It was happening well before the Internet and AOL could become factors. Back in the early 90s I remember fellow students using "2" "u" and "r" as words.
I think they key cost is infrastructure. Running cable to every house is expensive, especially in rural areas. As I'm sure you can infer, it's just not profitable to run cable to the farmhouse three miles out from the nearest Midwestern town.
The sat companies traded physical security for technological security, and they're seeing the effects of it. There's not so much risk of a person tapping into physical lines, and there is a clear legal basis when it comes to a person tapping a cable, while intercepting a signal is a little more fuzzy in people's minds.
I suppose the thing to remember is that rights to the airwaves are rather similar to mining rights. It's separare from normal ownership of property. Because what goes over the air affects those around you, the government reserves all ownership, doling out bandwidth as it sees fit. That's what the FCC does, you realize - sell the right to your air. You're lucky they let you use it at all...;)
"oooh...for only twice what i can get TV from a cable for, i can get it from a satellite! And satellites are shiny! oooooooo....shiny."
I don't know what planet you're on, but expanded basic cable where I live costs $38 per month. That's roughly fifty channels. This is also analog cable, mind you. DirecTV's Total Choice package is less than $35 per month, and has a better (IMO) selction of channels. The only downside is the lack of local channels for my area. Total Choice Plus offers even more channels for about the same rate as our current cable bill.
If I could get local channels through the DTV receiver, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
(The reason that is a big deal to me is my TiVo. The DirecTiVos may have dual-stream capability, but they have no actual MPEG encoder on-board. Considering that half the shows we record are on network TV, the only viable solution to us is regular DTV with our current stand-alone TiVo, which seems like a relatively poor option to me.)
But why do people not "get" the whole tradeoff idea except for portables?...For some reason people "get" it for portables, but not for desktop systems. Weird.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. There are people that "get it" on both sides of the laptop/desktop world. There are value desktops around, and many (if not most) people get them. It's just that the performance people go desktop because there is no laptop solution.
I am far from sure, but I believe the tech Woz actually had something to do with creating was a form of font anti-aliasing that involved rendering to a higher resolution then interpolating down to screen resolution.
Just because a nuclear bomb is one well-noted way to create an EM blast does not mean it's the ONLY WAY TO DO SO. It does require a large amount of power, but nothing on the scale of a nuclear reaction.
And hopefully, it takes more work to mess a chip up than a magnetic strip.
I would imagine a suitably strong EMP would to a number on both the strip and the chip. It's not that hard to build a device that does just that, either (IIRC).
I remember hearing commentators for the last game I watched, how about you? It's not the exact same thing, but you have to admit the commentary gives a story backdrop to an otherwise uninteresting exchange of points.
The most interesting, successful and universally appealing games are those such as Tetris, where there is no end, but no story to get there either.
These are popular for the much same reasons sitcoms and McDonald's are popular - they're fast and easy. Junk-food gaming. There will always be room for the more involved games, but it's a more limited market. (Witness the relative poularity of Risk versus Diplomacy, or Tic-Tac-Toe versus D & D.)
The problem is that if it takes so long to finish one game, people will buy less games.
That's why you'll see smaller companies making games like that - they only have one game at a time to sell you, while EA wants you to buy all 3,000 of their current titles.
90 million captive users watching your banner ads while they download? This is a golden business model of cat-and-mouse; by the time the courts shut them down, they will have made hundreds of millions, stashed away in private overseas accounts, and then they just declare bankruptcy to avoid paying anything out.
Yeah, maybe a few years ago. They're most likely just affording their Ramen noodle diet these days.
Last time I checked, murder was illegal, punishable by death in many states, yet it still occurs.
Spam is a means to an end - selling your shit to gullible people. Murder is not just a means, but an end in itself. When you want someone dead, there's not really another way around it. With spam, there's always telemarketing and pop-ups.
In addition, murder can be a crime of passion, while spamming is hardly such. I can't remember ever thinking "Oh that bastard cut me off! I'll help him increase his penis size, then give him a work-at-home job! Oh I'm JUST SOOOO ANGRY!"
The Alpha was in almost all ways a technically superior design to the IA-64. Now that the same group of architects is working for Intel, they can probably make the IA-64 run almost as well or better...
The fact that you have superior designers working on fixing up an inferior spec does not mean they can work miracles. When you start with something that is not as good, you will spend a lot of time catching up - time that could have been used to better an already good platform.
So, instead of a great Alpha, you'll end up with an as-good-as-the-old-Alpha Itanium.
I was goign to yell at you, but I see it's already been done. Oh well, might as well re-iterate.
Oh, so that ROM code included on all PCI cards that plugs right into the x86 BIOS framwork and gives you extra configuration menus and boot possibilities on everything from NICs to RAID controllers doesn't count?
By "plugs right into" do you mean "runs separately?" If not, well that's what you should have said. Your main motherboard BIOS has a boot option that allows other devices to take control of the boot process, but it's far short of a plug-in arch.
OpenFirmware doesn't solve your problem, there's no chanse in hell PCI card vendors will include the necessary code compiled for each and every CPU arch on earth.
Oh, but it does. It uses an interpreted language for everything, so it's platform-agnostic. It's rather powerful and flexible, as well. I have seen (not used, mind you, I didn't have the machine to run it) a version of Pong written in Forth code that you could run on a few specific Mac models. It was a product of MacHack, probably six years ago or so. You got it into the Mac by connecting a serial cable to the Mac, then entering a spefic command into the firmware that told it to read an incoming program off the serial lines. (Oh, what those geeks think of.)
ACPI is exactly what you want, it specifies a virtual machine and the pheripal ROM contains code compiled for this machine. Think Java in a BIOS. Unfortunatley ACPI today leaves a lot to be wished for but I bet that by version 3.0...
Okay, something sucks now, but I'm sure that by the time they work on it more it'll suck less. That's not the way clean interfaces get made. Look a little more into Open Firmware, and understand that it does pretty much everything now that you think ACPI will do eventually.
You confuse the mechanism with the functionality. Yes, a BIOS lets you set myriad options. None of those options are specific to a BIOS.
True, Apple doesn't really pack their OF implementations with features, but it suits the way a Macintosh is used. If you get into it, you will see that OF is actually remarkably flexible and powerful. For a really good example, get into the firmware on a Sun machine. Look at the things you can do with the SCSI cards. Note the extensive diagnostics for the network controllers. If Sun wanted to (indeed, if Sun users wanted the ability to) you can bet controls for voltages and the like would be there as well.
PCs use a bios still because of the enormous hardware choices available in the x86 marketplace that do not exist for small, closed hardware companies like Apple, for instance.
Not true at all. PCs use a BIOS because it provides all the bacwards compatibility the DOS (and now Windows) market demands. In fact, Open Firmware provides mechanisms so that devices can extend the functionality. If you insert a new card, it provides new abilitis related to the card in the firmware. The closest a PC BIOS gets to that is multiple independent BIOSes, like you see when you have a bootable SCSI controller, NIC, or the like installed.
The BIOS is very much like the x86 architecture. It's still here because it's the product of very gradual change. It is layer upon layer of compatibility, with advanced functions tacked on one at a time. Open Firmware, on the other hand, is relatively new. The group that designed it created it to be open and expandable, while the groups that designed the BIOS wanted to run DOS as well as the IBM PCs they were cloning, nothing more.
I'd imagine it'd take a run of the mill cs or engineering student less than a week to get the basics designed for this and maybe a little longer to get it to the level of the commercial product.
It'd take a run-of-the-mill student a week to get their Java environment set up, and you know it.
Slashdot Mirror
It was happening well before the Internet and AOL could become factors. Back in the early 90s I remember fellow students using "2" "u" and "r" as words.
I blame Prince.
Green shirt with blue pants is a good combination!
He was talking about the 80s, when it would have been much more appropriate to wear green pants with a hot pink shirt.
I think they key cost is infrastructure. Running cable to every house is expensive, especially in rural areas. As I'm sure you can infer, it's just not profitable to run cable to the farmhouse three miles out from the nearest Midwestern town.
;)
The sat companies traded physical security for technological security, and they're seeing the effects of it. There's not so much risk of a person tapping into physical lines, and there is a clear legal basis when it comes to a person tapping a cable, while intercepting a signal is a little more fuzzy in people's minds.
I suppose the thing to remember is that rights to the airwaves are rather similar to mining rights. It's separare from normal ownership of property. Because what goes over the air affects those around you, the government reserves all ownership, doling out bandwidth as it sees fit. That's what the FCC does, you realize - sell the right to your air. You're lucky they let you use it at all...
"oooh...for only twice what i can get TV from a cable for, i can get it from a satellite! And satellites are shiny! oooooooo....shiny."
I don't know what planet you're on, but expanded basic cable where I live costs $38 per month. That's roughly fifty channels. This is also analog cable, mind you. DirecTV's Total Choice package is less than $35 per month, and has a better (IMO) selction of channels. The only downside is the lack of local channels for my area. Total Choice Plus offers even more channels for about the same rate as our current cable bill.
If I could get local channels through the DTV receiver, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
(The reason that is a big deal to me is my TiVo. The DirecTiVos may have dual-stream capability, but they have no actual MPEG encoder on-board. Considering that half the shows we record are on network TV, the only viable solution to us is regular DTV with our current stand-alone TiVo, which seems like a relatively poor option to me.)
But why do people not "get" the whole tradeoff idea except for portables?...For some reason people "get" it for portables, but not for desktop systems. Weird.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. There are people that "get it" on both sides of the laptop/desktop world. There are value desktops around, and many (if not most) people get them. It's just that the performance people go desktop because there is no laptop solution.
I am far from sure, but I believe the tech Woz actually had something to do with creating was a form of font anti-aliasing that involved rendering to a higher resolution then interpolating down to screen resolution.
If you can't learn to be more expressive with your writing, then don't be surprised when people misread the tone you use.
I can see by your recent comments I'm not exactly the first person to miss your "jokes."
A directed EM pulse is NOT THAT HARD.
Just because a nuclear bomb is one well-noted way to create an EM blast does not mean it's the ONLY WAY TO DO SO. It does require a large amount of power, but nothing on the scale of a nuclear reaction.
Fucking trolls.
And hopefully, it takes more work to mess a chip up than a magnetic strip.
I would imagine a suitably strong EMP would to a number on both the strip and the chip. It's not that hard to build a device that does just that, either (IIRC).
By the way, relying on people to not type in your password is security through obscurity. Don't trust that. :-P
Having a 'secret' string of characters is security through obcurity, don't do that! =P
Do basketball games need narrative?
I remember hearing commentators for the last game I watched, how about you? It's not the exact same thing, but you have to admit the commentary gives a story backdrop to an otherwise uninteresting exchange of points.
The most interesting, successful and universally appealing games are those such as Tetris, where there is no end, but no story to get there either.
These are popular for the much same reasons sitcoms and McDonald's are popular - they're fast and easy. Junk-food gaming. There will always be room for the more involved games, but it's a more limited market. (Witness the relative poularity of Risk versus Diplomacy, or Tic-Tac-Toe versus D & D.)
The problem is that if it takes so long to finish one game, people will buy less games.
That's why you'll see smaller companies making games like that - they only have one game at a time to sell you, while EA wants you to buy all 3,000 of their current titles.
I'm a man
I'll be the judge of that.
90 million captive users watching your banner ads while they download? This is a golden business model of cat-and-mouse; by the time the courts shut them down, they will have made hundreds of millions, stashed away in private overseas accounts, and then they just declare bankruptcy to avoid paying anything out.
Yeah, maybe a few years ago. They're most likely just affording their Ramen noodle diet these days.
Correction.. spam will never stop... ever.
.
. .
Last time I checked, murder was illegal, punishable by death in many states, yet it still occurs.
Spam is a means to an end - selling your shit to gullible people. Murder is not just a means, but an end in itself. When you want someone dead, there's not really another way around it. With spam, there's always telemarketing and pop-ups.
In addition, murder can be a crime of passion, while spamming is hardly such. I can't remember ever thinking "Oh that bastard cut me off! I'll help him increase his penis size, then give him a work-at-home job! Oh I'm JUST SOOOO ANGRY!"
>>(32k+ games apparently) available over broadband
;)
>That's nothing! My old Apple IIe could play 64k games!
That's what the '+' is for. The thing's upgradeable
The Alpha was in almost all ways a technically superior design to the IA-64. Now that the same group of architects is working for Intel, they can probably make the IA-64 run almost as well or better...
The fact that you have superior designers working on fixing up an inferior spec does not mean they can work miracles. When you start with something that is not as good, you will spend a lot of time catching up - time that could have been used to better an already good platform.
So, instead of a great Alpha, you'll end up with an as-good-as-the-old-Alpha Itanium.
Okay, okay. I deserve that. =P
I was goign to yell at you, but I see it's already been done. Oh well, might as well re-iterate.
Oh, so that ROM code included on all PCI cards that plugs right into the x86 BIOS framwork and gives you extra configuration menus and boot possibilities on everything from NICs to RAID controllers doesn't count?
By "plugs right into" do you mean "runs separately?" If not, well that's what you should have said. Your main motherboard BIOS has a boot option that allows other devices to take control of the boot process, but it's far short of a plug-in arch.
OpenFirmware doesn't solve your problem, there's no chanse in hell PCI card vendors will include the necessary code compiled for each and every CPU arch on earth.
Oh, but it does. It uses an interpreted language for everything, so it's platform-agnostic. It's rather powerful and flexible, as well. I have seen (not used, mind you, I didn't have the machine to run it) a version of Pong written in Forth code that you could run on a few specific Mac models. It was a product of MacHack, probably six years ago or so. You got it into the Mac by connecting a serial cable to the Mac, then entering a spefic command into the firmware that told it to read an incoming program off the serial lines. (Oh, what those geeks think of.)
ACPI is exactly what you want, it specifies a virtual machine and the pheripal ROM contains code compiled for this machine. Think Java in a BIOS. Unfortunatley ACPI today leaves a lot to be wished for but I bet that by version 3.0...
Okay, something sucks now, but I'm sure that by the time they work on it more it'll suck less. That's not the way clean interfaces get made. Look a little more into Open Firmware, and understand that it does pretty much everything now that you think ACPI will do eventually.
...would answer this way.
You confuse the mechanism with the functionality. Yes, a BIOS lets you set myriad options. None of those options are specific to a BIOS.
True, Apple doesn't really pack their OF implementations with features, but it suits the way a Macintosh is used. If you get into it, you will see that OF is actually remarkably flexible and powerful. For a really good example, get into the firmware on a Sun machine. Look at the things you can do with the SCSI cards. Note the extensive diagnostics for the network controllers. If Sun wanted to (indeed, if Sun users wanted the ability to) you can bet controls for voltages and the like would be there as well.
PCs use a bios still because of the enormous hardware choices available in the x86 marketplace that do not exist for small, closed hardware companies like Apple, for instance.
Not true at all. PCs use a BIOS because it provides all the bacwards compatibility the DOS (and now Windows) market demands. In fact, Open Firmware provides mechanisms so that devices can extend the functionality. If you insert a new card, it provides new abilitis related to the card in the firmware. The closest a PC BIOS gets to that is multiple independent BIOSes, like you see when you have a bootable SCSI controller, NIC, or the like installed.
The BIOS is very much like the x86 architecture. It's still here because it's the product of very gradual change. It is layer upon layer of compatibility, with advanced functions tacked on one at a time. Open Firmware, on the other hand, is relatively new. The group that designed it created it to be open and expandable, while the groups that designed the BIOS wanted to run DOS as well as the IBM PCs they were cloning, nothing more.
Why Read CNN when you can read the real australian news at the ABC site.
So, basically, you're saying to get Austrailian news from the American Broadcasting Company rather than CNN?
Fa.
I'm excited about the possibilities it offers right now.
What...the same advantages of internal IEEE 1394? Yeah, that's been a HUGE success.
I'd imagine it'd take a run of the mill cs or engineering student less than a week to get the basics designed for this and maybe a little longer to get it to the level of the commercial product.
It'd take a run-of-the-mill student a week to get their Java environment set up, and you know it.
plus widening circles just make sense when you got a round thing.
Like...your average room?
Don't forget that 27-inch tire has a 27" diameter, not circumference.
A wheel with a 27-inch circumference would be...tiny.