If anyone can recall, back in the 70's Python films were always released as double features, with things like a travelogue on Bulgarian flower pickers dedicated to the destruction to the western world. Brian was shown with this little gem 'warming' the viewers up 1st.
Mail the accessories, instructions 'n guarantee home, using USMail. Then just carry the bugger on board, odds ons customs won't even notice, particularly if you wear a business suit while flying back.
If you know anyone with the same laptop, you could ask them if you can clone their hard drive before you leave to go to the US (back in the W98 days I use to make cloned HDD backups using some Powerquest or Quarterdeck program), then when you buy your laptop you make some ghost image backup of the new Dell default install on the HDD & put it on a CD, & then install the clone. Then if on the odd chance that customs challengers you on the laptop, you can show that all those pre-trip dates on the HDD. Even better ask for a copy of your mate's receipt & stuff it in the back of your wallet & cover it up with old train tickets & supermarket receipts, then you can say "actually I haven't cleaned out my wallet since then, so I've probably still got the receipt"
Or while you're in the US you could buy a pair of official looking overalls & then have some sort of 'quarentine' marking put on it. Then you get some bong water from someone & stick it in one of those little spray things that people use to spray their indoor ferns. Then you can walk along as people are queuing up to book their luggage in, & spray the stuff along the luggage, like ailines use to have to do on flights coming into Oz about 20 years ago. Then hopefully customs in London will be destracted by their dogs going crazy with half the luggage coming through.
I use to bring professional Nikon cameras & Sony Camcorders (like the DCR-VX2000) into Sydney from abroad just by carring then in as luggage & never got pulled up by customs. Mind you'd I'd always pre declare some Asian wood carving so I'd go through quarentine instead, where they paid less attention to synthetic & mineral based products. I'm not sure you can pull the same stunt at Heathrow.
You just have a seperate ballot for each seperate election issue that are different colours & one just sticks them in the box which matches the colour.
That's how its done here when one has to vote on both the house of reps, the senate & a constitutional referendum (3 seperate ballots)
Good ole papper ballets are best, as in 'tick the box' next to the candidate of your choice (or 'number the boxes in order of preferance', in regards preferential elections).
Then one just orginises for the election to occure on Saturday so thousands of public servents & teachers are available all weekend to get some good penalty rate dosh counting votes. Ontop of which it means thousand of party voluenteers are also available to hand scrutineer the count (IOW, in regards the US, each hand counter has a democrat & GOP scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders)
This is the way it's done in most countries, without any problems, including Australia, & there's no reason it shouldn't scale up to the US. Afterall scale wise a US election would be no different than Oz, New Zealand, Canada, the UK & half a dozen other European countries all having their general elections together on the same day.
Here in Oz it's rare for us not to know who's won by Saturday night, or the end of the weekend at the latest. Usraelly the number of seats that are undecided by monday can be counted on one hand.
Fact is the only reason the US uses their boody stupid machines is because they vote on Tuesday for some stupid reason & it's cheaper, but they just arn't as good.
Especially when every 2nd county or state uses different types of bloody machines, meaning a almost infinit variety of weird ballot styles & machine interfaces.
It's almost as if the US govt wants having about the lowest voter turnout in the western world. Get rid of the machines & replace them with simple hand counted 'tick the box' paper ballots & I bet the turnout increases at least 10%, then change the vote to saturday & I bet turnout increases at least another 10%.
Because of their long pipelines, Intel chips perform worse than what their clock speed suggests.
Remember how the P5 performed better per clock than a 486 (a P75 performed better than a 486 100 or something). Same thing occured with the P6 (the Pentium Pro 166 or whatever performed better than the P55 200). Yet the P4 (by the previous naming convention really a P7) performed worse per clock than a P!!! (by the previous naming convention really a P666). Yes a P!!! 1ghz performs better than a P4 1ghz.
Where as the AMD K7, beats both the K6-3 & P4 clock for clock
that uses Windows XP uses CDROM burns of the [i]'corpfiles edition'[/i] originally sourced from pirate copies bought on South-east Asian holidays (except for one uncle that has a store bought PC)
Lets be honest, one of the biggest things hurting alternative software developers is pirated MS software under cutting them.
You can bet that the Lotus & Word Perfect office suites would have much bigger market share (as they both virtually more or less match MS Office but undercut it to a significant degree price wise) if it wasn't for CD burns of MS Office costing less than a dollar undercutting them.
Considering that QNX has a 1.44MB bootable demo floppy that has:- 1 A live OS 2 A file system (that I think maybe even now has read/write drivers for QNX's 2 file systems & all the FAT derivitives, plus read-only NTFS support) 3 A very elegant colour graphical enviroment/GUI (that beats the crap out of X-Windows & all the layered crudge now normally ontop of it) 4 Networking capabilities (including drivers for common NICs & dial-up modems) & 5 a web browser (that even I think now supports a ported Shockwave/Flash plugin, if there's a HDD in the system with the required space formated with a supported file system).
Now even though there's obviously a RAM drive thing going on here, there's no reason why moderm BIOSes can't do the same thing, especially considering contemporary flash RAM sizes mean many BIOSes are to a good degree spare space. From what I remember someone posting here on Slashdot, when this or a very similar topic was previously posted (seems like yonks ago now), some PC flash RAM BIOSes are more than half empty, leading to this potential being investigated, simply as a by-product of finding something productive to do with the left over bytes on the BIOS's flash memory.
......Back in the era of the P5, I remember saying that there's absolutelly no reason (cost or technicalities) why the BIOS couldn't axcess & run all media imput & data saving devices, while running the Video card by a generic 800x600 colour VESA driver. Ontop of which there should've been a PAL/NTSC S-Video/RCA TV output connector embedded on the backplane, that communicated with the video card via the PCI bus, complete with embedded hardware that converted the complete desktop (of both the BIOS & any operating systems) to the standard input of PAL/NTSC TVs (so one doesn't have the problem of just getting the top left corner of the desktop on the telly, or only being able to use 480x640)
You see I remember a mate of mine in 1996 having a VGA to RCA converter cable that auto converted the desktop to PAL/NTSC resolutions automatically, using a gizmo box in the middle of the cable that was OS agnostic (it was for showing things like video/game demos & Power Point presentations on large screen tellies)
Surelly once economies of scale are taken into account (of a big firm like Aopen doing this on all there boards), the cost differance wouldn't be more than a dollar or 2, especially with the added demand potential improving economies of scale even more so.
Mind you what was the price of flash memory like in 1996? I've never bought any so I have no idea.Maybe just like VRAM, EDDO-RAM & the emerging SDRAM, flash memory was a lot more expensive back then, meaning BIOSes back them were a 1/4 the size or something. Which of course means everything I typed in the above paragraphs is a bunch of humbug.
Just because one agrees to help an old neihbour weed his garden, doesn't mean one has agreed to do it for life.
Just as agreeing to host a website doesn't mean one is agreeing to host it for life either.
Fact is 3 years is a long time on the web (going by the concept that web years equal dog years, that's 20 years in the real world), meaning he's quite within his rights to withdraw his service, pending a satisfactory conclusion to negotiating a new agreement.
Remember all he's doing is just withdrawing his services, nothing more.
In the telco business fixed costs are a disproportionate part of the total costs, making economies of scale king, so the best way to cut costs is by having one single provider with 100% of the market (remember the costs of a national cell phone company with 1/3 of the market arn't significantly lower than a national cell phone company with 100% of the market, well relativelly speaking anyway)
Now no one wants a private monopoly that free to charge what they want, so the go is a govt telco monopoly - meaning polies have to worry about voter reaction if they charge too much.
So the best way to resolve this is for govts to charge enormous fees for cables running in public air-space & ground space, then buy out the 1st big telco when it's shares drop enough. Then the govt can charge nominal public air/ground-space rents to itself, making all the other telcos uncompetitive.
Of course countries that still have govt telcos are way ahead - look at Singapore
When he said most modern chips don't covert CISC to RISC, which is right.
Just look at the huge variety of server & embedded CPUs they use RISC, compared to the number of X86 chip makers, basically Intel, AMD, VIA & NS (that make a enbedded version of the Cyrix 686 with intigrated chipset, video & audio). Of course going by PC unit sales things would be different.
Incidently the VIA C3 is basically a ramped up version of the IDT Winchip II. VIA purchased Cyrix, which had a newly designed chip called Joshua. It had the fastest X86 integer unit (the 686 integer unit), combined with double the floating point units of the 686 (& each was a faster FP unit too), with 2 3DNow units too, so it was very fast in regards instructions per clock, but was hopeless in regards being ramped up to good speeds, which meant poor marketibility. But VIA bough IDT which had the Winchip, which was the opposite, it was a design that could easily be ramped to a Ghz or more, but was poor in regards instructions per clock, marketibility wise much better, It did also have the benafit of being power efficient 'n cool.
So VIA cut the Joshua & renamed the Winchip IIB as the Cyrix 3(b), eventually becoming the C3.
There's real insecurity there. Just note the way US ceromonial units still use the M1 or M14, unlike Commenwealth countries like the UK & Oz we're ceramonial units are equiped with the standard service rifle, no matter how untraditional it looks (like the L1A1 & then the S85 (UK) &or the AUG (Oz).
& no ridiculous chrome helmets or JROTC school cadets wearing so much fruit salad you can barely see their shirts
This is why this videophone thing is being driven by the legions of one handed typists who want to see each other wank off, because they don't know that the [i]"16 year-old bisexual lesbian blond schoolgirl"[/i] they wank off too every day on the web's actually a 40 year old bloke.
In regards anyone with a western middle class back grounds (or better), yes being rich won't necessarily make one happy, but in regards anyone who's lived in grinding 3rd world poverty for any sort of length of time, wealth will definitly make one happy.
One's perspective all come's down to where one is coming from.
People of western middle class backgrounds have no idea what the insecurity of grounding 3rd world poverty is like. Just imagine what it would be like knowing that if one can't manage to get a days work tomorrow doing 15 hours manual labour in tropical heat, then one will have no money to feed one's self & one's children. Then just imagine the security that one would fill with sudden wealth, when one has had to live like that all one's life.
The only one's in the west that can really comprehend the insecurity of wondering where one's next meal is coming from, are Junkies who are willing to beg, borrow or steal to get their next shot (otherwise they'll be too sick to function)
Really there's no one happier than a 3rd world peasent that's all of a sudden wealthy
It's just a AMD XP/Nforce based NC/terminal running XP embedded, with any games running off RAM via a broadband connection.
Meaning all that's in the box is prabably a mini ATX NForce motherboard (with embedded audio, video, ethernet & USB) some RAM & a AMD CPU.
The venture capital is probably hypothetically needed to create a natio-wide subscription based broadband network for delivering the games. Well at a guess I'd say that's what his spiel is to investors.
Ripping of venture investors is like get rich quick schemes - the people getting ripped off have let their greed overtake their common sense & thus deserved to be ripped off. IE it's karma
Slashdot Mirror
...is in evidence here.
It could only come from England, or some colonial off-shoot with private schools of Etonian pretensions.
If anyone can recall, back in the 70's Python films were always released as double features, with things like a travelogue on Bulgarian flower pickers dedicated to the destruction to the western world. Brian was shown with this little gem 'warming' the viewers up 1st.
Mail the accessories, instructions 'n guarantee home, using USMail. Then just carry the bugger on board, odds ons customs won't even notice, particularly if you wear a business suit while flying back.
If you know anyone with the same laptop, you could ask them if you can clone their hard drive before you leave to go to the US (back in the W98 days I use to make cloned HDD backups using some Powerquest or Quarterdeck program), then when you buy your laptop you make some ghost image backup of the new Dell default install on the HDD & put it on a CD, & then install the clone. Then if on the odd chance that customs challengers you on the laptop, you can show that all those pre-trip dates on the HDD. Even better ask for a copy of your mate's receipt & stuff it in the back of your wallet & cover it up with old train tickets & supermarket receipts, then you can say "actually I haven't cleaned out my wallet since then, so I've probably still got the receipt"
Or while you're in the US you could buy a pair of official looking overalls & then have some sort of 'quarentine' marking put on it. Then you get some bong water from someone & stick it in one of those little spray things that people use to spray their indoor ferns. Then you can walk along as people are queuing up to book their luggage in, & spray the stuff along the luggage, like ailines use to have to do on flights coming into Oz about 20 years ago. Then hopefully customs in London will be destracted by their dogs going crazy with half the luggage coming through.
I use to bring professional Nikon cameras & Sony Camcorders (like the DCR-VX2000) into Sydney from abroad just by carring then in as luggage & never got pulled up by customs. Mind you'd I'd always pre declare some Asian wood carving so I'd go through quarentine instead, where they paid less attention to synthetic & mineral based products. I'm not sure you can pull the same stunt at Heathrow.
You just have a seperate ballot for each seperate election issue that are different colours & one just sticks them in the box which matches the colour.
That's how its done here when one has to vote on both the house of reps, the senate & a constitutional referendum (3 seperate ballots)
Good ole papper ballets are best, as in 'tick the box' next to the candidate of your choice (or 'number the boxes in order of preferance', in regards preferential elections).
Then one just orginises for the election to occure on Saturday so thousands of public servents & teachers are available all weekend to get some good penalty rate dosh counting votes. Ontop of which it means thousand of party voluenteers are also available to hand scrutineer the count (IOW, in regards the US, each hand counter has a democrat & GOP scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders)
This is the way it's done in most countries, without any problems, including Australia, & there's no reason it shouldn't scale up to the US. Afterall scale wise a US election would be no different than Oz, New Zealand, Canada, the UK & half a dozen other European countries all having their general elections together on the same day.
Here in Oz it's rare for us not to know who's won by Saturday night, or the end of the weekend at the latest. Usraelly the number of seats that are undecided by monday can be counted on one hand.
Fact is the only reason the US uses their boody stupid machines is because they vote on Tuesday for some stupid reason & it's cheaper, but they just arn't as good.
Especially when every 2nd county or state uses different types of bloody machines, meaning a almost infinit variety of weird ballot styles & machine interfaces.
It's almost as if the US govt wants having about the lowest voter turnout in the western world. Get rid of the machines & replace them with simple hand counted 'tick the box' paper ballots & I bet the turnout increases at least 10%, then change the vote to saturday & I bet turnout increases at least another 10%.
Because of their long pipelines, Intel chips perform worse than what their clock speed suggests.
Remember how the P5 performed better per clock than a 486 (a P75 performed better than a 486 100 or something). Same thing occured with the P6 (the Pentium Pro 166 or whatever performed better than the P55 200). Yet the P4 (by the previous naming convention really a P7) performed worse per clock than a P!!! (by the previous naming convention really a P666). Yes a P!!! 1ghz performs better than a P4 1ghz.
Where as the AMD K7, beats both the K6-3 & P4 clock for clock
originally.
But it panned out against the P4 of a certain spec, so that's what they say now.
had the ability to format ordinary 1.44MB floppies to 35MBs
thanks
http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
http://tinyurl.com/3yjvs
http://tinyurl.com/2xskw
that uses Windows XP uses CDROM burns of the [i]'corpfiles edition'[/i] originally sourced from pirate copies bought on South-east Asian holidays (except for one uncle that has a store bought PC)
Lets be honest, one of the biggest things hurting alternative software developers is pirated MS software under cutting them.
You can bet that the Lotus & Word Perfect office suites would have much bigger market share (as they both virtually more or less match MS Office but undercut it to a significant degree price wise) if it wasn't for CD burns of MS Office costing less than a dollar undercutting them.
Considering that QNX has a 1.44MB bootable demo floppy that has:-
1 A live OS
2 A file system (that I think maybe even now has read/write drivers for QNX's 2 file systems & all the FAT derivitives, plus read-only NTFS support)
3 A very elegant colour graphical enviroment/GUI (that beats the crap out of X-Windows & all the layered crudge now normally ontop of it)
4 Networking capabilities (including drivers for common NICs & dial-up modems)
& 5 a web browser (that even I think now supports a ported Shockwave/Flash plugin, if there's a HDD in the system with the required space formated with a supported file system).
Now even though there's obviously a RAM drive thing going on here, there's no reason why moderm BIOSes can't do the same thing, especially considering contemporary flash RAM sizes mean many BIOSes are to a good degree spare space. From what I remember someone posting here on Slashdot, when this or a very similar topic was previously posted (seems like yonks ago now), some PC flash RAM BIOSes are more than half empty, leading to this potential being investigated, simply as a by-product of finding something productive to do with the left over bytes on the BIOS's flash memory.
......Back in the era of the P5, I remember saying that there's absolutelly no reason (cost or technicalities) why the BIOS couldn't axcess & run all media imput & data saving devices, while running the Video card by a generic 800x600 colour VESA driver. Ontop of which there should've been a PAL/NTSC S-Video/RCA TV output connector embedded on the backplane, that communicated with the video card via the PCI bus, complete with embedded hardware that converted the complete desktop (of both the BIOS & any operating systems) to the standard input of PAL/NTSC TVs (so one doesn't have the problem of just getting the top left corner of the desktop on the telly, or only being able to use 480x640)
You see I remember a mate of mine in 1996 having a VGA to RCA converter cable that auto converted the desktop to PAL/NTSC resolutions automatically, using a gizmo box in the middle of the cable that was OS agnostic (it was for showing things like video/game demos & Power Point presentations on large screen tellies)
Surelly once economies of scale are taken into account (of a big firm like Aopen doing this on all there boards), the cost differance wouldn't be more than a dollar or 2, especially with the added demand potential improving economies of scale even more so.
Mind you what was the price of flash memory like in 1996? I've never bought any so I have no idea.Maybe just like VRAM, EDDO-RAM & the emerging SDRAM, flash memory was a lot more expensive back then, meaning BIOSes back them were a 1/4 the size or something. Which of course means everything I typed in the above paragraphs is a bunch of humbug.
Just because one agrees to help an old neihbour weed his garden, doesn't mean one has agreed to do it for life.
Just as agreeing to host a website doesn't mean one is agreeing to host it for life either.
Fact is 3 years is a long time on the web (going by the concept that web years equal dog years, that's 20 years in the real world), meaning he's quite within his rights to withdraw his service, pending a satisfactory conclusion to negotiating a new agreement.
Remember all he's doing is just withdrawing his services, nothing more.
In the telco business fixed costs are a disproportionate part of the total costs, making economies of scale king, so the best way to cut costs is by having one single provider with 100% of the market (remember the costs of a national cell phone company with 1/3 of the market arn't significantly lower than a national cell phone company with 100% of the market, well relativelly speaking anyway)
Now no one wants a private monopoly that free to charge what they want, so the go is a govt telco monopoly - meaning polies have to worry about voter reaction if they charge too much.
So the best way to resolve this is for govts to charge enormous fees for cables running in public air-space & ground space, then buy out the 1st big telco when it's shares drop enough. Then the govt can charge nominal public air/ground-space rents to itself, making all the other telcos uncompetitive.
Of course countries that still have govt telcos are way ahead - look at Singapore
When he said most modern chips don't covert CISC to RISC, which is right.
Just look at the huge variety of server & embedded CPUs they use RISC, compared to the number of X86 chip makers, basically Intel, AMD, VIA & NS (that make a enbedded version of the Cyrix 686 with intigrated chipset, video & audio). Of course going by PC unit sales things would be different.
Incidently the VIA C3 is basically a ramped up version of the IDT Winchip II. VIA purchased Cyrix, which had a newly designed chip called Joshua. It had the fastest X86 integer unit (the 686 integer unit), combined with double the floating point units of the 686 (& each was a faster FP unit too), with 2 3DNow units too, so it was very fast in regards instructions per clock, but was hopeless in regards being ramped up to good speeds, which meant poor marketibility. But VIA bough IDT which had the Winchip, which was the opposite, it was a design that could easily be ramped to a Ghz or more, but was poor in regards instructions per clock, marketibility wise much better, It did also have the benafit of being power efficient 'n cool.
So VIA cut the Joshua & renamed the Winchip IIB as the Cyrix 3(b), eventually becoming the C3.
Well things went something like that.
basically a Cyrix 686 with intigrated chipset, video & audio.
Ever heard of the Ka-52?
There's real insecurity there. Just note the way US ceromonial units still use the M1 or M14, unlike Commenwealth countries like the UK & Oz we're ceramonial units are equiped with the standard service rifle, no matter how untraditional it looks (like the L1A1 & then the S85 (UK) &or the AUG (Oz).
& no ridiculous chrome helmets or JROTC school cadets wearing so much fruit salad you can barely see their shirts
Well except for the Arab minority there
This is why this videophone thing is being driven by the legions of one handed typists who want to see each other wank off, because they don't know that the [i]"16 year-old bisexual lesbian blond schoolgirl"[/i] they wank off too every day on the web's actually a 40 year old bloke.
Like 500% or more
In regards anyone with a western middle class back grounds (or better), yes being rich won't necessarily make one happy, but in regards anyone who's lived in grinding 3rd world poverty for any sort of length of time, wealth will definitly make one happy.
One's perspective all come's down to where one is coming from.
People of western middle class backgrounds have no idea what the insecurity of grounding 3rd world poverty is like. Just imagine what it would be like knowing that if one can't manage to get a days work tomorrow doing 15 hours manual labour in tropical heat, then one will have no money to feed one's self & one's children. Then just imagine the security that one would fill with sudden wealth, when one has had to live like that all one's life.
The only one's in the west that can really comprehend the insecurity of wondering where one's next meal is coming from, are Junkies who are willing to beg, borrow or steal to get their next shot (otherwise they'll be too sick to function)
Really there's no one happier than a 3rd world peasent that's all of a sudden wealthy
It's just a AMD XP/Nforce based NC/terminal running XP embedded, with any games running off RAM via a broadband connection.
Meaning all that's in the box is prabably a mini ATX NForce motherboard (with embedded audio, video, ethernet & USB) some RAM & a AMD CPU.
The venture capital is probably hypothetically needed to create a natio-wide subscription based broadband network for delivering the games. Well at a guess I'd say that's what his spiel is to investors.
Ripping of venture investors is like get rich quick schemes - the people getting ripped off have let their greed overtake their common sense & thus deserved to be ripped off. IE it's karma