Actually, most of the former DEC labs managed to survive the Compaq merger. The ice pick came shortly after HP acquired Compaq. A few weeks after terminating DECWRL, HP announced the opening of a new research lab in Singapore, "because of the shortage of research talent in Silicon Valley". DEC's labs had a directly attributable added value in the billions of dollars, but I guess that wasn't enough to overcome the short term cost savings of outsourcing to Singapore. (Hi John!)
The WMD "fiasco" is a proof of why the US doesn't rely on HUMINT. It's becoming plainly obvious that most of the confidence in the existence of Iraqi WMDs came from HUMINT; however, those sources have now indicated that they would have said anything to get the US to take Saddam out.
Of course, someday, we may actually find WMDs buried in the sand, like the MIG squadron found buried last August. It's a very big country...
This is a rapidly growing hobby. Arcade games of the 70s and 80s were designed to be fixed, and there's nothing like the kick of turning a piece of coldware into a living, breathing machine. For folks in the SF Bay Area, there's an annual show in San Jose, California Extreme, where you can find machines for sale, parts, manuals, and tons of classic games and pinballs set up for free play.
I have a restored Asteroids Deluxe machine, bought it for a song, reworked the power supplies, and bango, instant early 80s nostalgia trip. Asteroids wasn't my game back then, but the Deluxe version is much more refined -- cooler graphics, better sound, fluorescent backdrop lit by a blacklight, and "killer satellites" that are a real pain.
Why not just play the MAME version? Well, it's not bad, and a gamepad helps, but... there's something about the sound of a quarter dropping through the chute, clinking into the coinbox, the corresponding click of the mechanical coin counter, that just says "okay, this is for real!"...
I worked on the border of the Biomed field for a few years. Most of the folks I worked with were MD/PhDs, med docs first and techs second. It's a great field, you can save thousands of lives through a single innovation (we were working on better motorcycle helmets and industrial hardhats).
Because of the educational requirements, there's no oversupply of biomeds, either.
I'd recommend Marquette , as it's a great program with good people, but there are always other options.
True enough, but you don't need a 64 bit machine to surf the web and read your email, and given the power consumption of the Athlon 64, you probably want an outlet nearby.
The best cases for 64 bit computing are generally text string database operations, server side encryption, and error control codes, not to mention heavy floating point apps like finite element analysis -- none of which I do anywhere near Starcruds.
Casio's Wristech product line has been the standard bearer for Geeks for nearly two decades. Highlights include:
The legendary CFX-200 Scientific Calculator watch
MP3 Player watch
GPS unit watch
IR Remote watch
Camera watch
Of these, only the IR Remote and Camera watches have become part of the permanent product line. Casio still produces calculator watches, but without scientific functions.
There are plenty of applications which benefit from a 64 bit memory model -- particularly text string operations, encryption, error control codes, and the like. Given the importance of search engines, privacy, and noise reduction, AMD's decision to push the 64 bit advantage could really help them, at least in the short run.
And since Microsoft is once again behind the curve, the various freeware Unix platforms could benefit a great deal by trumpeting their inherent advantage over Windows in these key areas.
I had no problems getting 0.95 line bandwidth out of Kermit, but then protocols 'r us. Note also the ancient Telebit references, now lost to the mists of time.
Note that as an X17, this flare is 10x the size of last week's little girly man X6 (log scale). And, unlike the X20 of two years ago, we're directly in its path. So, the resulting aurora should be on par with the 1989 event.
Batten down those scintillation counters! Unhook the HF radios!
Alphas weren't inherently expensive. Most were good servers and workstations, with special internal busses and memory interconnection; you paid for the whole system. The personal systems, such as the PWs, Multias and the clones, were actually good value and price.
And that was a big part of the problem. DEC's senior management firmly believed that price/performace translated to end user prices, in spite of being told over and over that customers were not willing to pay twice as much for a system that was twice as fast. And unfortunately, they were also not willing to pay a premium for DEC's legendary reliability engineering, either.
Had DEC priced its systems appropriately, and explained the benefits of performance and reliability to the market, the Alpha would still be a serious player.
Actually, DEC was the first major vendor to openly support Linux. It wasn't an easy political play inside DEC, but the people involved were truly "Mad Dogs"...
Bluetooth was the triumph of marketing over technical reality, but then the technology folks involved grossly overestimated what they had.
The primary basis of Bluetooth was supposed to be a cheap single chip implementation, that would allow it to be incorporated into everything once it hit scale. But something that gets glued into everything has to be feature laden, and the marketers pushed for all sorts of widgeteria. Net result: the chipmakers never hit their cost targets.
Meanwhile, the WAVElan folks kept chugging ahead, standardized the technology as 802.11, built a market, and the usual forces of commoditization have allowed WiFi to provide 90% of the functionality of Bluetooth, at similar cost, and with better range, higher speed, a far superior peer-to-peer model, and without that evil frequency-hopping bogosity.
Swell. We're back to the standard anonymity issues. With such a mechanism, anyone can leak secret information with impunity, any time it's politically convenient. And not just for the government either; such a mechanism would be very useful for disgruntled employees to leak proprietary information.
Remember, you might not like who's in power at the moment, but secrecy has valid purposes, such as keeping alive sources of intelligence [Many Bothans died to bring you this information...]
The Grid can be considered as one very large open loop control system. Essentially, the phase of the grid determines its state -- generators pull the phase state forward, loads pull it back. If the loads pull the phase back too far, the generators suddenly become motors, and all hell breaks loose.
Ideally, we'd be able to squirt in some reactive power when needed, but until a few years ago, the electronics for doing so didn't exist. MCTs are getting bigger and faster all the time, which will allow a more graceful response to overloads than throwing the Big Switch.
So why did they hide multiple cracks in the reactors, or rig a measuring instrument to give falsified data or any of the other things in the big list of infractions? I really can't see any reason other than to protect the bottom line.
Then you know little of Japanese culture. The primary motivation was most likely saving face. This is a huge factor in risk assessment for just about any process in Japan -- you have to design problem reporting processes which are thorougly anonymous.
Oh, and TEPCO isn't just a local concern, they're arguably one of the world's largest power engineering firms (on par with GE / Westinghouse).
Actually, transporting coal by rail is indeed more efficient than the presently used transmission technology. Friction losses from steel wheels on steel rail are amazingly small.
And as for safety, railroads tend to be less susceptible to natural disasters than transmission lines. Aside from the obvious advantage of being located on the ground, the rails aren't under constant use -- all that potential energy is contained in a mile-long train of 100 ton cars.
Faultline (online magazine for the Environmental Movement) isn't exactly a credible source. Ever since the blackouts, the environmentalists have been trying to shift blame from themselves to Enron, by confusing Enron's stock manipulation with its alledged manipulation of the California energy market.
Of course, this is to draw attention away from the fact that:
From 1990-2000, California's electricity consumption doubled, while the environmentalists prevented the construction of any new power plants or transmission lines.
The environmentalists have been forcing the power generation industry to convert from low-sulpher coal to natural gas, which is now in short supply.
Enron's hijinks aside, the consumer cost of power in California has been more than twice that for other western states for the last two decades. But I suspect it's going to take more blackouts before people wake up and start rejecting the religion of environmentalism...
While some of the hysteria regarding the War on Terror is well founded, may I ask where were you when the Clinton Administration was systematically disassembling the Right to Keep and Bear Arms? From the Brady Bill's intrusive databases to "assault weapon" (whatever that means) bans, the Clintons trashed the Second Amendment, with the silent consent of folks like the ACLU and EFF.
Frankly, if I have to put up with a background check before I can buy a squirrel rifle, then you can deal with a credit check before you board your Weapon-of-Mass-Destruction...
Well, both are basically vacuum bottles. But, while the coffee pot is trying to keep the inside hot, SIRTF's helium dewar is trying to keep its innards very, very cold.
Dave Mill's original clock distribution architecture ala NTP was based loosely on the Bell System's inverted tree structure. Only the top level servers are locked to the national servers; the next level is locked to the top level, and so on. In theory, it's a perfectly scalable infrastructure, with terrific fan-out.
Unfortunately, the code droids seem to think that there's something magical about being at Stratum 2 instead of Stratum 3 or Stratum 4; also, they seem perfectly willing to take advantage of a nonprofit consortium (the owners/operators of public Strat 1 clocks) instead of spending the $500 or so on hardware to service their own customers, who presumably paid them for something.
Anyone else remember the Good Old Days when it was considered polite to ask first before using someone else's clock?
One has to wonder how much of this is motivated by Europe's blatently obvious attempts at erecting non-tarriff barriers, especially for technology imports, and particularly with the US.
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Actually, most of the former DEC labs managed to survive the Compaq merger. The ice pick came shortly after HP acquired Compaq. A few weeks after terminating DECWRL, HP announced the opening of a new research lab in Singapore, "because of the shortage of research talent in Silicon Valley". DEC's labs had a directly attributable added value in the billions of dollars, but I guess that wasn't enough to overcome the short term cost savings of outsourcing to Singapore. (Hi John!)
Of course, someday, we may actually find WMDs buried in the sand, like the MIG squadron found buried last August. It's a very big country...
I have a restored Asteroids Deluxe machine, bought it for a song, reworked the power supplies, and bango, instant early 80s nostalgia trip. Asteroids wasn't my game back then, but the Deluxe version is much more refined -- cooler graphics, better sound, fluorescent backdrop lit by a blacklight, and "killer satellites" that are a real pain.
Why not just play the MAME version? Well, it's not bad, and a gamepad helps, but... there's something about the sound of a quarter dropping through the chute, clinking into the coinbox, the corresponding click of the mechanical coin counter, that just says "okay, this is for real!"...
Because of the educational requirements, there's no oversupply of biomeds, either.
I'd recommend Marquette , as it's a great program with good people, but there are always other options.
Who's the new useless plot device lately?
Looking like bugs from Galaxy Quest,
Latest contrivance in Dupont Latex,
EVERYONE KNOWS IT'S XINDI!
True enough, but you don't need a 64 bit machine to surf the web and read your email, and given the power consumption of the Athlon 64, you probably want an outlet nearby.
The best cases for 64 bit computing are generally text string database operations, server side encryption, and error control codes, not to mention heavy floating point apps like finite element analysis -- none of which I do anywhere near Starcruds.
Shuttle already has an Athlon 64 Cube, which is cheaper, more rugged, and has a heatpipe...
- The legendary CFX-200 Scientific Calculator watch
- MP3 Player watch
- GPS unit watch
- IR Remote watch
- Camera watch
Of these, only the IR Remote and Camera watches have become part of the permanent product line. Casio still produces calculator watches, but without scientific functions.And since Microsoft is once again behind the curve, the various freeware Unix platforms could benefit a great deal by trumpeting their inherent advantage over Windows in these key areas.
I had no problems getting 0.95 line bandwidth out of Kermit, but then protocols 'r us. Note also the ancient Telebit references, now lost to the mists of time.
Gas taxes pay for maintenance, not construction, which is far more expensive.
Batten down those scintillation counters! Unhook the HF radios!
And that was a big part of the problem. DEC's senior management firmly believed that price/performace translated to end user prices, in spite of being told over and over that customers were not willing to pay twice as much for a system that was twice as fast. And unfortunately, they were also not willing to pay a premium for DEC's legendary reliability engineering, either.
Had DEC priced its systems appropriately, and explained the benefits of performance and reliability to the market, the Alpha would still be a serious player.
Actually, DEC was the first major vendor to openly support Linux. It wasn't an easy political play inside DEC, but the people involved were truly "Mad Dogs"...
The primary basis of Bluetooth was supposed to be a cheap single chip implementation, that would allow it to be incorporated into everything once it hit scale. But something that gets glued into everything has to be feature laden, and the marketers pushed for all sorts of widgeteria. Net result: the chipmakers never hit their cost targets.
Meanwhile, the WAVElan folks kept chugging ahead, standardized the technology as 802.11, built a market, and the usual forces of commoditization have allowed WiFi to provide 90% of the functionality of Bluetooth, at similar cost, and with better range, higher speed, a far superior peer-to-peer model, and without that evil frequency-hopping bogosity.
Remember, you might not like who's in power at the moment, but secrecy has valid purposes, such as keeping alive sources of intelligence [Many Bothans died to bring you this information...]
Ideally, we'd be able to squirt in some reactive power when needed, but until a few years ago, the electronics for doing so didn't exist. MCTs are getting bigger and faster all the time, which will allow a more graceful response to overloads than throwing the Big Switch.
Then you know little of Japanese culture. The primary motivation was most likely saving face. This is a huge factor in risk assessment for just about any process in Japan -- you have to design problem reporting processes which are thorougly anonymous.
Oh, and TEPCO isn't just a local concern, they're arguably one of the world's largest power engineering firms (on par with GE / Westinghouse).
And as for safety, railroads tend to be less susceptible to natural disasters than transmission lines. Aside from the obvious advantage of being located on the ground, the rails aren't under constant use -- all that potential energy is contained in a mile-long train of 100 ton cars.
Of course, this is to draw attention away from the fact that:
- From 1990-2000, California's electricity consumption doubled, while the environmentalists prevented the construction of any new power plants or transmission lines.
- The environmentalists have been forcing the power generation industry to convert from low-sulpher coal to natural gas, which is now in short supply.
Enron's hijinks aside, the consumer cost of power in California has been more than twice that for other western states for the last two decades. But I suspect it's going to take more blackouts before people wake up and start rejecting the religion of environmentalism...Most of DWP's power comes from Hoover Dam.
Frankly, if I have to put up with a background check before I can buy a squirrel rifle, then you can deal with a credit check before you board your Weapon-of-Mass-Destruction...
See: this article in Space Today on SIRTF.
Unfortunately, the code droids seem to think that there's something magical about being at Stratum 2 instead of Stratum 3 or Stratum 4; also, they seem perfectly willing to take advantage of a nonprofit consortium (the owners/operators of public Strat 1 clocks) instead of spending the $500 or so on hardware to service their own customers, who presumably paid them for something.
Anyone else remember the Good Old Days when it was considered polite to ask first before using someone else's clock?
[Truechiming since 1987...]
One has to wonder how much of this is motivated by Europe's blatently obvious attempts at erecting non-tarriff barriers, especially for technology imports, and particularly with the US.