It's about time, too. It's sort of insulting, that one of the oldest civilizations on Earth is not quite a superpower, despite having developed and refined governement and buearacracy for the past 4000 years. Go team!
The Chinese dropped the ball. If they had put any real effort into pushing their geopolitical boundaries into Europe, the British wouldn't have whipped their asses in the Opium wars, which led them into subservient colonial status for the next 150 years.
They'd stand a better chance of being a superpower now if they hadn't wasted so much of their internal energy on Maoism and crushing internal dissent. As it stands now their political and economic systems are grossly corrupt. Their foreign policy bent on selling destablizing technology to anti-American nations rather than actually working to expand their influence.
You've underscored the basic problem with the cable-delivered broadband mediums. The CATV companies really do view it as a two-way medium to the extent that they view an addressable cable box as a two-way medium.
You can take a conspiracy/Chomsky-styled critique and say they're afraid of losing their place as "entertainment providers", but I'm not sure that's completely accurate. I think a lot of it comes from simply not having experience as a telcomm provider.
I also think that a few people serving MP3s, porn or warez are largely to blame for the absence and restrictions on upstream, just as a relatively small number of people who misuse guns totally misrepresent the larger gun-owning population (to pick a totally loaded analogy..).
Frog legs are actually quite good. I prefer them deep-fried. There's not a whole lot of meat on an individual frog leg. I'm guessing its roughly parallel to a chicken wing in overall meat quantity. A standard bucket (~2 US gallons) would probably provide enough meat for about 2-3 people to eat a meal.
I recently at some excellent frog legs in a restaurant in Houma, Louisiana on West Main Street. For the uninitiated, they really do taste something like white-meat chicken.
This was the way it was everywhere that was once called "Bell Land". The Man did the wiring, the fixing, and telephone set leasing and fucking with any of it was a no-no. I'm not sure if it was illegal in the sense of a criminal action, but it was not looked upon with any nicities.
I'm surprised that they can refuse service. Around here, residential service is considered a "lifeline" service that has some kind of power over other telco initiatives. In fact, US West tried to use it as some kind of justification for some kind of modem surcharge about 4-5 years ago when the internet was heating up and the telco claimed they'd need to do branch-office upgrades because the trunks were full of modem users.
Residential service is still a nut waiting to be cracked, though. It's still too subsidized by other services (wonder why a T1 is still $800/mo?) and rural people still pay too little for service relative to the costs urban dwellers pay.
At least it's not like it was. I'm sure it will never be perfect, they'll ALWAYS be looking for a way to screw us.
That's impressive. I've always heard rumors (friend-of-a-friend variety) that Intel had the 486 line running well over 100Mhz internally. The FOAF said his personal workstation at Intel was a 133Mhz 486. It wasn't clear whether these were standard 486s running on odd mainboards or odd 486s running on standard mainboards.
99 times out of 100, management has to pry the techs' fingers from the code.
I agree with you up to a certain point. I think there are some engineers who will never "finish" a project unless they're given an end time. We've referred to this as the "Lego" problem -- when we were kids and built something with legos it never got "finished" -- there was ALWAYS some kind of further optimization/coolness/whatever changes that could be made. I emphasize COULD -- you can ALWAYS make something better. Even with the geek's favorite, Linux, Linus has to say "CODE FREEZE" in spite of the developers who know that there's further improvement that could be made.
Not to defend meddling marketers too much, but many of them do know that if they don't get some product into the market at a certain point in time it won't sell well enough to provide ROI. If it doesn't provide ROI, then nobody has a job.
Furthermore, we as users are USED to getting slipshod code the first few releases. Be it Windows, Linux, etc -- everybody knows you don't go production in an initial release, you wait until the first patch/service pack (at least).
I hear your same complaints from a friend who is a history professor at a major midwestern land-grant university. He says 90% of his students are "knuckle-walking droolers who can barely string four words together".
And this is the problem with achievment of any kind everywhere. Most people are more interested in eating, fucking and getting wasted. Anything that involves work, thought or some kind of introspection is clearly out the window.
I see the same thing at work, and saw the same thing at University and in high school. People just aren't interested.
I used to go to UG meetings and the like that were hosted in vednors spaces. What I found when I got there was a lot of anti-competitor FUD and pro-product marketing. The people from the vendor that hosted the meeting were a bunch of suit-wearing geeks who knew shit about their own products and nothing but corporate PR about anything else. The UG "facilitator" was some dork lackey for the vendor who managed to turn the meeting into a 1 hr commercial.
Not a terrible idea. I think experience has shown that those with money will dominate a TLD in all namespaces available, thus rendering TLDs rather pointless. High levels of regulation would be required to achieve otherwise, and the global nature of the internet makes this difficult at best.
Re:Multi Processors under Win9x
on
Emergence of SMT
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· Score: 1
IIRC, it was even more limited than that. It was certain filters that were SMP enabled. There would be little value and great expense in SMP-enabling the basic UI.
IIRC further, there have long been available daughter boards for various Mac platforms to do filter acceleration in Photoshop. I think these have ranged from general purpose CPUs to DSPs. Earliest one I can remember was for JPEG compression, although I think more commonly they were used for stuff like gaussian blurs. I can remember working at prepress shop on an unaccelerated '030 and waiting like 5 minutes to do filters on a 30 MB file, so they had some value.
Is it that bad? Random, high-speed might be a problem but sequential ought to be not that difficult. I'd imagine that the entire mechanism could be housed in something no larger than a typical housing used for external CDs.
Given the storage capacity relative to the size, even a mechanism as large as a typical mid-tower PC case capable of storing several TB of data would be useful. Remember, there were people who wet their pants over early WORM drives that were slow as hell.
I think the data "cube" conception is what gets people. IANA optical researcher, but why not a cylinder? I envision a cylinder spinning with two lasers mounted on the side at 90 deg angles to each other and another mounted something like a hard disk head on one end.
But I do agree... I'd rather be photographed in the UK than go to a US school
But it's British schools that have the reputation for brutality. I think they're the archetype, with headmasters doling out caning and all that. Look at "The Wall" -- that illustrates it pretty well.
American schools have long had a reputation for cliquishness, but American society is much less burdended by the social stratifications that burden the British system.
I notice that most of the other posters here claim "MD isn't dead" but every time I'm at BestBuy or the like I see an increasingly smaller MD display and more emphasis on CD-R(W). MD prerecordeds are nonexistant (Sony had a few titles from their own in-house labels, I never saw others).
That being said, I believe MD is a superior technology. I just wish that Sony would get off their arses and give us MP3 capabilities. Somebody did a great mockup of a Palm/MD/MP3 combo player which would be HUGE if someone would actually build it.
The one thing missing from flash-based MP3 players is their cost per unit of storage. MD is the ideal storage media for MP3.
You know, multiple anonymous servers, except for Napster, just rotate among them. Go underground in such a way that there is no legal entity who owns and manages the service.
Except that this is the problem that people have complained about the centralized Napster model. There has to be at minimum a list of napster servers to connect to. Sure, you don't have to maintain this list but then you don't know which one to connect to. Without a large number of people connecting to a server, the selection of things to download sucks, and nobody uses it and you're back to the selection of things that your circle of friends has and we're back to taping 12" LPs onto tape again.
For every class I'd ever been to, only 1 in 6 were actually looking for a job. The rest were already employed, in the computer field in some manner or other. I'd say that maybe for half the info was directly job relevant, and the other half? You'd be surprised the number of places that send employees to training costing $$$$ for no reason other than it seems like the right thing to do.
The rumor mill has it that the Select version of XP will be register-free, to help companies that do imaging and the like. To my eyes these look like the non-Select version of the same install CD. My question is, what's to prevent someone from comparing a select and non-select XP CD and finding the N files that are different (presumably they will largely be the same) and producing either a binary patch set or just distributing those files?
And the Russians refused to even provide maps on the same "national insecurity" basis. I'm sure there were rudimentary road maps, but generally IIRC maps were considered state secrets, especially larger maps or detailed maps of rural areas.
I'm sure there were examples of this during the Yugoslavian bombing campaign. I started getting a lot of spam from pro-Serbian organizations about this time, of course all of the address information was forged. Relay-hijacking probably doesn't fit the mental model that most people have if you say "hacktivism", but it certainly fits mine..
There was a great article in mumblemuble about an extensive aerial mapping of New York that's just reached completion. Until recently, the civil engineering folks in NYC didn't even have a partiuclarly accurate map of the CITY, let alone the sewer system.
The new map used aeriel photography coupled with a GIS-type CAD system to produce a super-accurate (within a couple of feet) map of NYC's streets, buildings, bridges, docks and so on.
The kicker was that they wanted to make it publicly available, but the ubiqutous "law enforcement" (cue sinister music) didn't want it made public since they felt that it'd be an ideal way for "criminal elements" to pursue whatever it is "criminal elements do".
Anyway, given the relative age of NYC and the way it grew, I'm surprised they know where ANYTHING goes.
Right, the idea being that the blurring allows a level of smoothness the screen cannot deliver.
The issue I had was that the previous poster was showing a JPEG bitmap of what it looked like. Since JPEG is a lossy format, the "detail" I was looking for was the specific blurring of type edges and I'm not sure if what I'm seeing is antialiasing or JPEG artifacts..
They've been carping about HDTV for a while, I think you're right on track. The CATV people don't want to carry it at all, they want to use the extra signalling for value-add services (phone, internet, other channels, etc).
Another well-intentioned scheme that turns into corporate welfare. Wonderful.
Come on now! This is 2001, the age where nations and states are surfing the information superhighway to the future, riding the crest of the info-economy as they fight for their territory in the cyberworld with data-dollars, not the "old economy" way of fighting for statehood with bullets and copyright laws.
Political power comes from the barrel of a gun.Mao
As for the "user error" response - it does happen I'm afraid but let me say this. I get so many calls from people who are supposedly IT professionals who have no clue at all that it's real hard to stay un-cynical - but I try. But I also make sure that I get them to check the simple things first. Sometimes people hear that as patronizing or me blaming them but it's not - it's a troubleshooting procedure. I know for a fact that for every guy who's offended by me asking if any of the filesystems are 100% - there's two who haven't checked it. (And 5 others who just say no and we move on.) Believe me we'll quickly get to the non-trivial problems if that's what it is.
My gripe is the exact opposite. I answer with exact honest and precision with all the basic questions they bother with. Where I get pissed is the *days* of "analysis" they go through and the fingerpointing they get into. If the first-line guy doesn't have an option when I've answered his obvious questions, the ticket ought to be escalated to someone with more knowledge and better problem solving skills, and not kept with the drone who regurgitates the fingerpointing excuses fed to them by their line managers who have call-resolution numbers to make.
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Yay China, I guess, since I'm Chinese.
It's about time, too. It's sort of insulting, that one of the oldest civilizations on Earth is not quite a superpower, despite having developed and refined governement and buearacracy for the past 4000 years. Go team!
The Chinese dropped the ball. If they had put any real effort into pushing their geopolitical boundaries into Europe, the British wouldn't have whipped their asses in the Opium wars, which led them into subservient colonial status for the next 150 years.
They'd stand a better chance of being a superpower now if they hadn't wasted so much of their internal energy on Maoism and crushing internal dissent. As it stands now their political and economic systems are grossly corrupt. Their foreign policy bent on selling destablizing technology to anti-American nations rather than actually working to expand their influence.
You've underscored the basic problem with the cable-delivered broadband mediums. The CATV companies really do view it as a two-way medium to the extent that they view an addressable cable box as a two-way medium.
You can take a conspiracy/Chomsky-styled critique and say they're afraid of losing their place as "entertainment providers", but I'm not sure that's completely accurate. I think a lot of it comes from simply not having experience as a telcomm provider.
I also think that a few people serving MP3s, porn or warez are largely to blame for the absence and restrictions on upstream, just as a relatively small number of people who misuse guns totally misrepresent the larger gun-owning population (to pick a totally loaded analogy..).
Frog legs are actually quite good. I prefer them deep-fried. There's not a whole lot of meat on an individual frog leg. I'm guessing its roughly parallel to a chicken wing in overall meat quantity. A standard bucket (~2 US gallons) would probably provide enough meat for about 2-3 people to eat a meal.
I recently at some excellent frog legs in a restaurant in Houma, Louisiana on West Main Street. For the uninitiated, they really do taste something like white-meat chicken.
This was the way it was everywhere that was once called "Bell Land". The Man did the wiring, the fixing, and telephone set leasing and fucking with any of it was a no-no. I'm not sure if it was illegal in the sense of a criminal action, but it was not looked upon with any nicities.
I'm surprised that they can refuse service. Around here, residential service is considered a "lifeline" service that has some kind of power over other telco initiatives. In fact, US West tried to use it as some kind of justification for some kind of modem surcharge about 4-5 years ago when the internet was heating up and the telco claimed they'd need to do branch-office upgrades because the trunks were full of modem users.
Residential service is still a nut waiting to be cracked, though. It's still too subsidized by other services (wonder why a T1 is still $800/mo?) and rural people still pay too little for service relative to the costs urban dwellers pay.
At least it's not like it was. I'm sure it will never be perfect, they'll ALWAYS be looking for a way to screw us.
That's impressive. I've always heard rumors (friend-of-a-friend variety) that Intel had the 486 line running well over 100Mhz internally. The FOAF said his personal workstation at Intel was a 133Mhz 486. It wasn't clear whether these were standard 486s running on odd mainboards or odd 486s running on standard mainboards.
99 times out of 100, management has to pry the techs' fingers from the code.
I agree with you up to a certain point. I think there are some engineers who will never "finish" a project unless they're given an end time. We've referred to this as the "Lego" problem -- when we were kids and built something with legos it never got "finished" -- there was ALWAYS some kind of further optimization/coolness/whatever changes that could be made. I emphasize COULD -- you can ALWAYS make something better. Even with the geek's favorite, Linux, Linus has to say "CODE FREEZE" in spite of the developers who know that there's further improvement that could be made.
Not to defend meddling marketers too much, but many of them do know that if they don't get some product into the market at a certain point in time it won't sell well enough to provide ROI. If it doesn't provide ROI, then nobody has a job.
Furthermore, we as users are USED to getting slipshod code the first few releases. Be it Windows, Linux, etc -- everybody knows you don't go production in an initial release, you wait until the first patch/service pack (at least).
I hear your same complaints from a friend who is a history professor at a major midwestern land-grant university. He says 90% of his students are "knuckle-walking droolers who can barely string four words together".
And this is the problem with achievment of any kind everywhere. Most people are more interested in eating, fucking and getting wasted. Anything that involves work, thought or some kind of introspection is clearly out the window.
I see the same thing at work, and saw the same thing at University and in high school. People just aren't interested.
I used to go to UG meetings and the like that were hosted in vednors spaces. What I found when I got there was a lot of anti-competitor FUD and pro-product marketing. The people from the vendor that hosted the meeting were a bunch of suit-wearing geeks who knew shit about their own products and nothing but corporate PR about anything else. The UG "facilitator" was some dork lackey for the vendor who managed to turn the meeting into a 1 hr commercial.
Not a terrible idea. I think experience has shown that those with money will dominate a TLD in all namespaces available, thus rendering TLDs rather pointless. High levels of regulation would be required to achieve otherwise, and the global nature of the internet makes this difficult at best.
IIRC, it was even more limited than that. It was certain filters that were SMP enabled. There would be little value and great expense in SMP-enabling the basic UI.
IIRC further, there have long been available daughter boards for various Mac platforms to do filter acceleration in Photoshop. I think these have ranged from general purpose CPUs to DSPs. Earliest one I can remember was for JPEG compression, although I think more commonly they were used for stuff like gaussian blurs. I can remember working at prepress shop on an unaccelerated '030 and waiting like 5 minutes to do filters on a 30 MB file, so they had some value.
Is it that bad? Random, high-speed might be a problem but sequential ought to be not that difficult. I'd imagine that the entire mechanism could be housed in something no larger than a typical housing used for external CDs.
Given the storage capacity relative to the size, even a mechanism as large as a typical mid-tower PC case capable of storing several TB of data would be useful. Remember, there were people who wet their pants over early WORM drives that were slow as hell.
I think the data "cube" conception is what gets people. IANA optical researcher, but why not a cylinder? I envision a cylinder spinning with two lasers mounted on the side at 90 deg angles to each other and another mounted something like a hard disk head on one end.
But I do agree... I'd rather be photographed in the UK than go to a US school
But it's British schools that have the reputation for brutality. I think they're the archetype, with headmasters doling out caning and all that. Look at "The Wall" -- that illustrates it pretty well.
American schools have long had a reputation for cliquishness, but American society is much less burdended by the social stratifications that burden the British system.
I notice that most of the other posters here claim "MD isn't dead" but every time I'm at BestBuy or the like I see an increasingly smaller MD display and more emphasis on CD-R(W). MD prerecordeds are nonexistant (Sony had a few titles from their own in-house labels, I never saw others).
That being said, I believe MD is a superior technology. I just wish that Sony would get off their arses and give us MP3 capabilities. Somebody did a great mockup of a Palm/MD/MP3 combo player which would be HUGE if someone would actually build it.
The one thing missing from flash-based MP3 players is their cost per unit of storage. MD is the ideal storage media for MP3.
You know, multiple anonymous servers, except for Napster, just rotate among them. Go underground in such a way that there is no legal entity who owns and manages the service.
Except that this is the problem that people have complained about the centralized Napster model. There has to be at minimum a list of napster servers to connect to. Sure, you don't have to maintain this list but then you don't know which one to connect to. Without a large number of people connecting to a server, the selection of things to download sucks, and nobody uses it and you're back to the selection of things that your circle of friends has and we're back to taping 12" LPs onto tape again.
For every class I'd ever been to, only 1 in 6 were actually looking for a job. The rest were already employed, in the computer field in some manner or other. I'd say that maybe for half the info was directly job relevant, and the other half? You'd be surprised the number of places that send employees to training costing $$$$ for no reason other than it seems like the right thing to do.
You're right, but by then we'll have come full circle -- back to the IBM Profs-type mainframe productivity environment...
The rumor mill has it that the Select version of XP will be register-free, to help companies that do imaging and the like. To my eyes these look like the non-Select version of the same install CD. My question is, what's to prevent someone from comparing a select and non-select XP CD and finding the N files that are different (presumably they will largely be the same) and producing either a binary patch set or just distributing those files?
And the Russians refused to even provide maps on the same "national insecurity" basis. I'm sure there were rudimentary road maps, but generally IIRC maps were considered state secrets, especially larger maps or detailed maps of rural areas.
I'm sure there were examples of this during the Yugoslavian bombing campaign. I started getting a lot of spam from pro-Serbian organizations about this time, of course all of the address information was forged. Relay-hijacking probably doesn't fit the mental model that most people have if you say "hacktivism", but it certainly fits mine..
There was a great article in mumblemuble about an extensive aerial mapping of New York that's just reached completion. Until recently, the civil engineering folks in NYC didn't even have a partiuclarly accurate map of the CITY, let alone the sewer system.
The new map used aeriel photography coupled with a GIS-type CAD system to produce a super-accurate (within a couple of feet) map of NYC's streets, buildings, bridges, docks and so on.
The kicker was that they wanted to make it publicly available, but the ubiqutous "law enforcement" (cue sinister music) didn't want it made public since they felt that it'd be an ideal way for "criminal elements" to pursue whatever it is "criminal elements do".
Anyway, given the relative age of NYC and the way it grew, I'm surprised they know where ANYTHING goes.
Right, the idea being that the blurring allows a level of smoothness the screen cannot deliver.
The issue I had was that the previous poster was showing a JPEG bitmap of what it looked like. Since JPEG is a lossy format, the "detail" I was looking for was the specific blurring of type edges and I'm not sure if what I'm seeing is antialiasing or JPEG artifacts..
Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but isn't some of the enhanced detail provided by antialiasing lost in a jpeg bitmap?
They've been carping about HDTV for a while, I think you're right on track. The CATV people don't want to carry it at all, they want to use the extra signalling for value-add services (phone, internet, other channels, etc).
Another well-intentioned scheme that turns into corporate welfare. Wonderful.
As for the "user error" response - it does happen I'm afraid but let me say this. I get so many calls from people who are supposedly IT professionals who have no clue at all that it's real hard to stay un-cynical - but I try. But I also make sure that I get them to check the simple things first. Sometimes people hear that as patronizing or me blaming them but it's not - it's a troubleshooting procedure. I know for a fact that for every guy who's offended by me asking if any of the filesystems are 100% - there's two who haven't checked it. (And 5 others who just say no and we move on.) Believe me we'll quickly get to the non-trivial problems if that's what it is.
My gripe is the exact opposite. I answer with exact honest and precision with all the basic questions they bother with. Where I get pissed is the *days* of "analysis" they go through and the fingerpointing they get into. If the first-line guy doesn't have an option when I've answered his obvious questions, the ticket ought to be escalated to someone with more knowledge and better problem solving skills, and not kept with the drone who regurgitates the fingerpointing excuses fed to them by their line managers who have call-resolution numbers to make.