Only Chevron, formerly known as SoCal, or Standard Oil Company of California. However, Texaco and Chevron were both major players in Aramco, formerly known as Arabian-American Oil Company.
Conoco, fomerly Continental Oil Company, was purchased by DuPont during the oil company buyup frenzy in the early eighties, so DuPont was just getting out of the oil business. It never made much sense for DuPont to be in the oil business, anyway.
The oil company merger that amazes me was between Exxon and Mobil, two of the largest of former Standard Oil Companies, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Socoy Mobil, previously known as Standard Oil Company of New York, respectively. Both were players in Aramco, too. The Fed's radar most certainly was turned off for that one.
Few denizens of the USofA relate to withdrawn banknotes or coins because every coin and every bill ever issued by the United States of America is still acceptable as legal tender. As I recall, the three cent coin (early 1800's) is the only coin ever demonitized; but it effectively remained valid anyway. Gold notes (all issued before 1933) were recalled, but remained in use, just not convertable to gold.
I have a Saudi note and a UK 50 pence coin that were demonitized - no big loss, but annoying anyway. Not to mention perfectly valid Canadian and New Zealand 1 cent and Irish 1 penny coins foisted off on me as US 1 cent coins because they are the same size:-)
Those who travel between European countries can expect some benefit from not having to change currencies so much - the fees are outright predatory at some Bureaux de Change. This might not be a big problem to those who travel frequently, but to the inexperienced and those who travel infrequently, it can be a real, unexpected expense. Plastic is best, but you still have to have some cash.
Wrong. Fuel cells don't store anything. A fuel cell is a conversion device - it converts some fuel directly to electrical power. A fuel cell is just an engine with no moving parts. Some use methanol for fuel, others use propane etc.
A solar panel is also a conversion device, converting solar radiation to electrical power.
And yes, the two are in competition with each other. The Santa Fe Railroad (now Burlington Northern Santa Fe) used to use solar panels to power their remote communications units, but switched to propane powered fuel cells. Why? Lack of sufficient power at night or under cloudy conditions, plus, wind and hail repeatedly damaged their expensive solar panels.
Wrong oxide. Nitrous oxide, N20, is laughing gas, the stuff used by dentists alright, but the switch that operates the firefly flash is nitric oxide, NO, a different oxide of nitrogen. Nice try at a bit of humor, though.
Wonder what does the EPA has to say about this? Can't have all those fireflies flashing so much! Hmm. Maybe it is excessive firefly flashing that causes smog instead of oxides of nitrogen themselves;-)
FORTRAN and FORTRAN With Format were very much compiled. For quickie, not-too-big programs, there were also FORGO and FORTOGO, which were single pass, resident FORTRAN compilers. This was A Good Thing (TM) because the IBM 1620 compiler was two-pass, and if the card reader didn't mess up reading the almost two-box compiler deck, it actually made it in two passes occasionally.
If I recall correctly, one of the two (FORGO or FORTOGO) was developed at U Mich.
BTW, there was as least one interpreted FORTRAN too. It was supplied by Interdata (now owned by Perkin-Elmer) about 1974-75 for the Interdata Model 70 family. I used it on a Model 74. Ah, the convenience of BASIC for FORTRAN.
Octane Number has nothing to do with the n-octane content of a fuel. Octane Number measures the knocking tendency of a fuel relative to n-octane. There are two different Octane Numbers, MON and RON. The number on the pump is the average of the two: AON = (RON + MON)/2. Motor Octane Number (MON) is always lower than Research Octane Number (RON). Extremely wide difference in the two is usually due to high olefin (unsaturated paraffins) content in the fuel. One test is run in a special test engine at constant compression ratio, the other with varying compression ratio.
Diesel fuel is rated by Cetane Number, also obtained using a special test engine, which is the fuel's performance relative to n-cetane.
As others have indicated, or at least hinted at, most combustible liquids may be used as diesel fuel, but usually have to be blended to get the best performance. The situation is more complex with spark ignition engines because the fuel must not only atomize properly and also respond properly to the ignition spark without pre-igniting ("knocking"). Pre-ignition is a problem in spark engines because they aren't designed for the much higher bearing loads that compression ignition imposes, amongst a number of other problems.
So whaddaya do when the supporter disappears or decides to support it no longer? Right, you're stuck. Worse, what do you do if you have important data locked up in the supplier's proprietary file format(s)? Get out your checkbook and waste a lot of time, one way or another.
How many ways do I not love thee [propietary closed source software, protocols, file formats etc.], let me count the ways... This has happened over and over and over and...
Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past [supply your own favorite quotable source]. Many (or most) of the people behind the Open Source movement do remember.
I was making a point by stretching it a bit. The idea is that GUI was not original with Apple. Apple borrowed all the basic concepts.
My memory isn't what it used to be, so thanks for your update on SCP. Essentially MSDOS was a piece of junk, far outclassed by CP/M, but Kildall lost his chance the day IBM called - and he was at the golf course. I think I recall a lawsuit between Kildall and Gates over the SCP stuff, but if there was a monetary settlement, Kildall still lost because CP/M wasn't the OS that came with the box, and few people will spend extra to get something better when what's provided is "good enough.".
I'm surprised no one has commented on the evils of Motorola's intellectual property, which their former employees used to make the 6502. Their mistake, which allowed Motorola to acquire ALL rights to the 6502, was that they took drawings etc. so they had a jumpstart on the artwork. And Motorola's work could be indentified on the 6502 silicon!
As another poster has observed in the post, West Coast Bias - Rewite History why don't you?, this book misrepresents much of the earliest days of what became personal computers.
The Intel 4004 was not a computer by any stretch of the imagination, but a special purpose controller, and lived on a handful of separate, hard-to-integrate parts. The 8008 was, IIRC, Intel's first computer chip, with what became the infamous x86 instruction set, and slower than molasses in January, even for the time. Motorola (Austin, Texas) developed the first computer-on-a-chip, but marketing believed they would never sell more than 10,000 (or somewhere in that neighborhood) of the things, so the 6800 was put into cold storage. The Commodore, Atari and Apple computers were all based on the 6502, an inexpensive (for the time), stripped-down 8-bit-only 6800, but with two index registers, produced by some malcontents who left Motorola and went to Philadelphia. Motorola eventually won a massive intellectual property suit, but had lost the initiative because of lack of insight into the future of computing.
There is a lot of hype about how the Altair was so innovative also, but it was produced in New Mexico, I believe, at least at first. Neither Altair nor any of the other early Intel-based computers could be cold booted. The bootstrap program had to be toggled in from front panel switches, just as mainframes had for years. Southwest Technical Products, San Antonio, introduced the first boot ROM (Gary Kildall and the Intel-centric community insisted on calling it the BIOS) with their 6800-based computers, and until 1982, had sold more computers, based on the 6800 and 68000 processor families, over 110,000 in all, than all the Intel-based boxes together to that time.
Zilog darned near killed Intel by bringing out a better 8085 than the 8085. The Zilog Z80 had index registers! And some neat extensions to the instruction set. And ate Intel's lunch, technologically speaking, as well as market share. If you read publications from the 1981-1983 period, you will see a lot of hype about how the 4 MHz Z80 was so much superior to Motorola's 2 MHz 6809, just like you see people moaning G4's being outdated by PIII's with twice the rated clock speed. It ain't how fast the clock ticks, li'l buddies, it's what you do each time the clock ticks. A 2 MHz 6809 is about 20% faster than a 4 MHz Z80 because the 6809 used an internal clock doubler to minimize problems with having the processor clock on the motherboard, which only needed the half-speed memory clock. Altair put the processor clock, and a number of dumb Intel hand-shaking signals, on the S100 bus and early S100 motherboard designs had massive signal problems as a result.
The bottom line is that all the Silicon Valley stuff was based on stolen intellectual property (the 6502) and a piece of crap (Intel 8080), but succeeded because they were afordable by the public. Hell, even the infamous GUI is stolen property. Apple stole it from Xerox PARC and Microsoft stole it from Apple. At least Gates had the insight (and ethics) to buy DOS from Seattle Software and a Unix license from Bell Labs.
Is my memory going? Don't know about the Honywell 6180, but I thought I remembered that the GE 635 and GE 645 were 48-bit machines instead of 36-bit as one of the articles says. GE also made a line of 24-bit machines, the PAC-4000 line, of which the PAC-4020 was probably the best known. The PAC-4000's were process control machines, but the IRS bought a bunch of them starting about 1966, and most of them were still in service as late as 1986. By all means, the wrong box for the job. The PAC-4000 was superseded by the Honeywell TDC 4200, TDC 4400 and TDC 44000, which used the same relative-addressing instruction set.
Actually, 100 MB/sec isn't access time, its the data transfer rate. Older IDE/ATA disk drives transfer at 33 MB/sec, the newer ATA drives at 66 MB/sec. Some of the newer PCs have 133 and even 200 MB/sec memory buses, so this device can pump data roughly as fast as all but the newest, top-of-the-line boxes can handle.
The access time (latency) for a device with no conventional moving parts is probably (but not necessarily, as demonstrated by bubble memory in the mid-eighties) much less than that for a conventional hard disk drive, which is typically 6 to 9 milliseconds these days.
Actually, Haloid Xerox Company introduced the xerographic copier in the early 'fifties, but they weren't widely available until the middle to late 'fifties. Coin-operated copiers would copy one page for five cents, and the librarian kept a supply of nickels on hand to make change. For reference, beginning in 1957, a 6-1/2 ounce Coca Cola was seven cents for a short while, then they upped the bottle to ten ounces and raised the price to ten cents. Before that a "coke" was a nickel.
Oops, careless wording; I know better. The point is that Tim Berners-Lee formulated hyperlinking in his WWW proposal long before any of these hyperlinking patent ideas could have possibly been conceived. And, as others have pointed out, this same concept was at work via ftp long before WWW.
AFAIR Tim Berners-Lee described hyper-linking in his original proposal for the Internet. His proposal should be carefully reviewed by all claims candidates, including the Patent Office and Al Gore, with respect to all claims of invention with respect to the internet.
I recall reading Tim's proposal in some magazine -- don't recall for sure (CRS syndrome at work here), but I think it was published in Dr. Dobb's Journal (of Computer Calisthentics and Orthodontia - Running Light without Overbyte).
The REAL problem, however, is that in the dim, distant past (CRS notwithstanding), the Patent Office reviewed all applications so thoroughly that it took far too long for patents to be issued, so Congress changed the rules to ease the process and reduce the cost of obtaining a patent, but didn't include a reasonable enough objection mechanism.If you don't like the way it works, write your U S Senators and Congressmen!
One or two years isn't long enough for most industrial patentees. It often takes five years or longer for industrial processes to reach production, so the patent holder may has only a short time to recover research and development costs.
Ideas that involve little or no associated development costs and are not part of some larger mechanism or process shoudn't receive the same protections as those that do, but it would be virtually impossible to differentiate them in the law.
Those who create books, music and other works covered by copright deserve to benefit from their work, just as a factory or office worker (or, gasp! code hacker) deserves a paycheck. Current U. S. intellectual property law has been developed from the whole cloth mostly by the film industry, which determined from the very earliest days of its existence to protect their work. The problem is that it all seems to gotten out of hand. Authors of books, plays and music and musical performers receive only a tiny percentage of the sale or licensing of their work, about ten percent. So the biggest benefactors of copyright are not the creators, but the publishers, distributors and all the other peripherally involved folks who distribute the work to the public.
The whole problem is that things seem to have gotten out of hand, and that is why so many seem to intuitivly recoil against patent and copyright protection. Almost every publisher (book, film, TV, whatever) would dearly love to force the public into pay-per-view. So we have had divix and now various kinds of e-books foisted on us. While few movies could be indicted for intellectual content, ideas have long been conveyed by print, and it is critically important that ideas be freely distributable. It is sad to note that many of the ideas most important to modern society yielded little or no benefit to their authors. We must ensure that all authors (and performers) receive compensation to encourage them to publish their ideas. But how to keep the parasites from getting too large a share?
Who is a parasite? The publisher must buy presses, ink and paper and the film maker must pay for studios, cameras, film, actors etc. So it really resolves down to who is getting an excessive share of the boodle. And, except when monoply or near-monoply is involved, the law (in the USA anyway) carefully steers clear of regulating prices for goods and services and the proration of sales values between all the parties. So the REAL issue here is attempt to create near-monoply or monoply market controls for very long periods of time. So the film studios bought Congress to extend copyright so Disney Studios can continue to have exclusive control of Mickey Mouse for many more years. Well, I don't begrudge them Mickey Mouse, but it really steams me when they con national governments into collecting a tax on recordable media "to make up for all the stolen goods."
In a number of court decisions in the early 'sixties, non-compete agreements were held to be a form of involuntary servitude - slavery - in many cases. If you work as an ordinary employee and leave to work as an ordinary employee with another organization, non-compete claims are probably invalid (bear in mind IANAL), but if a senior manager leaves and starts another company in the same line of business, non-compete may come into play.
But, if the first organization is very large, say, um, Micro$oft, and the manager is not obviously using some key technology from his first employer to make the second company work, he needs to raise the hue and cry of involuntary servitude.
In the cases cited here, a lot of people need to bring this to the attention of the press, the U. S. Labor Department and the U. S. Department of Justice, as well as the state Attorneys General where these people live. It would be very interesting to see what the State of Washington's Attorney General might have to say about this.
There are two sides to this coin, and each is important. I see a couple of references to land record registrations, but a more accurate analogy, which many of us may not even be aware of, is the requirement for anyone engaging in business to register any name used in the business (known in some states as legal alias, assumed name in others) which differs from the person's name. This is so shysters (and others) can't hide.
The other side is the desire, even the need for anonymity in some cases. In no event should any corporation, or other business entity, ever need, or be allowed to act anonymously. That should be reserved to individuals only, and used wisely and with discretion.
That said, ALL commercial URL's should be required to comply with legal alias/assumed name registration. The rest of us, well, leave it to our individual discretion, but please do respect the need for occasional complete anonymity.
Nope, punched cards are a bad idea. They are, in fact, the whole problem in Palm Beach County, Florida, because the voters often don't punch the hole fully, the chad stays attached, causing problems, or, worse, the voter punches more than one candidate for the same office. I have used punched cards, voting machines and two different kinds of mark-up paper ballots.
The biggest problem with counting mark-up paper ballots is that most of the counting machines are OLD - they use lamps (or worse technology) to sense the vote. This is such a problem that Texas allows the election judges, under supervision, to place clear tape over the original mark (to preserve the voter's intent) and apply a so the reader will read the ballot properly. Well, at least the reader does reject questionable ballots to a "try again" hopper so the election judges can make sure they are counted, either by rescan or manually. Modern scanners could do a much better job.
Although the on-chip address space of the 6502, Z80, 6800, 6802 and 6809 was 64KB, there were a number of page-switching implementations. I'm not familiar with the 65C816 mentioned, but it may have an on-chip paging register similar to 80286 etc.
I still have a 6809 box (Southwest Technical Products compatible, *not* Tandy Color Computer) with over 1 MB of (off-chip) page-switched main memory.
Oh, and MHz ratings for 65xx and 68xx are *not* directly comparable with 80xx, 80xxx and Z80 because the 65/68xx are spec'd by memory bus clock, whereas the 80* and Z80 families are spec'd by internal state clock, which is typically 2 to 11 times as fast, depending on the processor. A 2 MHz 6809 is about 20% faster than a 4 MHz Z80 in terms of actual performance because most 6809 instructions execute in 2 clocks, but a Z80 takes about 5 and an 8085 even more.
It's not only how fast the clock runs, but what happens each time it ticks.
Nope, plain ole ftp. But from an xterm, not barebones command line. Mozilla downloads just fine from xterm, but then it is "only" 8 MB, not 16. Hmm. Seems like I recall doing previous (successful) kernel downloads from barebones command line.
I have made two successive attempts to build from separate downloads (full 2.2.17 tar.bz2 file). Both terminated with an error message saying EOL is not on correct boundary and file can't be unpacked.
or (C) the cable company limits your bandwidth. At first, most everyone in Amarillo had well over 200 Mbps over cable, but now the cableco limits to about 100-120 Mbps unless you pay for more bandwith. Hmm - still faster than a 56K modem, tho... The cableco limits by requiring subscribers to use a particular model modem, which the cableco can program over the cable to set bandwidth, amongst other things.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's X Window System. Though I suspect it is called X Windows as often as not.
Only Chevron, formerly known as SoCal, or Standard Oil Company of California. However, Texaco and Chevron were both major players in Aramco, formerly known as Arabian-American Oil Company.
Conoco, fomerly Continental Oil Company, was purchased by DuPont during the oil company buyup frenzy in the early eighties, so DuPont was just getting out of the oil business. It never made much sense for DuPont to be in the oil business, anyway.
The oil company merger that amazes me was between Exxon and Mobil, two of the largest of former Standard Oil Companies, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Socoy Mobil, previously known as Standard Oil Company of New York, respectively. Both were players in Aramco, too. The Fed's radar most certainly was turned off for that one.
Few denizens of the USofA relate to withdrawn banknotes or coins because every coin and every bill ever issued by the United States of America is still acceptable as legal tender. As I recall, the three cent coin (early 1800's) is the only coin ever demonitized; but it effectively remained valid anyway. Gold notes (all issued before 1933) were recalled, but remained in use, just not convertable to gold.
:-)
I have a Saudi note and a UK 50 pence coin that were demonitized - no big loss, but annoying anyway. Not to mention perfectly valid Canadian and New Zealand 1 cent and Irish 1 penny coins foisted off on me as US 1 cent coins because they are the same size
Those who travel between European countries can expect some benefit from not having to change currencies so much - the fees are outright predatory at some Bureaux de Change. This might not be a big problem to those who travel frequently, but to the inexperienced and those who travel infrequently, it can be a real, unexpected expense. Plastic is best, but you still have to have some cash.
English and Korean, Thai, Chinese, Arabic, Albanian, Spanish, and other major European languages.
:-))
That's interesting. I didn't realize Korean, Thai, Chinese and Arabic were European languages. Or that Albanian was a major European language.
Wrong. Fuel cells don't store anything. A fuel cell is a conversion device - it converts some fuel directly to electrical power. A fuel cell is just an engine with no moving parts. Some use methanol for fuel, others use propane etc.
A solar panel is also a conversion device, converting solar radiation to electrical power.
And yes, the two are in competition with each other. The Santa Fe Railroad (now Burlington Northern Santa Fe) used to use solar panels to power their remote communications units, but switched to propane powered fuel cells. Why? Lack of sufficient power at night or under cloudy conditions, plus, wind and hail repeatedly damaged their expensive solar panels.
Wrong oxide. Nitrous oxide, N20, is laughing gas, the stuff used by dentists alright, but the switch that operates the firefly flash is nitric oxide, NO, a different oxide of nitrogen. Nice try at a bit of humor, though.
;-)
Wonder what does the EPA has to say about this? Can't have all those fireflies flashing so much! Hmm. Maybe it is excessive firefly flashing that causes smog instead of oxides of nitrogen themselves
FORTRAN and FORTRAN With Format were very much compiled. For quickie, not-too-big programs, there were also FORGO and FORTOGO, which were single pass, resident FORTRAN compilers. This was A Good Thing (TM) because the IBM 1620 compiler was two-pass, and if the card reader didn't mess up reading the almost two-box compiler deck, it actually made it in two passes occasionally.
If I recall correctly, one of the two (FORGO or FORTOGO) was developed at U Mich.
BTW, there was as least one interpreted FORTRAN too. It was supplied by Interdata (now owned by Perkin-Elmer) about 1974-75 for the Interdata Model 70 family. I used it on a Model 74. Ah, the convenience of BASIC for FORTRAN.
Octane Number has nothing to do with the n-octane content of a fuel. Octane Number measures the knocking tendency of a fuel relative to n-octane. There are two different Octane Numbers, MON and RON. The number on the pump is the average of the two: AON = (RON + MON)/2. Motor Octane Number (MON) is always lower than Research Octane Number (RON). Extremely wide difference in the two is usually due to high olefin (unsaturated paraffins) content in the fuel. One test is run in a special test engine at constant compression ratio, the other with varying compression ratio.
Diesel fuel is rated by Cetane Number, also obtained using a special test engine, which is the fuel's performance relative to n-cetane.
As others have indicated, or at least hinted at, most combustible liquids may be used as diesel fuel, but usually have to be blended to get the best performance. The situation is more complex with spark ignition engines because the fuel must not only atomize properly and also respond properly to the ignition spark without pre-igniting ("knocking"). Pre-ignition is a problem in spark engines because they aren't designed for the much higher bearing loads that compression ignition imposes, amongst a number of other problems.
So whaddaya do when the supporter disappears or decides to support it no longer? Right, you're stuck. Worse, what do you do if you have important data locked up in the supplier's proprietary file format(s)? Get out your checkbook and waste a lot of time, one way or another.
... This has happened over and over and over and ...
How many ways do I not love thee [propietary closed source software, protocols, file formats etc.], let me count the ways
Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past [supply your own favorite quotable source]. Many (or most) of the people behind the Open Source movement do remember.
I was making a point by stretching it a bit. The idea is that GUI was not original with Apple. Apple borrowed all the basic concepts.
My memory isn't what it used to be, so thanks for your update on SCP. Essentially MSDOS was a piece of junk, far outclassed by CP/M, but Kildall lost his chance the day IBM called - and he was at the golf course. I think I recall a lawsuit between Kildall and Gates over the SCP stuff, but if there was a monetary settlement, Kildall still lost because CP/M wasn't the OS that came with the box, and few people will spend extra to get something better when what's provided is "good enough.".
I'm surprised no one has commented on the evils of Motorola's intellectual property, which their former employees used to make the 6502. Their mistake, which allowed Motorola to acquire ALL rights to the 6502, was that they took drawings etc. so they had a jumpstart on the artwork. And Motorola's work could be indentified on the 6502 silicon!
As another poster has observed in the post, West Coast Bias - Rewite History why don't you?, this book misrepresents much of the earliest days of what became personal computers.
The Intel 4004 was not a computer by any stretch of the imagination, but a special purpose controller, and lived on a handful of separate, hard-to-integrate parts. The 8008 was, IIRC, Intel's first computer chip, with what became the infamous x86 instruction set, and slower than molasses in January, even for the time. Motorola (Austin, Texas) developed the first computer-on-a-chip, but marketing believed they would never sell more than 10,000 (or somewhere in that neighborhood) of the things, so the 6800 was put into cold storage. The Commodore, Atari and Apple computers were all based on the 6502, an inexpensive (for the time), stripped-down 8-bit-only 6800, but with two index registers, produced by some malcontents who left Motorola and went to Philadelphia. Motorola eventually won a massive intellectual property suit, but had lost the initiative because of lack of insight into the future of computing.
There is a lot of hype about how the Altair was so innovative also, but it was produced in New Mexico, I believe, at least at first. Neither Altair nor any of the other early Intel-based computers could be cold booted. The bootstrap program had to be toggled in from front panel switches, just as mainframes had for years. Southwest Technical Products, San Antonio, introduced the first boot ROM (Gary Kildall and the Intel-centric community insisted on calling it the BIOS) with their 6800-based computers, and until 1982, had sold more computers, based on the 6800 and 68000 processor families, over 110,000 in all, than all the Intel-based boxes together to that time.
Zilog darned near killed Intel by bringing out a better 8085 than the 8085. The Zilog Z80 had index registers! And some neat extensions to the instruction set. And ate Intel's lunch, technologically speaking, as well as market share. If you read publications from the 1981-1983 period, you will see a lot of hype about how the 4 MHz Z80 was so much superior to Motorola's 2 MHz 6809, just like you see people moaning G4's being outdated by PIII's with twice the rated clock speed. It ain't how fast the clock ticks, li'l buddies, it's what you do each time the clock ticks. A 2 MHz 6809 is about 20% faster than a 4 MHz Z80 because the 6809 used an internal clock doubler to minimize problems with having the processor clock on the motherboard, which only needed the half-speed memory clock. Altair put the processor clock, and a number of dumb Intel hand-shaking signals, on the S100 bus and early S100 motherboard designs had massive signal problems as a result.
The bottom line is that all the Silicon Valley stuff was based on stolen intellectual property (the 6502) and a piece of crap (Intel 8080), but succeeded because they were afordable by the public. Hell, even the infamous GUI is stolen property. Apple stole it from Xerox PARC and Microsoft stole it from Apple. At least Gates had the insight (and ethics) to buy DOS from Seattle Software and a Unix license from Bell Labs.
Is my memory going? Don't know about the Honywell 6180, but I thought I remembered that the GE 635 and GE 645 were 48-bit machines instead of 36-bit as one of the articles says. GE also made a line of 24-bit machines, the PAC-4000 line, of which the PAC-4020 was probably the best known. The PAC-4000's were process control machines, but the IRS bought a bunch of them starting about 1966, and most of them were still in service as late as 1986. By all means, the wrong box for the job. The PAC-4000 was superseded by the Honeywell TDC 4200, TDC 4400 and TDC 44000, which used the same relative-addressing instruction set.
Actually, 100 MB/sec isn't access time, its the data transfer rate. Older IDE/ATA disk drives transfer at 33 MB/sec, the newer ATA drives at 66 MB/sec. Some of the newer PCs have 133 and even 200 MB/sec memory buses, so this device can pump data roughly as fast as all but the newest, top-of-the-line boxes can handle.
The access time (latency) for a device with no conventional moving parts is probably (but not necessarily, as demonstrated by bubble memory in the mid-eighties) much less than that for a conventional hard disk drive, which is typically 6 to 9 milliseconds these days.
Actually, Haloid Xerox Company introduced the xerographic copier in the early 'fifties, but they weren't widely available until the middle to late 'fifties. Coin-operated copiers would copy one page for five cents, and the librarian kept a supply of nickels on hand to make change. For reference, beginning in 1957, a 6-1/2 ounce Coca Cola was seven cents for a short while, then they upped the bottle to ten ounces and raised the price to ten cents. Before that a "coke" was a nickel.
Oops, careless wording; I know better. The point is that Tim Berners-Lee formulated hyperlinking in his WWW proposal long before any of these hyperlinking patent ideas could have possibly been conceived. And, as others have pointed out, this same concept was at work via ftp long before WWW.
AFAIR Tim Berners-Lee described hyper-linking in his original proposal for the Internet. His proposal should be carefully reviewed by all claims candidates, including the Patent Office and Al Gore, with respect to all claims of invention with respect to the internet.
I recall reading Tim's proposal in some magazine -- don't recall for sure (CRS syndrome at work here), but I think it was published in Dr. Dobb's Journal (of Computer Calisthentics and Orthodontia - Running Light without Overbyte).
The REAL problem, however, is that in the dim, distant past (CRS notwithstanding), the Patent Office reviewed all applications so thoroughly that it took far too long for patents to be issued, so Congress changed the rules to ease the process and reduce the cost of obtaining a patent, but didn't include a reasonable enough objection mechanism. If you don't like the way it works, write your U S Senators and Congressmen!
One or two years isn't long enough for most industrial patentees. It often takes five years or longer for industrial processes to reach production, so the patent holder may has only a short time to recover research and development costs.
Ideas that involve little or no associated development costs and are not part of some larger mechanism or process shoudn't receive the same protections as those that do, but it would be virtually impossible to differentiate them in the law.
Those who create books, music and other works covered by copright deserve to benefit from their work, just as a factory or office worker (or, gasp! code hacker) deserves a paycheck. Current U. S. intellectual property law has been developed from the whole cloth mostly by the film industry, which determined from the very earliest days of its existence to protect their work. The problem is that it all seems to gotten out of hand. Authors of books, plays and music and musical performers receive only a tiny percentage of the sale or licensing of their work, about ten percent. So the biggest benefactors of copyright are not the creators, but the publishers, distributors and all the other peripherally involved folks who distribute the work to the public.
The whole problem is that things seem to have gotten out of hand, and that is why so many seem to intuitivly recoil against patent and copyright protection. Almost every publisher (book, film, TV, whatever) would dearly love to force the public into pay-per-view. So we have had divix and now various kinds of e-books foisted on us. While few movies could be indicted for intellectual content, ideas have long been conveyed by print, and it is critically important that ideas be freely distributable. It is sad to note that many of the ideas most important to modern society yielded little or no benefit to their authors. We must ensure that all authors (and performers) receive compensation to encourage them to publish their ideas. But how to keep the parasites from getting too large a share?
Who is a parasite? The publisher must buy presses, ink and paper and the film maker must pay for studios, cameras, film, actors etc. So it really resolves down to who is getting an excessive share of the boodle. And, except when monoply or near-monoply is involved, the law (in the USA anyway) carefully steers clear of regulating prices for goods and services and the proration of sales values between all the parties. So the REAL issue here is attempt to create near-monoply or monoply market controls for very long periods of time. So the film studios bought Congress to extend copyright so Disney Studios can continue to have exclusive control of Mickey Mouse for many more years. Well, I don't begrudge them Mickey Mouse, but it really steams me when they con national governments into collecting a tax on recordable media "to make up for all the stolen goods."
In a number of court decisions in the early 'sixties, non-compete agreements were held to be a form of involuntary servitude - slavery - in many cases. If you work as an ordinary employee and leave to work as an ordinary employee with another organization, non-compete claims are probably invalid (bear in mind IANAL), but if a senior manager leaves and starts another company in the same line of business, non-compete may come into play.
But, if the first organization is very large, say, um, Micro$oft, and the manager is not obviously using some key technology from his first employer to make the second company work, he needs to raise the hue and cry of involuntary servitude.
In the cases cited here, a lot of people need to bring this to the attention of the press, the U. S. Labor Department and the U. S. Department of Justice, as well as the state Attorneys General where these people live. It would be very interesting to see what the State of Washington's Attorney General might have to say about this.
Warning: X Box does NOT run X
;-)
Yet.
There are two sides to this coin, and each is important. I see a couple of references to land record registrations, but a more accurate analogy, which many of us may not even be aware of, is the requirement for anyone engaging in business to register any name used in the business (known in some states as legal alias, assumed name in others) which differs from the person's name. This is so shysters (and others) can't hide.
The other side is the desire, even the need for anonymity in some cases. In no event should any corporation, or other business entity, ever need, or be allowed to act anonymously. That should be reserved to individuals only, and used wisely and with discretion.
That said, ALL commercial URL's should be required to comply with legal alias/assumed name registration. The rest of us, well, leave it to our individual discretion, but please do respect the need for occasional complete anonymity.
Nope, punched cards are a bad idea. They are, in fact, the whole problem in Palm Beach County, Florida, because the voters often don't punch the hole fully, the chad stays attached, causing problems, or, worse, the voter punches more than one candidate for the same office. I have used punched cards, voting machines and two different kinds of mark-up paper ballots.
The biggest problem with counting mark-up paper ballots is that most of the counting machines are OLD - they use lamps (or worse technology) to sense the vote. This is such a problem that Texas allows the election judges, under supervision, to place clear tape over the original mark (to preserve the voter's intent) and apply a so the reader will read the ballot properly. Well, at least the reader does reject questionable ballots to a "try again" hopper so the election judges can make sure they are counted, either by rescan or manually. Modern scanners could do a much better job.
Although the on-chip address space of the 6502, Z80, 6800, 6802 and 6809 was 64KB, there were a number of page-switching implementations. I'm not familiar with the 65C816 mentioned, but it may have an on-chip paging register similar to 80286 etc.
I still have a 6809 box (Southwest Technical Products compatible, *not* Tandy Color Computer) with over 1 MB of (off-chip) page-switched main memory.
Oh, and MHz ratings for 65xx and 68xx are *not* directly comparable with 80xx, 80xxx and Z80 because the 65/68xx are spec'd by memory bus clock, whereas the 80* and Z80 families are spec'd by internal state clock, which is typically 2 to 11 times as fast, depending on the processor. A 2 MHz 6809 is about 20% faster than a 4 MHz Z80 in terms of actual performance because most 6809 instructions execute in 2 clocks, but a Z80 takes about 5 and an 8085 even more.
It's not only how fast the clock runs, but what happens each time it ticks.
Nope, plain ole ftp. But from an xterm, not barebones command line. Mozilla downloads just fine from xterm, but then it is "only" 8 MB, not 16. Hmm. Seems like I recall doing previous (successful) kernel downloads from barebones command line.
I have made two successive attempts to build from separate downloads (full 2.2.17 tar.bz2 file). Both terminated with an error message saying EOL is not on correct boundary and file can't be unpacked.
or (C) the cable company limits your bandwidth. At first, most everyone in Amarillo had well over 200 Mbps over cable, but now the cableco limits to about 100-120 Mbps unless you pay for more bandwith. Hmm - still faster than a 56K modem, tho ... The cableco limits by requiring subscribers to use a particular model modem, which the cableco can program over the cable to set bandwidth, amongst other things.