Booting up a kernel is nothing, start in run level 3 on an older system that only has about 32 megs of ram and you'll see the advantages of having an instant on system. If your system boots up a GUI and deamons, that is considered part of the system. Stability is a moot point, depending on what you do or don't do can definitely affect system stability. You can run Windows 98 for days if you're keen and know how to manage it (Wintop works great for killing hung apps). I wouldn't want to spend days in Win 98 but it is possible. Booting isn't an issue if you store your system in a FlashROM and can hit a power button and get to work. GO down to Circuit City and play with an i-Opener demo, flick the power on and off a few times and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Linux weiners tout never having to reboot a system because their OS is oh so stable. Big efing deal. My file server's been up for a week and will probably stay up until I decide I want to upgrade the kernel. This is totally beyond the point of instant-on computers. It would be rad to have a computer with 10 gigs of ram that all your stuff was on, that way you'd have little seek time and could turn the system on and off like a television. Why is this cool? Because some people don't like leaving computers on all the time, in many places eletricity can be pretty pricy at certain times of the year or they may just not want to have their electrical toys running 24/7. Instant on would be great in a corporate environment because you'd get to save time waiting for stuff to start, that time builds up in the course of a year costing you cash. Home users also wouldn't have to deal with boot-ups which they may or may not understand. Oh well.
Have you ever used Linux? If you want JUST boot the kernel and bash you can load up in a few seconds, if you want to load any deamons or apps that let you do something it takes as much time as Windows to boot. Instant on computers are stuff like terminals although an instant on workstation would be pretty cool. Your stability atgument is stupid, the OS means shit if your programs aren't programmed well, a shoddy Linux app is as bad as a shoddy Windows app. Boot up time for an app is agregate so after a while the time builds up to a loass of productivity. In the course of a year you'd make back hours if not days worth of productivity if you could have a program open the instant you needed it. Stop being a "me too" weiner.
Well, from a science fiction standpoint this has been predicted for a long time. Conventional science has yet to catch up in thi area although many people are rushing to it. This is another step in that direction, one that sorta bothers me. I don't particularly care for militaries in general, and the though of people who's absolute specialty is war really tweaks my pedal. In 2050 are we going to have genetically engineered soldiers that are raised for the sole purpose of killing other people? Genetic engineering and eating supliments are totally different research areas but they won't be in the future. In 2025 the Army can give a soldier an implant that feeds them, then another to augment his/her perceptions, then another which releases a stimulant to increase muscle strength and dull pain impulses. Then by 2050 the modifications are done on a genetic level rather than a bionic level. What will these factory made soldiers do when there is no war? Will will end up in another decades long cold war because two dogmas don't agree and have the funding to build a super powerful military? How about instead of actually fighting each other, we play a couple rounds of Mortal Kombat and the winner gets a dollar.
My favourite quote from the the article, The year 2000 is going to be 1983 all over again, with user interfaces a confusing mish-mash of whatever strikes a coder's fancy the day before the product ships. This really does sum it up, UI seems to right a sine wave. It goes from really crappy interface to a fairly decent and standard one back to a crappy one. At first the developers want it to just work without being pretty, then they want it to work and be pretty, after the pretty stage they go to gaudy because they want to test some sort of artistic mettle and be original. Theres also different kids of users to screw things up, people just learning a program want a simple interface thats easy to use (basic), more advanced users want all the buttons and widgets they can, while real power users want the starkest yet functional UI because they are on the clock. I like my UI stark yet functional and upfront. On topic but a tangent, what would happen if someone ported GTK (or Qt) to Windows? I mean if it were possible to port it would probably be a boon to everyone. If you make a program thats ported to several OSes you could have the same UI for each of them meaning professional environments could more easily make a transition from one Unix to another or from Windows to Unix or however you want to do it. Besides that the GUI library would be free of charge which means lower development costs on said piece of software. Oh well, I need to do a make.
Back before ActiveX and VB Script we used plain jane HTML code and could usually come up with some nice looking stuff. The good thing was that all hyperlinks looked the same so when you saw underlined text you could probably surmise that it was a hyperlink. Now on some sites you're lucky if you can even read the text, let alone find hyperlinks. Back then the web was instesting enough for people to keep using it, so I spose it did work afterall.
I remember a time when I had time to play plain old pen and paper role playing games. In the course of our adventuring eventually we'd find someone who had the raddest sword/gun/ship/character in general yet had no REAL way of backing up said cool thing (i.e. actually won it in battle or some such). These people always got rad stuff off-screen, we called these people munchkins. Star Trek always reminded me of these munchkins, especially with the antics of Deep Space 9 and Voyager. I mean of course it's science fiction and some stuff you just need in order to make a story work but as with our role playing games, too much rad stuff leads to not enough innovation and you don't have a fun game. Back on topic now. I've thought for a while a good series idea for ST would be one that took place on and around Earth. I was thinking like a series based out of the Starfleet Academy or something, that way you could have lots of characters many of which are not reoccuring. They key to a series ought to be the characters and story, not the quality of special effects. I'd like to see a series with a dozen or more characters in the course of a season. Then the Paramount people could figure out who people liked and keep them and replace the ones people didnt like. If I didn't have to see the same crew and the same scenery all the time I'd watch it alot more often. I think thats what people really liked about TNG and TOS, you saw lots of different people and places and you had the option of seeing dozens of worlds. The series' also didn't have a set path to follow, DS9 had some prophesy while Voyager needs to return home. TNG didn't have much of a path at all, Q didn't rub it in Picard's face much that he had a plan for him. Well thats all I have to say about that.
Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop isn't a drop in the bucket compared to AOL and Time Warner. Windows doesn't edit text documents to only say nice friendly things about Windows and Microsoft, it also doesn't really interperate the way to view media. It doesn't censor JPEGs of GIFs if it doesn't agree with them. TW and AOL can and do this! Besides censorship AOL now is in a position to increase their user base 5 fold. TW transmits information to millions upon millions of people every single day, now AOL has access to all these people. AOL has always made their money from marketing, they sell all the information about their users and make billions off of it, the merger with TW means they have that many more people to sell information on. Not only do they have lots more information to sell, they're also in a position to stick AOL into everyone's house whether they want it or not. Does anyone remember the stories of the AOL set-top box that were circulating around? Lets say that came to fruition and they told TW to replace all their cable boxes with AOL's box. This is almost always done at the customers expense by the way. Now all of TW's cable subscribers watch AOL-TV. Ads in the corners of the screen, some interactive WebTV crap, and a detailed database about everything every household does on their AOL box. There isn't a whole lot that can be done about this either because I don't know of many cities where the coax lines aren't owned by the cable companies. Some cities have imposed that the cable co's open up their loops but not every city. Even if all cable loops in the country were open and galavanting freely in the grass what would keep the megacorp of TW and AOL from buying them all up? Oooooh the DOJ might slap their hand and "break" them up. All the DOJ stands for is "Don't Offend Janet", they aren't going to whip out the bulldogs in the matter of a media conglomerate. Windows was an easy trial because they cheated and didn't even cheat that well. DO you think TW has become so large and been around so long without knowing how to cow politicians? The 21st century customer has new and improved buying power with a clean non-complaining tone.
I agree, my grandparents use AOL and often ask me to come fix it for them. I usually have no idea where to begin. Evertything in that app is obfuscated and candy coated. AOL of course doesn't use standard PPP or TCP/IP, they have their own network protocols which means you can ONLY connect to them using AOL software.
My most favorite distro...
on
SuSE For PPC
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· Score: 2
is now available on PPC. Those Germans are rad! I was actually wondering about this yesterday, lots more people have old PPC hardware lying around that they would like to get some use out of than people with old Alpha hardware (I assume). I think SuSE is a very good system overall, it's more middle of the road than the other distros. It's fairly simple to install (YaST is great for beginners) and it has pretty good security and stability. I admit though I haven't tried Redhat since 5.something or other but SuSE has always been my pal. I'm glad it's on PPC now, maybe I'll take up that offer for the 6100...
Re:When will Red Hat join?
on
SuSE For PPC
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· Score: 2
How would you emulate three buttons with a one button Mac mouse?
I've been hearing the rumours for this film for years upon years, I'm so glad it is FINALLY in production. If there is one trilogy that is really under exposed to the world it's Tolkien's. Star Wars is nice and all and gets props for technical wizardry but if you want good depth (Star Wars is a typical space opera with higher budget effects) you HAVE to go with LotR. I find it a bit depressing that all of the LotR stuff I have ever seen has been such poor quality and had little depth. The Super Nintendo video game sucked troll balls and I've never seen a good game reproduction of the trilogy. Maybe now with the movie exposure it will make its way into other media forms. I'd buy a MMPG if it were based on LotR or the Hobbit. Besides those you could easily use the world of the Silmarilion or the Second Age with Numenor. Fanboys unite!
The card has a port that allows you to plug an external antenna to it, all they did was take the AirPort housing off, it's just a PCMCIA card inside a pretty package. There's some cards that will sell you a dipole to plug into their card to increase the range. Stop making yourself look like a jackass.
This engine doesn't impress me much at all. The Genesis 3D engine is like the Unreal engine with better shadowing and alpha stippling. To heck with flat structures, give me curved structures a la Q3A. Curved structures and mirroring are probably the two most important things (graphically) that most games today seriously lack. Curved character models is a bit out of the question (for now) but good curved structures add a good deal of realistic form to things. If you're running through a network of sewers or charging a castle wall it looks much better if the sides of the sewer or the wall has a real curve, it looks MUCH more realistic. Mirrors are also something you see in real life that would make games more visually appealing, jumping into a pool of water and have it reflect your character and anything else near it would be just awesome to see. Genesis 3D doesn't appear to provide these, at least not from all of the screenshots I've seen. Maybe someone can convince id to license the Q3A engine out so we can see some more good looking games. Maybe someone can talk to Bungie too...
Cold hydrogen emits 21cm not 21Mhz, I'm estimating but 21cm is somewhere around 1.2 or 1.3Ghz. Iridium used 1.8 and 2.1 Ghz, not Mhz by the way. SETI searches around 1.3-1.5Ghz so 1.8 and 2.1 don't interfer per se but they can feasibly interfer if a device isn't tuned correctly or the astronomers decide to up the frequency a little bit.
You don't need an Earth-Moon refuel poit dude, it's not nearly far enough away that fuel is a problem. Going from an Earth orbit to the moon doesn't require a bunch of energy, just a few minutes of delta-v in the right direction (you do the calculus) and coast the rest of the way. What is needed is a more efficient mode of travel from the Earth's surface to orbit. Launching something on the shuttle costs about 10,000$/lb IIRC, that is a bit much to make lots of trips up to a space station. It'd be billions of dollars cheaper to build a space station if a Earth-to-orbit method was cheap and efficient, if there was such a system orbital platforms would abound overhead.
Monitors don't use lasers! They use "cathode rays" which is not a laser. Cathode rays happens when you run electricity through a vacuum. Aligning them into a single point on the back of the screen would make a bright dot, then the phosphors would completely ionize and turn a healthy black. This is what happens in monitors when the same image is on them for a long time. This effect can be seen in old video games and ATM machines. In order for it to burn through your head and screen you'd need to run several megawatts through the circuitry and put a metal plate behind your head. Then MAYBE it would burn through your head, though if you attempt it you probably deserve it.
I think long distance FireWire would be cool but I'm bothered by the people wanting to use it to watch television or DVDs. Want to know a simple way to watch TV from the DVD downstairs? Run a coax from the DVD to your TV. Get a radio remote to control it. Sheesh. I think this would be great for device networking in data centers. You could get SCSI speeds over really long distances, need more speed? Just add more FW ports. I really think that FW has the potential to replace IEEE 802.x in many environments, especially as the protocol stands now. It would be much simpler to treat any networked device as a remote device on the network. The autonegotiation would go over really well for the non-networking engineers setting up a LAN in their house. Besides the auto-setup all the routing and such is done in the hardware so the software and CPU are totally free to do other things, this is a good thing when executing a large/complex remote file.
FireWire is NOT A BUS PROTOCOL. FireWire is a SERIAL protocol. A bus transmits multiple bits at the same time, a serial connection transmits one bit at a time. FireWire sends one bit at a time, hence its speed measured in megabits per second. A FW-Ethernet converter would be stupid, Ethernet is only 100Mbps and interpreting the FW protocol and translating it to your favourite Ethernet protocol would take time which increases lag.
You can create a partition for Be and load its bootloader onto your drive's boot sector but this must be done from inside Be. Don't you think not having a floppy is kinda dumb?
a bad dream about orbital advertising the other night, I thought I'd share. I imagined enormous low orbit billboards floating merrily across the sky. Eventually the Earth's atmosphere became so cluttered with this huge billboards all light from the Sun was reflected back into space and instead of a nuclear winter we enjoyed an advertismal winter. "As I looked upwards into a cobalt heaven, looking for answers. I beheld a.com advertisement and all was well."
Quicktime is a very large bundle of toys all wrapped up in a chrome box. Not only is it the Sorensen CODEC, it is also a suite of scripting tools akin to Flash. AFAIK the scripting utilities could feasibly be as extensible as Flash is so you could create cool interactive sessions and games with it. Porting this would require a nice wad of cash because they also need to port a bunch of API calls that exist on MacOS to said OS. As someone else said, if VA or Redhat paid Apple to do the port I believe that they would. I think it would really be in Apple's best interest to do the port though, look at Adobe, they've ported Acrobat reader to a slew of operating systems and now PDFs are everywhere. The Quicktime scripting would get real popular really quickly if you could view it on any OS you wanted. The Sorensen CODEC is something you need to ask the Sorenson people to port (maybe in plug-in form to xanim). Redhat or VA ought to spend their mighty millions purchasing a Sorensen license for xanim, they could build a player/plug-in by themselves.
Toshiba's EE is a verrry nice processor and I've been waiting for someone to take a good look at it for a long time. I think the most impressive part to me is how they handled all the processing units on the chip. It looks like it'll be VERY flexible and probably last as long as the PSX has. I think what Sony is going to do with the PS2 is not make it take over the desktop market but become the centerpiece in their home entertainment line-up. What Sony ought to do is release home media components as add-ons to the PS2. As an aside, today I got to wondering why PC gaming has always remained rather popular dispite powerful gaming consoles that come out. I used to think it was due to networking or the fact that the computer had other uses besides games. These two elements are being incorpoarated into the latest gaming consoles, so someone else was thinking along the same lines as me. I realized today though that PC gaming remains popular because in 6 months or a year a new faster computer will come out that will run the games faster/better. Because faster chips and so forth are coming out all the time they start out slow (the PSX was a monster gaming machine when compared to the PCs c. 1995) but soon enough they are monsters themselves. Also related to this, old PC games are usually compatible with the brand new systems. Doom and Zork will run on a brand new PIII and on an aging 486DX. NES games don't play on SNES consoles. I think this is partly why Sony has made the PS2 able to run some PSX games, people already have libraries of games yet want to purchase a new and faster system. If a console is released that is backwards compatible and runs the old games FASTER people will be more apt to buy it. I think this is also a quasi-reason for the X-Box, it's supposed to run some PC games without rebuilding them (I've heard). Maybe Nintendo will see this too and build some sort of small expension module that one could stick a game cart in and play in emulation mode [on the Dolphin].
Slashdot Mirror
Quantum singularity? You've been watching too much Star Trek.
Booting up a kernel is nothing, start in run level 3 on an older system that only has about 32 megs of ram and you'll see the advantages of having an instant on system. If your system boots up a GUI and deamons, that is considered part of the system. Stability is a moot point, depending on what you do or don't do can definitely affect system stability. You can run Windows 98 for days if you're keen and know how to manage it (Wintop works great for killing hung apps). I wouldn't want to spend days in Win 98 but it is possible. Booting isn't an issue if you store your system in a FlashROM and can hit a power button and get to work. GO down to Circuit City and play with an i-Opener demo, flick the power on and off a few times and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Linux weiners tout never having to reboot a system because their OS is oh so stable. Big efing deal. My file server's been up for a week and will probably stay up until I decide I want to upgrade the kernel. This is totally beyond the point of instant-on computers. It would be rad to have a computer with 10 gigs of ram that all your stuff was on, that way you'd have little seek time and could turn the system on and off like a television. Why is this cool? Because some people don't like leaving computers on all the time, in many places eletricity can be pretty pricy at certain times of the year or they may just not want to have their electrical toys running 24/7. Instant on would be great in a corporate environment because you'd get to save time waiting for stuff to start, that time builds up in the course of a year costing you cash. Home users also wouldn't have to deal with boot-ups which they may or may not understand. Oh well.
Have you ever used Linux? If you want JUST boot the kernel and bash you can load up in a few seconds, if you want to load any deamons or apps that let you do something it takes as much time as Windows to boot. Instant on computers are stuff like terminals although an instant on workstation would be pretty cool. Your stability atgument is stupid, the OS means shit if your programs aren't programmed well, a shoddy Linux app is as bad as a shoddy Windows app. Boot up time for an app is agregate so after a while the time builds up to a loass of productivity. In the course of a year you'd make back hours if not days worth of productivity if you could have a program open the instant you needed it. Stop being a "me too" weiner.
Well, from a science fiction standpoint this has been predicted for a long time. Conventional science has yet to catch up in thi area although many people are rushing to it. This is another step in that direction, one that sorta bothers me. I don't particularly care for militaries in general, and the though of people who's absolute specialty is war really tweaks my pedal. In 2050 are we going to have genetically engineered soldiers that are raised for the sole purpose of killing other people? Genetic engineering and eating supliments are totally different research areas but they won't be in the future. In 2025 the Army can give a soldier an implant that feeds them, then another to augment his/her perceptions, then another which releases a stimulant to increase muscle strength and dull pain impulses. Then by 2050 the modifications are done on a genetic level rather than a bionic level. What will these factory made soldiers do when there is no war? Will will end up in another decades long cold war because two dogmas don't agree and have the funding to build a super powerful military? How about instead of actually fighting each other, we play a couple rounds of Mortal Kombat and the winner gets a dollar.
My favourite quote from the the article,
The year 2000 is going to be 1983 all over again, with user interfaces a confusing mish-mash of whatever strikes a coder's fancy the day before the product ships.
This really does sum it up, UI seems to right a sine wave. It goes from really crappy interface to a fairly decent and standard one back to a crappy one. At first the developers want it to just work without being pretty, then they want it to work and be pretty, after the pretty stage they go to gaudy because they want to test some sort of artistic mettle and be original. Theres also different kids of users to screw things up, people just learning a program want a simple interface thats easy to use (basic), more advanced users want all the buttons and widgets they can, while real power users want the starkest yet functional UI because they are on the clock. I like my UI stark yet functional and upfront.
On topic but a tangent, what would happen if someone ported GTK (or Qt) to Windows? I mean if it were possible to port it would probably be a boon to everyone. If you make a program thats ported to several OSes you could have the same UI for each of them meaning professional environments could more easily make a transition from one Unix to another or from Windows to Unix or however you want to do it. Besides that the GUI library would be free of charge which means lower development costs on said piece of software. Oh well, I need to do a make.
Back before ActiveX and VB Script we used plain jane HTML code and could usually come up with some nice looking stuff. The good thing was that all hyperlinks looked the same so when you saw underlined text you could probably surmise that it was a hyperlink. Now on some sites you're lucky if you can even read the text, let alone find hyperlinks. Back then the web was instesting enough for people to keep using it, so I spose it did work afterall.
I remember a time when I had time to play plain old pen and paper role playing games. In the course of our adventuring eventually we'd find someone who had the raddest sword/gun/ship/character in general yet had no REAL way of backing up said cool thing (i.e. actually won it in battle or some such). These people always got rad stuff off-screen, we called these people munchkins. Star Trek always reminded me of these munchkins, especially with the antics of Deep Space 9 and Voyager. I mean of course it's science fiction and some stuff you just need in order to make a story work but as with our role playing games, too much rad stuff leads to not enough innovation and you don't have a fun game.
Back on topic now. I've thought for a while a good series idea for ST would be one that took place on and around Earth. I was thinking like a series based out of the Starfleet Academy or something, that way you could have lots of characters many of which are not reoccuring. They key to a series ought to be the characters and story, not the quality of special effects. I'd like to see a series with a dozen or more characters in the course of a season. Then the Paramount people could figure out who people liked and keep them and replace the ones people didnt like. If I didn't have to see the same crew and the same scenery all the time I'd watch it alot more often. I think thats what people really liked about TNG and TOS, you saw lots of different people and places and you had the option of seeing dozens of worlds. The series' also didn't have a set path to follow, DS9 had some prophesy while Voyager needs to return home. TNG didn't have much of a path at all, Q didn't rub it in Picard's face much that he had a plan for him. Well thats all I have to say about that.
Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop isn't a drop in the bucket compared to AOL and Time Warner. Windows doesn't edit text documents to only say nice friendly things about Windows and Microsoft, it also doesn't really interperate the way to view media. It doesn't censor JPEGs of GIFs if it doesn't agree with them. TW and AOL can and do this! Besides censorship AOL now is in a position to increase their user base 5 fold. TW transmits information to millions upon millions of people every single day, now AOL has access to all these people. AOL has always made their money from marketing, they sell all the information about their users and make billions off of it, the merger with TW means they have that many more people to sell information on. Not only do they have lots more information to sell, they're also in a position to stick AOL into everyone's house whether they want it or not.
Does anyone remember the stories of the AOL set-top box that were circulating around? Lets say that came to fruition and they told TW to replace all their cable boxes with AOL's box. This is almost always done at the customers expense by the way. Now all of TW's cable subscribers watch AOL-TV. Ads in the corners of the screen, some interactive WebTV crap, and a detailed database about everything every household does on their AOL box. There isn't a whole lot that can be done about this either because I don't know of many cities where the coax lines aren't owned by the cable companies. Some cities have imposed that the cable co's open up their loops but not every city. Even if all cable loops in the country were open and galavanting freely in the grass what would keep the megacorp of TW and AOL from buying them all up? Oooooh the DOJ might slap their hand and "break" them up. All the DOJ stands for is "Don't Offend Janet", they aren't going to whip out the bulldogs in the matter of a media conglomerate. Windows was an easy trial because they cheated and didn't even cheat that well. DO you think TW has become so large and been around so long without knowing how to cow politicians? The 21st century customer has new and improved buying power with a clean non-complaining tone.
I agree, my grandparents use AOL and often ask me to come fix it for them. I usually have no idea where to begin. Evertything in that app is obfuscated and candy coated. AOL of course doesn't use standard PPP or TCP/IP, they have their own network protocols which means you can ONLY connect to them using AOL software.
is now available on PPC. Those Germans are rad! I was actually wondering about this yesterday, lots more people have old PPC hardware lying around that they would like to get some use out of than people with old Alpha hardware (I assume). I think SuSE is a very good system overall, it's more middle of the road than the other distros. It's fairly simple to install (YaST is great for beginners) and it has pretty good security and stability. I admit though I haven't tried Redhat since 5.something or other but SuSE has always been my pal. I'm glad it's on PPC now, maybe I'll take up that offer for the 6100...
How would you emulate three buttons with a one button Mac mouse?
I've been hearing the rumours for this film for years upon years, I'm so glad it is FINALLY in production. If there is one trilogy that is really under exposed to the world it's Tolkien's. Star Wars is nice and all and gets props for technical wizardry but if you want good depth (Star Wars is a typical space opera with higher budget effects) you HAVE to go with LotR. I find it a bit depressing that all of the LotR stuff I have ever seen has been such poor quality and had little depth. The Super Nintendo video game sucked troll balls and I've never seen a good game reproduction of the trilogy. Maybe now with the movie exposure it will make its way into other media forms. I'd buy a MMPG if it were based on LotR or the Hobbit. Besides those you could easily use the world of the Silmarilion or the Second Age with Numenor. Fanboys unite!
The card has a port that allows you to plug an external antenna to it, all they did was take the AirPort housing off, it's just a PCMCIA card inside a pretty package. There's some cards that will sell you a dipole to plug into their card to increase the range. Stop making yourself look like a jackass.
This engine doesn't impress me much at all. The Genesis 3D engine is like the Unreal engine with better shadowing and alpha stippling. To heck with flat structures, give me curved structures a la Q3A. Curved structures and mirroring are probably the two most important things (graphically) that most games today seriously lack. Curved character models is a bit out of the question (for now) but good curved structures add a good deal of realistic form to things. If you're running through a network of sewers or charging a castle wall it looks much better if the sides of the sewer or the wall has a real curve, it looks MUCH more realistic. Mirrors are also something you see in real life that would make games more visually appealing, jumping into a pool of water and have it reflect your character and anything else near it would be just awesome to see. Genesis 3D doesn't appear to provide these, at least not from all of the screenshots I've seen. Maybe someone can convince id to license the Q3A engine out so we can see some more good looking games. Maybe someone can talk to Bungie too...
Cold hydrogen emits 21cm not 21Mhz, I'm estimating but 21cm is somewhere around 1.2 or 1.3Ghz. Iridium used 1.8 and 2.1 Ghz, not Mhz by the way. SETI searches around 1.3-1.5Ghz so 1.8 and 2.1 don't interfer per se but they can feasibly interfer if a device isn't tuned correctly or the astronomers decide to up the frequency a little bit.
You don't need an Earth-Moon refuel poit dude, it's not nearly far enough away that fuel is a problem. Going from an Earth orbit to the moon doesn't require a bunch of energy, just a few minutes of delta-v in the right direction (you do the calculus) and coast the rest of the way. What is needed is a more efficient mode of travel from the Earth's surface to orbit. Launching something on the shuttle costs about 10,000$/lb IIRC, that is a bit much to make lots of trips up to a space station. It'd be billions of dollars cheaper to build a space station if a Earth-to-orbit method was cheap and efficient, if there was such a system orbital platforms would abound overhead.
Monitors don't use lasers! They use "cathode rays" which is not a laser. Cathode rays happens when you run electricity through a vacuum. Aligning them into a single point on the back of the screen would make a bright dot, then the phosphors would completely ionize and turn a healthy black. This is what happens in monitors when the same image is on them for a long time. This effect can be seen in old video games and ATM machines. In order for it to burn through your head and screen you'd need to run several megawatts through the circuitry and put a metal plate behind your head. Then MAYBE it would burn through your head, though if you attempt it you probably deserve it.
I think long distance FireWire would be cool but I'm bothered by the people wanting to use it to watch television or DVDs. Want to know a simple way to watch TV from the DVD downstairs? Run a coax from the DVD to your TV. Get a radio remote to control it. Sheesh. I think this would be great for device networking in data centers. You could get SCSI speeds over really long distances, need more speed? Just add more FW ports. I really think that FW has the potential to replace IEEE 802.x in many environments, especially as the protocol stands now. It would be much simpler to treat any networked device as a remote device on the network. The autonegotiation would go over really well for the non-networking engineers setting up a LAN in their house. Besides the auto-setup all the routing and such is done in the hardware so the software and CPU are totally free to do other things, this is a good thing when executing a large/complex remote file.
FireWire is NOT A BUS PROTOCOL. FireWire is a SERIAL protocol. A bus transmits multiple bits at the same time, a serial connection transmits one bit at a time. FireWire sends one bit at a time, hence its speed measured in megabits per second. A FW-Ethernet converter would be stupid, Ethernet is only 100Mbps and interpreting the FW protocol and translating it to your favourite Ethernet protocol would take time which increases lag.
Floppies have saved my life (well, saved my hard work). If your boot sector ever gets fscked and you don't have a bootable NIC you neeeeeed a floppy.
You can create a partition for Be and load its bootloader onto your drive's boot sector but this must be done from inside Be. Don't you think not having a floppy is kinda dumb?
a bad dream about orbital advertising the other night, I thought I'd share. I imagined enormous low orbit billboards floating merrily across the sky. Eventually the Earth's atmosphere became so cluttered with this huge billboards all light from the Sun was reflected back into space and instead of a nuclear winter we enjoyed an advertismal winter. .com advertisement and all was well."
"As I looked upwards into a cobalt heaven, looking for answers. I beheld a
Quicktime is a very large bundle of toys all wrapped up in a chrome box. Not only is it the Sorensen CODEC, it is also a suite of scripting tools akin to Flash. AFAIK the scripting utilities could feasibly be as extensible as Flash is so you could create cool interactive sessions and games with it. Porting this would require a nice wad of cash because they also need to port a bunch of API calls that exist on MacOS to said OS. As someone else said, if VA or Redhat paid Apple to do the port I believe that they would. I think it would really be in Apple's best interest to do the port though, look at Adobe, they've ported Acrobat reader to a slew of operating systems and now PDFs are everywhere. The Quicktime scripting would get real popular really quickly if you could view it on any OS you wanted. The Sorensen CODEC is something you need to ask the Sorenson people to port (maybe in plug-in form to xanim). Redhat or VA ought to spend their mighty millions purchasing a Sorensen license for xanim, they could build a player/plug-in by themselves.
Toshiba's EE is a verrry nice processor and I've been waiting for someone to take a good look at it for a long time. I think the most impressive part to me is how they handled all the processing units on the chip. It looks like it'll be VERY flexible and probably last as long as the PSX has. I think what Sony is going to do with the PS2 is not make it take over the desktop market but become the centerpiece in their home entertainment line-up. What Sony ought to do is release home media components as add-ons to the PS2. As an aside, today I got to wondering why PC gaming has always remained rather popular dispite powerful gaming consoles that come out. I used to think it was due to networking or the fact that the computer had other uses besides games. These two elements are being incorpoarated into the latest gaming consoles, so someone else was thinking along the same lines as me. I realized today though that PC gaming remains popular because in 6 months or a year a new faster computer will come out that will run the games faster/better. Because faster chips and so forth are coming out all the time they start out slow (the PSX was a monster gaming machine when compared to the PCs c. 1995) but soon enough they are monsters themselves. Also related to this, old PC games are usually compatible with the brand new systems. Doom and Zork will run on a brand new PIII and on an aging 486DX. NES games don't play on SNES consoles. I think this is partly why Sony has made the PS2 able to run some PSX games, people already have libraries of games yet want to purchase a new and faster system. If a console is released that is backwards compatible and runs the old games FASTER people will be more apt to buy it. I think this is also a quasi-reason for the X-Box, it's supposed to run some PC games without rebuilding them (I've heard). Maybe Nintendo will see this too and build some sort of small expension module that one could stick a game cart in and play in emulation mode [on the Dolphin].