
My pet peeve is switches that offer no visual indication of their state when the power is out. This is important when you are trying to turn off a room full of equipment during a power failure. Besides removing load, it helps prevent damage to the equipment when the power is restored.
Take the stick out of your ass. If the Social Security Administration wants to throw a periodic awards banquet or party for employees who have done outstanding work for the government and the nation, what's wrong with that? Is it a crime to recognize and reward outstanding performance?
95% of the actual work is done by contractors. NASA's role is primarily management.
The typewriter cabal.
It would just create a slow leak, nothing catastrophic. I'd be more worried about getting hit by a piece of orbital debris, which can have much more kinetic energy than a bullet.
Why not? They already have a firearm on the Soyuz. It's part of their survival kit in case they land off-course and have to deal with unfriendly and hungry wildlife.
Have you even looked at the web site?
There's going to be a revival meeting on the B Ark this weekend. Tickets are free. Invite all your friends.
Anyone who is a public figure can expect their past to be closely scrutinized. Why should King get a free pass for a PhD thesis that had large sections that were plagiarized from other people's work? I thought plagiarism was supposed to be a mortal sin in academia.
As an example, the Washington, D.C. fire department uses a digital trunked radio systems on frequencies between 852 MHz and 860 MHz. That is right in the middle of the 800 MHz cellular band (824-849 MHz, 869-894 MHz). A cheap jammer is going to nuke the whole band.
It's more educational to do it with MSI TTL and wire-wrap. You learn something about power distribution/filtering, race conditions, fan-in and fan-out, etc. All of the analog things that you need to know in the real world.
Even if you think that it's OK to jam cell phones, how do you deal with the problem that the jammer is not selective? There are other radio services, including police and fire, that use frequencies in the same bands as those used by cell phones. Personally, I hope that the FCC drops a 10-ton ACME wrecking ball on anyone who operates a jammer in the USA.
My father, who worked for a news wire service many years ago, said that after a while you learned how to read punched paper tape by eye. This was handy when you were writing a story, punching it to tape for later transmission, and needed to make a correction. You could back up the tape and use the delete key to erase text by overpunching it with all ones. Now you know why ASCII DEL is 0x7f. The world's first word processor?
If she manages to avoid going back to prison, she can get together with OJ and look for the real killer.
I looked up the actual price for an RT-1523B radio, which is a vehicle mounted VHF SINCGARS radio used by the U.S. Army. It's $7226, not $80K. I don't know where the numbers in the article came from.
Have you priced mil-spec parts? They are damned expensive due to low production volumes, inspection, testing, and documentation. They also have to meet tougher specs than commercial grade parts. I haven't seen any commercial radios that would meet all of the mil-spec requirements. It would cost too much money to design and build them to that standard. That said, the military has bought a lot of commercial grade radio equipment (VHF/UHF HTs for example), on the theory that they are good enough for most situations and they are cheap enough to buy in large quantities and issue to the average soldier.
Most contracts are fixed price. XYZ Corp. agrees to deliver 1,000 radios with accessories for $20M.
The military usually uses disposable batteries. They have better energy density than rechargeable batteries and they avoid all the problems of managing, monitoring and recharging a bunch of rechargeable batteries. Another benefit is that their lifetime is more predictable. A fresh battery will last N hours, every time.
A large portion of that cost is making the radio conform to military specifications for ruggedness, reliability, extreme environmental conditions, etc. It has to work in all possible conditions and also be "soldier proof". You wouldn't believe the amount of abuse that they are subjected to. The manufacturer is making a reasonable profit, it's very expensive to design, build, and support mil-spec hardware. It's not the sort of business to go into if you want to get rich quick.
That's why many modern tactical radio systems use frequency-hopping or direct-sequence spread spectrum techniques to make it difficult to jam or DF (direction finding) the radios on the net. Even with older FM radios, keeping power to a minimum and using proper radio discipline can reduce the risk to friendly forces. The signal from a direct-sequence spread spectrum transmitter can be below the noise floor when viewed on a spectrum analyzer.
What about OS/8? It used mass storage organized in 12-bit words. There use to be a wide variety of word-addressed systems that were not designed around 8-bit bytes and block sizes that were 2^N.
The use of powers of 2 for RAM sizes is a side-effect of digital circuit design techniques, in particular, binary addresses and address decoders. Mass storage devices are not subject to the same constraints. They deal in streams of bits, which can be segmented in arbitrary ways by the drive's firmware.
I'm disappointed that Seagate caved on this issue. They didn't do anything wrong. They are being punished for the illiteracy of the average computer user.
I don't think so. Nuclear weapons are feeble in comparison to natural disasters. One small asteroid (1 km diameter) impact can generate three times as much energy as all of the nuclear weapons in the world at the peak of the cold war.