AT&T had the same deal, and it was private, although regulated. I guess it's probably more related to stodgy old ways than anything else.
Hence acoustically coupled modems, and that sort of fun.
The nice part about leasing the phones was they were domestic made, brick shithouses, not like today's basic phone. They also double as an excellent bludgeoning tool. Designed specifically to reduce service calls, I guess.
In my region, we have a state owned POTS/mobile/internet carrier, they seem to compete well, and let you have a modem hooked to the line. So it isn't impossible. I suppose modernization might have sped up with competing carriers, though (although that is unrelated to privatisation). It's sort of like anything though, powers that be have run phones like this since forever, those sorts of mindsets take a while to come around. Letting consumers push data over the lines wasn't their sort of mandate.
Now, did they actually fear third party equipment would damage the lines? I mean that was the reasoning, but did they have faith in it? Maybe helpdesk didn't want to have to support 100000 models, who knows:p
Ah, I thought PIII was pretty solid, it was just bloody expensive. I seem to recall the frequencies going up faster and the prices being cut more often once the athlon started to get a decent chunk of the market.
P4/netburst was a shitsack, though, especially the early ones. IIRC the 1GHz or 1.13GHz, whatever was top of the line at the time, PIIIs were still blowing the first gen P4s out of the water... pathetic.
That's intentional though. The ARM and MIPS chips used in say, routers, have various amounts of i2c/spi/gpio/pwm/timers/uart/etc, sometimes ADC, DAC. GPIOs are usually configurable as push-pull or open drain, various switching speeds, etc. It's not like an old x86 chip that only has bus I/O and absolutely no peripherals integrated. Sounds more like a microcontroller than a processor, doesn't it...
Now, with proper documentation* you can use all of that in linux quite well, or you could go bare metal if you wanted to. An ARM9 based LED clock is overkill, but it's certainly up for the task as well as an arduino, especially if the price is the same. Plus it can do things your arduino never will without expensive add-ons, say pull some RSS feeds through ethernet and display it on your clock. Or sync via NTP. (That's a weak example, as I've done it on AVRs, although it costed me more than the pi). the sky is the limit here, in what it can do vs. a little 8bit mcu. The clock can also double as your webserver, maybe display some hit statistics in realtime... have it buzz on intrusion attempts, or change color every 50 hits, etc, etc.
*Proper documentation is never going to happen with Broadcom. I wish they would prove me wrong, but past performance shows no chance in hell.
I would love a modern maemo tablet. I had a 770 when they were new, but the hardware was more than a little lacking (speed/memory wise, the build quality was excellent).
Not that government is an inanimate object, oops. Conceptual things too. Anything that isn't alive and capable of having a (physical) gender.
so people, animals, pretty much, get his and her (and its, but people don't like using it on people for some unknown reason*), everything else gets its.
* This is why you see retarded shit like 'he/she' instead of it.
I recall reading that a ridiculously high proportion of men that die in old age have prostate cancer, something like 75% of males over 75, iirc. Usually without posing symptoms / problems, relative to old age at least.
First world problems I guess, as historically they wouldn't have lived long enough for it to show up.
Same reason he dropped the long form census. Facts go against conservative logic. It's easier to pass things without facts.
Hell, even with facts, it doesn't matter with these guys. Crime at it's lowest point in years? Oh - but 'unreported' crime is up. We better expand prisons, add mandatory minimums. For drug offences no less. Back to the fucking cave.
It should be a single line of code on this too, provided the non-existent datasheet tells you where the GPIOs are mapped in memory.
Should be as easy as:
GPIOA_OUTPUT = 0xDDBF;
or something along those lines. (in kernel space. in user space you just write to/sys/class/gpio/something. which is easier, but slower and can only do one bit at a time).
On a side note, some older network cards have sockets for boot EEPROMs, and you can use them to program compatible chips for any purpose, using flashrom from the coreboot project. However, they seem to have a limited number of address lines, so the full capacity of the chips is not exposed.
A few years ago, I added an 8 bit latch onto a 3com card, the highest address line would select it, and latch the upper 8 address lines (so effectively adding 7 bits of address space).
I had planned on adding higher voltage lines for old EPROMs and the like... never got around to it though. It was kind of hokey, mostly just did it to see that i could. I think I had a board I had screwed the bios up on, and that was the whole reason for it.
(I ended up buying one of the chinese programmers eventually, but never use it really.. shifted gears i guess..)
Well, part of it is the move to switch-mode power supplies. In old microwaves the big transformer alone was probably $35 to make.
Your computer PS would be a lot more than $20 if it was a linear PS as opposed to switching. Bigger and heavier too.
I'm with you on the shittier construction, shorter life, more waste aspect though. I'd gladly pay more for something made here, by people paid a living wage... but the population has spoken, cheapest wins. A nice side effect of more expensive, serviceable equipment is that it employs people in repair, too... but that ship has sailed.
Not exactly easy at first. There are userland extensions to all of the above too, which is fine for blinking LEDs and such, but has some limitations... spidev only has certain modes and data lengths,/SS lines are defined in board config (so kernel compile to change), things like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Russia violating IP law? lmao. not a single fuck was given.
Maybe the US should start WWIII to protect its IP interests in china and russia. Good luck bro.
The AK family of weapons are definitely analog.
AT&T had the same deal, and it was private, although regulated. I guess it's probably more related to stodgy old ways than anything else.
Hence acoustically coupled modems, and that sort of fun.
The nice part about leasing the phones was they were domestic made, brick shithouses, not like today's basic phone. They also double as an excellent bludgeoning tool. Designed specifically to reduce service calls, I guess.
In my region, we have a state owned POTS/mobile/internet carrier, they seem to compete well, and let you have a modem hooked to the line. So it isn't impossible. I suppose modernization might have sped up with competing carriers, though (although that is unrelated to privatisation). It's sort of like anything though, powers that be have run phones like this since forever, those sorts of mindsets take a while to come around. Letting consumers push data over the lines wasn't their sort of mandate.
Now, did they actually fear third party equipment would damage the lines? I mean that was the reasoning, but did they have faith in it? Maybe helpdesk didn't want to have to support 100000 models, who knows :p
The oldest telecom in the world, with 100k employees in its current state, traded on both LSE and NYSE under the name 'BT'. Part of the FTSE index.
It used to be part of the post office. It was owned by the crown until fucking thatcher came along.
Criticality isn't a bad thing... when you want the reactor to be running.
When it's a heap of slag you can't control, not so much.
A player piano perhaps? One that can't be played manually, I suppose that would be sort of relevant.
In this case it would only play a limited amount of music rolls, if you want something custom, or to play it yourself, you are screwed.
Ah, I thought PIII was pretty solid, it was just bloody expensive. I seem to recall the frequencies going up faster and the prices being cut more often once the athlon started to get a decent chunk of the market.
P4/netburst was a shitsack, though, especially the early ones. IIRC the 1GHz or 1.13GHz, whatever was top of the line at the time, PIIIs were still blowing the first gen P4s out of the water... pathetic.
Hope that AMD pulls through, intel fanboys should too.
Remember the early PIII era? What fun that was, until AMD got competitive again.
I wish my desktop was a nautilus :)
Unfortunately they don't live long above their normal depths, shorter still out of water...
That's intentional though. The ARM and MIPS chips used in say, routers, have various amounts of i2c/spi/gpio/pwm/timers/uart/etc, sometimes ADC, DAC. GPIOs are usually configurable as push-pull or open drain, various switching speeds, etc. It's not like an old x86 chip that only has bus I/O and absolutely no peripherals integrated. Sounds more like a microcontroller than a processor, doesn't it...
Now, with proper documentation* you can use all of that in linux quite well, or you could go bare metal if you wanted to. An ARM9 based LED clock is overkill, but it's certainly up for the task as well as an arduino, especially if the price is the same. Plus it can do things your arduino never will without expensive add-ons, say pull some RSS feeds through ethernet and display it on your clock.
Or sync via NTP. (That's a weak example, as I've done it on AVRs, although it costed me more than the pi). the sky is the limit here, in what it can do vs. a little 8bit mcu.
The clock can also double as your webserver, maybe display some hit statistics in realtime... have it buzz on intrusion attempts, or change color every 50 hits, etc, etc.
*Proper documentation is never going to happen with Broadcom. I wish they would prove me wrong, but past performance shows no chance in hell.
I would love a modern maemo tablet. I had a 770 when they were new, but the hardware was more than a little lacking (speed/memory wise, the build quality was excellent).
They've been planning this since 2003, when they passed legislation to do so.
The point is that DNS poisoning doesn't affect IP addresses, I presume.
Not that government is an inanimate object, oops. Conceptual things too. Anything that isn't alive and capable of having a (physical) gender.
so people, animals, pretty much, get his and her (and its, but people don't like using it on people for some unknown reason*), everything else gets its.
* This is why you see retarded shit like 'he/she' instead of it.
Inanimate objects are neuter in english. "its" would be the word you're looking for.
Well to be fair, the most basic symbian phones were among the original smartphones. It's not Nokia's fault that other smartphones got smarter ;)
I recall reading that a ridiculously high proportion of men that die in old age have prostate cancer, something like 75% of males over 75, iirc. Usually without posing symptoms / problems, relative to old age at least.
First world problems I guess, as historically they wouldn't have lived long enough for it to show up.
I really like these sorts of names, no ambiguity.
Maybe if NASA was called Aerospacadmin they'd still have a working launch vehicle.
Same reason he dropped the long form census. Facts go against conservative logic. It's easier to pass things without facts.
Hell, even with facts, it doesn't matter with these guys. Crime at it's lowest point in years? Oh - but 'unreported' crime is up. We better expand prisons, add mandatory minimums. For drug offences no less. Back to the fucking cave.
Oh, you can do this from userspace too, I forgot. via mmap() and /dev/mem.
It should be a single line of code on this too, provided the non-existent datasheet tells you where the GPIOs are mapped in memory.
Should be as easy as:
GPIOA_OUTPUT = 0xDDBF;
or something along those lines. (in kernel space. in user space you just write to /sys/class/gpio/something. which is easier, but slower and can only do one bit at a time).
On a side note, some older network cards have sockets for boot EEPROMs, and you can use them to program compatible chips for any purpose, using flashrom from the coreboot project. However, they seem to have a limited number of address lines, so the full capacity of the chips is not exposed.
A few years ago, I added an 8 bit latch onto a 3com card, the highest address line would select it, and latch the upper 8 address lines (so effectively adding 7 bits of address space).
I had planned on adding higher voltage lines for old EPROMs and the like... never got around to it though. It was kind of hokey, mostly just did it to see that i could. I think I had a board I had screwed the bios up on, and that was the whole reason for it.
(I ended up buying one of the chinese programmers eventually, but never use it really.. shifted gears i guess..)
I just submerge my whole system in a vat of snake oil. Very mellow sounding.
Well, part of it is the move to switch-mode power supplies. In old microwaves the big transformer alone was probably $35 to make.
Your computer PS would be a lot more than $20 if it was a linear PS as opposed to switching. Bigger and heavier too.
I'm with you on the shittier construction, shorter life, more waste aspect though.
I'd gladly pay more for something made here, by people paid a living wage... but the population has spoken, cheapest wins.
A nice side effect of more expensive, serviceable equipment is that it employs people in repair, too... but that ship has sailed.
SPI and GPIO support exist (i2c too), it's just very hardware dependent and needs to be configured with board-specific bits at compile time.
GPIO
SPI
Not exactly easy at first. There are userland extensions to all of the above too, which is fine for blinking LEDs and such, but has some limitations... spidev only has certain modes and data lengths, /SS lines are defined in board config (so kernel compile to change), things like that.