I am from the United States but I am not sure if I am a "Yank." You see I am from Maryland. Maryland is south of the Mason Dixon line which means that it is often considered to be in the south. However, Maryland never joined the Confederacy during the Civil War. At the time Maryland was very pro-South and probably would have left the union if given the chance; the federal government didn't let Maryland leave because if they did then Washington DC would have been totally surrounded by southern. In the united states a "yankee" usually refers to people in the north, particularly New England. At least people living in the South usually refer to northerners as Yankees. And in fact the first two definitions of the word Yankee in my "Webster's New World Dictionary" are someone living in New England, and someone living in the North. I am not from New England and to be honest I am not sure if I am from the North or not. People in New England would probably say that Maryland is in the South but people in the Deep South would probably say that Maryland is in the North. So I usually don't consider myself a Yankee. It doesn't help that the most evil team in all of American sports happens to call themselves the Yankees.
Anyway, my point is that calling everyone from the US a Yank is a little like calling everyone in the UK English. When you call me a yank in my mind it just shows how ignorant you are of the history of the US.
Yes, the filters block most of the near IR light but not ALL of it. Keep in mind the detector on your TV that reads the signals from the remote is a silicon photodiode that is probably pretty similar to the detectors on a CCD. And the detector on your TV has no trouble at all reading the remote (unless the batteries are going dead or you opted for the cheap TV.)
Also, some CCD's will alternate the color of their detectors: one red, then one blue then one green detector. When the camera guesses what the color of the image should be at let's say a red pixel it averages the blue and green signals from it's neighbors. This can obviously produce color errors but most of the time you don't see it.
Another problem I forgot to mention with color CCD's is that silicon CCD's are often times actually MORE sensitive in the near IR -- the sensitivity is starting to tail off when you get to the visible. So a color CCD actually blocks the wavelengths where the camera is most sensitive. Having a B&W camera with no filters at all will be able to see in the near IR and be more sensitive overall than a color one. But hey, color is pretty:)
Another reason to use a color wheel instead of having a color CCD (filters attached to each pixel) is that unfiltered silicon CCD's can see into the near infrared; they can detect light that the human eye cannot. If you use a color CCD then you basically limit the camera so it is only sensitive to light that the human eye can see. With the color wheel they get pretty color images but still have a camera that is sensitive to other wavelengths.
I find that when some people get out of high school they get this idea in their heads that if they don't go to this super snooty college than they will never be able to get a job and all of their hopes and dreams will be crushed. Another unusual thing I find is that high school students often times think that state schools are only cool if they in other states. This is ironic because although you may not think that colleges in your state are cool many people from other states probably do think they are cool. Now I am not going to tell you that there is NO difference between going to a super expensive school and going to a cheap school. However I have had some experience in this matter (undergrad at a cheap state school grad at a super expensive private school that you all have heard of) and I can tell you that the difference in education is very small. All schools use more or less the same text books and they have to meet certain standards in order to be able to keep giving out diplomas.
My point is that if you can't afford some super expensive school maybe you should think about going to a cheaper state school (one that is in YOUR state.) I think that you will find that when you get out the people who went to the cheap schools will for the most part being working at the same jobs and making the same amount of $$ as those who went for the expensive schools. The cost of state schools are going up much faster than inflation but I think most of the time you can still afford basic tuition by working in the summer and at part time jobs. For room and board I guess you will have to live off mommy and daddy or get student loans. My advice: try to stay for longer than 4 years (compared to college the real world sucks!! who graduates in 4 years anymore anyway?) and try to take as few student loans as possible; if you are lucky the mommy and daddy bank will pay for much of it -- even if that means you have to live in your parent's basement.
Re:What about ads you can only see here?
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10 Ads The US Won't See
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· Score: 3, Insightful
America is the most religous country in the industrialized world based on the number of churches versus population and the number of people that attend them. I am sure that MOST people in the US would probably be ok with racier TV (see cable and movies) but when someone does something that is even a little over the top the religous right comes out and mails a gazillion letters.
Keep in mind that many of the people that originally came to this country did it to escape religious persecution. So in other words many of the worlds religious nuts came to this country and are now sending letters in to fox because they said the word "ass" one too many times. Well things are changing alittle. I think it is actually ok to say "ass" on tv and in fact fox is thinking of changing their slogan so it has the word "ass" in it. So basically the US is 20-30 years (at least) behind the rest of the world when it comes to putting sex on TV.
What I don't understand is that I believe that we are 10-20 years ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to putting violence on TV and movies.
enter rant mode:
I mean WTF? It is ok to have a movie where millions of people have their cuts spewed out of them in violent death scenes but god forbid if anyone could use the media to figure out where babies come from. Many years ago I saw in the video store that they made a PG version of the movie titanic. What made it PG? Did thousands of people not get sent to their horrifying death? No mostly they just took out the sex scenes. I mean no one should know that Kate Winslet is acutally anatomically correct. And another thing, why the hell do they put brail instruction on drive through ATMs?... oops went to far better stop now...
Why is is that when Sega released the Nohmad (portable system that played genesis games) everyone thought they were a bunch of idiots. However if and when Sony releases the portable playstation everyone will think they are the biggest geniuses in the world? I guess it just goes to show that advertising and product loyalty are more important in the video game industry than coming up with a new idea. Heck even the Gamegear was basically just a portable Sega Master system. Making a portable version of your full sized system is NOT a new idea, but to many people will think it is.
First of all, if you make statements about the inhabitance of an ENTIRE nation -- well at best that is a stereotype at worst it may be racism. British people are just that, people, and you can't make a statement about a group of people that large.
At the same time you can't make a statement about every engineer and every device the British make. There are good engineers and there are bad engineers living in the UK -- just like there are good and bad engineers living in every other country on the face of the Earth.
Finally, putting things into space is not an easy thing for anybody to do. NASA has been having more trouble lately because at some point the decided to switch to the better, faster, and cheaper school of building. This means that they have been spending millions on spacecrafts instead of billions. When you spend billions on spacecrafts you can have someone who's full time job is to check to make sure everyone uses metric or imperial. When you spend millions on spacecrafts then you have to cut corners and you will therefore have more failures. You can also put ALOT more missions up there and will hopefully have more successes as well (although I am not sure that this has happened.)
That being said the Hubble was an oops because they did spend billions on it and there was an error with it. However I would defend the hubble because after the fix the thing works as well as anyone could expect.
The Wrights and many other inventors worked in secret in order to try to prevent people from stealing their ideas. This leads some dreamers to believe that the inventor from their country really invented the airplane and just didn't tell enough people. Ok, there are some facts that work against the Wrights having been the first to be in the air:
The Wrights did not invent the wing, or the propellor. Hang gliders had been around long before the Wrights and they first got interested in flying when playing with a toy helicopter when they were kids. Not only that but lighter than air devices had also been flying long before the Wrights.
The 1903 flier that flew on Dec. 17 was very unstable and probably was only able to fly because there was a large amount of wind that day.
Having said that there are a lot of things in favor of the Wrights.
Although the 1903 flier was useless the brothers went back to work improving it and by most accounts by 1904 or so they did indeed have a heavier than air plane that could take off and land and could be controlled in the air.
After securing all of the patents the Wrights went on exibition showing off their invention to everyone who wanted to see it. For most people the first time they saw an airplane it was a Wright plane.
The Wrights eventually ended up manufactoring and selling their planes to anyone who could afford it; they thought that their planes would become as common as motor cars. And just about everyone who made a plane after the Wrights used many of their ideas.
In the end however does it really matter who invented the airplane or what country they were from? The important thing is that roughly 100 years ago today a HUMAN BEING did what only birds had done before -- took to the air in a heavier than air aircraft. I think that is something we can all be proud of.
Ok, I was wrong. Nobody can know everything about everything. You still didn't answer the original question. Except for some memory addresses that were set in stone because of how the 8088 was designed, why couldn't the creators of the IBM PC set up the memory address space differently than they did -- perhaps more efficiently. 640k may seemed like a lot in the late 70's/early 80's but it became clear later that having even a little bit more would have been a good thing.
As far as I know the only memory address that is set in stone is 0. This is the address that the cpu first checks when it is booting and therefore there must be some rom there to tell the computer how to boot itself. Other than that I suppose the creators of the IBM PC could have split the memory anyway they wanted. I don't see how it really matters, they had to split it up somehow. I believe that later they decided that not all of the 384K needed to be reserved, parts of it became HMA. Don't you remember editing your config.sys and autoexec.bat in DOS so all of the drivers would load in the HMA leaving the lower 640K free for memory hungry programs? Wasn't there a "load high" command you had to stick in there? Been a long time I don't remember the exact command
Right now everyone's media is pre-formated in FAT -- a filesystem that has been around so long and is so simple that just about every operating system on the planet can read it. If MS starts charging for people to use FAT maybe everyone will simply invent their own file system and force windows users to install a driver in order to be able to read the new media. It may take awhile for the new filesystem to be ported to linux. Maybe in the near future you won't be able to use the latest digital camera with a linux system because linux can't read the filesystem that the camera uses. Also what if each digital camera company invents their own filesystem? Maybe cameras from Cannon will work under linux but not cameras from Sony? At the very least if they have to pay money to use FAT then they will no doubt pass the cost on to the consumer which means we will pay an MS tax just to use any preformatted media.
I don't know about you, but IMO standard NTSC is fine for most hollywood movies on most small screen TVs. Maybe if I had a 300 foot monster TV I would want more resolution (Mmmm 300 foot TV! pixels the size of your head!) So I am perfectly happy with my current DVD selection. So when everyone else sells back their standard DVD collection in order to make way for the super duper high res DVD, I will be busy buying up all of their old standard DVDs for a fraction of the cost they paid for them.
This just looks like ultra wide band communication to me -- just with a different buzz word attached. They probably just pulse an electromagnet on and off to produce a digital signal that is picked up by the reciever. When you vary the intensity of a magnetic field you produce electro magnetic radiation. Since they are pulses and not a signal modulated at sum carrier frequency the frequency spectrum that is emmited is across a large spectrum. Hence the name ultra wide band communication. Because of the way UWB signal propigate (different frequencies propigate at different speeds and have different absorption rates) the signals don't propigate as far as regular RF signals (well they propigate the information is just lost.)
Read "The Victorian Internet" by I forget who wrote it. It is about the telegraph and how all the things we thought were new in the 90's had really been around for 100 years or so (chat rooms, compression, data security) and it talks about the first time some nut decided to put a big cable under the ocean to connect continents. It is a really cool book!
The biggest issue I have with OO.org is that it is too much like MS Office for my taste:) Give me latex any day (especially when you are writing scientific papers.) When I use OO.org I find that almost all of the features and some of the annoyances from MS office are reproduced. Maybe it is just me. If you like MS office I don't see why you wouldn't like OO.org.
There are those that believe that we should stop all genetic engineering research right now because we shouldn't be "playing God." Others think that we cannot afford to stop genetic engineering research as the technology could be used to cure many illnesses and benefit mankind. This is one of the first comercially available genetically modified creature, but it probably won't be the last. Right now it is just a fish. What's next? Genetically modified food? People? Somebody someday will probably want to make sure that their children are smarter than a Nobel prize winner and more beautiful than a model and won't be afraid to fund the research to make it happen.
I don't think we should take the fear of what could happen if this fish or others like it were released into the wild too lightly. Right now there is a plant that was bred to live in aquariums that was released into the wild and is now basically killing much of the native plants and animals that live in the Mediterranean sea. And who could forget the snake fish that was released into a lake in Maryland. Anyone living in Australia I am sure will be able to come up with many examples of what can happen if you introduce even a seemingly innocent animal into an ecosystem where it does not belong. We have screwed up the ecosystem enough times by introducing animals that were cross bred naturally who knows what would happen if we release a creature that was genetically modified by man into the wild. We have to be sure that this fish CANNOT reproduce on its own no matter what happens. And we have to be sure that if you create a genetically modified animal and then sell it to the public one day some idiot is going to release it into the wild. And if there is even the smallest chance that a genetically modified animal can somehow reproduce we have to respect Murphy's law on this and conclude that the fish WILL reproduce.
I personally look at genetic engineering the same way I look at nuclear power. Both have great potential to benefit mankind. Maybe nuclear power can be used to solve the energy crisis, maybe genetic engineering can be used to cure cancer. We should not just dissmiss either technology as being evil. But both are VERY dangerous and could potentially screw up the environment big time -- they could even be used to make it so that planet Earth can no longer support human life.
I personally think that the Glofish is more than just a fish but maybe I am wrong on that one.
Maybe if my dad were head of the CIA and then a senator I could have gone to Harvard and then gotten all B's as well. Also, I went to college at a university that you probably never have heard of -- and then I went to grad school at a snooty school I am sure everyone has heard of. I can tell you that just because you haven't heard of a school doesn't mean it is easy to get all A's -- and just because a school is world famous doesn't mean that it is difficult to get good grades there (although it may be difficult to get into that school but if your parent's are able to make a large enough donation you can probably get in almost anywhere.)
The expo said that it was dedicated to 8-bit commodore computers but only really mentioned the C64 and 128. I still have my Vic 20 in my house (although I haven't plugged it in for a while.) Did the expo just ignore the Pet and the Vic20?
The Vic20 was the first computer I ever programed for (and I believe it was the first computer Linus ever programed for as well.) I just had a cassette tape deck and an expansion memory card that was hacked to allow one to play programs that were ripped from game carts (my uncle supplied the expansion card -- first time I ever heard of the concept of computer piracy.)
Later I bought a 300 baud phone modem for it but my attempt (in the late 90's) to use it to connect to my university's internet ISP failed.
I didn't know what all the Peek and Poke commands did I just new that it would make the computer play music and change the color of the screen (I was like 12 at the time) if I poked to the correct number. So when my family got our first IBM XT I noticed it had GW-Basic which I thought was just like the basic on the Vic-20. So of course I issued the exact same peek and poke commands in GW-basic as I did on my old vic-20 in an attmept to make the XT play music. It wasn't until I was a little older that I learned why poking to random memory addresses might not be such a good idea. Luckly I think the worst thing that ever happened was that it froze the machine up.
You can get these all over the place. Even Edmund scientific sells them: http://www.edmundoptics.com/IOD/DisplayProd uct.cfm ?productid=1904 Try googling sapphire windows. Sapphire is great! Extremely durable and transparent well into the infrared -- that is why they use them for protective domes on heat seaking missiles as well as other cool applications.
You guys all know this happened before! http://blackout.gmu.edu/events/tl1965.htm l History repeats itself and in some of the same cities. You would think almost 40 years later we would know how to stop this from happening.
Your system ran anyway even though the 12V line was running at 13.2V? I wonder how sensitive mobos really are to voltage fluctuations. They often do have lots of caps and voltage regulators that clean the power for any circuit that is sensitive. Also switching power supplies can have trouble regulating the power if there is no load. Maybe the 12V line wasn't regulated well because nothing was using the 12V line?
It depends on what encoding scheme you are using. If you are using NRZ then yes, the zeros are no signal and therefore they "bend" quite easily. Although if there is a bend then you might have increased dispersion; your pulse would then spread and it might make a 0 look more like a 1. However I don't think they usually use NRZ (could be wrong about that.) I think usually they use something else like manchester where zero is when you go from a high signal to a low signal while a one is when you go from low to high (http://www.erg.abdn.ac.uk/users/gorry/course/phy- pages/man.html.) The bending problem would therefore effect both zeros and ones. The problem with NRZ is that your transmitter and reciever have to be synchronized. If the reciever's timing get's off it may think that bit 6 is really bit 7. I think this is why serial ports have stop bits. I know this was a joke but it brings up interesting points:)
Actually, it is my understanding that sometimes having too small of a load can be bad for a switching power suppplies. I am pretty sure I heard somewhere that if you turned on some older power supplies with no load you could actually break the power supply -- although I could be wrong about that. And I am sure that if you do put some load on the supply it should be ok. Anyway, I would suggest finding out how much current you really need and then buying a supply that is rated a bit higher than that. Use the money you save to buy more toys:) If it does limit the life of the supply then who cares -- most of them last so darn long anyway that it doesn't matter. Do you care if the supply on your 386 dies? Some people might, I don't. If you are worried about the life of the supply I would be more interested in the reputation of the company that makes the supply than the wattage of the supply. Call me old fashion but I think that if a manufactorer rates their product for a certain wattage you should be able to draw that much power almost indefinitely and not have any problems. If this isn't the case then that company is just sucks! It would be interesting if someone did post the reliability of different brands. You can't always tell if the more expensive ones really will outlast the cheap ones. Of course even if you don't push your supply and you do buy one from a good company sometimes they might still die too soon -- life just sucks sometimes!
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I am from the United States but I am not sure if I am a "Yank." You see I am from Maryland. Maryland is south of the Mason Dixon line which means that it is often considered to be in the south. However, Maryland never joined the Confederacy during the Civil War. At the time Maryland was very pro-South and probably would have left the union if given the chance; the federal government didn't let Maryland leave because if they did then Washington DC would have been totally surrounded by southern. In the united states a "yankee" usually refers to people in the north, particularly New England. At least people living in the South usually refer to northerners as Yankees. And in fact the first two definitions of the word Yankee in my "Webster's New World Dictionary" are someone living in New England, and someone living in the North. I am not from New England and to be honest I am not sure if I am from the North or not. People in New England would probably say that Maryland is in the South but people in the Deep South would probably say that Maryland is in the North. So I usually don't consider myself a Yankee. It doesn't help that the most evil team in all of American sports happens to call themselves the Yankees.
Anyway, my point is that calling everyone from the US a Yank is a little like calling everyone in the UK English. When you call me a yank in my mind it just shows how ignorant you are of the history of the US.
Yes, the filters block most of the near IR light but not ALL of it. Keep in mind the detector on your TV that reads the signals from the remote is a silicon photodiode that is probably pretty similar to the detectors on a CCD. And the detector on your TV has no trouble at all reading the remote (unless the batteries are going dead or you opted for the cheap TV.)
:)
Also, some CCD's will alternate the color of their detectors: one red, then one blue then one green detector. When the camera guesses what the color of the image should be at let's say a red pixel it averages the blue and green signals from it's neighbors. This can obviously produce color errors but most of the time you don't see it.
Another problem I forgot to mention with color CCD's is that silicon CCD's are often times actually MORE sensitive in the near IR -- the sensitivity is starting to tail off when you get to the visible. So a color CCD actually blocks the wavelengths where the camera is most sensitive. Having a B&W camera with no filters at all will be able to see in the near IR and be more sensitive overall than a color one. But hey, color is pretty
Another reason to use a color wheel instead of having a color CCD (filters attached to each pixel) is that unfiltered silicon CCD's can see into the near infrared; they can detect light that the human eye cannot. If you use a color CCD then you basically limit the camera so it is only sensitive to light that the human eye can see. With the color wheel they get pretty color images but still have a camera that is sensitive to other wavelengths.
I find that when some people get out of high school they get this idea in their heads that if they don't go to this super snooty college than they will never be able to get a job and all of their hopes and dreams will be crushed. Another unusual thing I find is that high school students often times think that state schools are only cool if they in other states. This is ironic because although you may not think that colleges in your state are cool many people from other states probably do think they are cool. Now I am not going to tell you that there is NO difference between going to a super expensive school and going to a cheap school. However I have had some experience in this matter (undergrad at a cheap state school grad at a super expensive private school that you all have heard of) and I can tell you that the difference in education is very small. All schools use more or less the same text books and they have to meet certain standards in order to be able to keep giving out diplomas.
My point is that if you can't afford some super expensive school maybe you should think about going to a cheaper state school (one that is in YOUR state.) I think that you will find that when you get out the people who went to the cheap schools will for the most part being working at the same jobs and making the same amount of $$ as those who went for the expensive schools. The cost of state schools are going up much faster than inflation but I think most of the time you can still afford basic tuition by working in the summer and at part time jobs. For room and board I guess you will have to live off mommy and daddy or get student loans. My advice: try to stay for longer than 4 years (compared to college the real world sucks!! who graduates in 4 years anymore anyway?) and try to take as few student loans as possible; if you are lucky the mommy and daddy bank will pay for much of it -- even if that means you have to live in your parent's basement.
America is the most religous country in the industrialized world based on the number of churches versus population and the number of people that attend them. I am sure that MOST people in the US would probably be ok with racier TV (see cable and movies) but when someone does something that is even a little over the top the religous right comes out and mails a gazillion letters.
... oops went to far better stop now ...
Keep in mind that many of the people that originally came to this country did it to escape religious persecution. So in other words many of the worlds religious nuts came to this country and are now sending letters in to fox because they said the word "ass" one too many times. Well things are changing alittle. I think it is actually ok to say "ass" on tv and in fact fox is thinking of changing their slogan so it has the word "ass" in it. So basically the US is 20-30 years (at least) behind the rest of the world when it comes to putting sex on TV.
What I don't understand is that I believe that we are 10-20 years ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to putting violence on TV and movies.
enter rant mode:
I mean WTF? It is ok to have a movie where millions of people have their cuts spewed out of them in violent death scenes but god forbid if anyone could use the media to figure out where babies come from. Many years ago I saw in the video store that they made a PG version of the movie titanic. What made it PG? Did thousands of people not get sent to their horrifying death? No mostly they just took out the sex scenes. I mean no one should know that Kate Winslet is acutally anatomically correct. And another thing, why the hell do they put brail instruction on drive through ATMs?
rant mode off
Why is is that when Sega released the Nohmad (portable system that played genesis games) everyone thought they were a bunch of idiots. However if and when Sony releases the portable playstation everyone will think they are the biggest geniuses in the world? I guess it just goes to show that advertising and product loyalty are more important in the video game industry than coming up with a new idea. Heck even the Gamegear was basically just a portable Sega Master system. Making a portable version of your full sized system is NOT a new idea, but to many people will think it is.
First of all, if you make statements about the inhabitance of an ENTIRE nation -- well at best that is a stereotype at worst it may be racism. British people are just that, people, and you can't make a statement about a group of people that large.
At the same time you can't make a statement about every engineer and every device the British make. There are good engineers and there are bad engineers living in the UK -- just like there are good and bad engineers living in every other country on the face of the Earth.
Finally, putting things into space is not an easy thing for anybody to do. NASA has been having more trouble lately because at some point the decided to switch to the better, faster, and cheaper school of building. This means that they have been spending millions on spacecrafts instead of billions. When you spend billions on spacecrafts you can have someone who's full time job is to check to make sure everyone uses metric or imperial. When you spend millions on spacecrafts then you have to cut corners and you will therefore have more failures. You can also put ALOT more missions up there and will hopefully have more successes as well (although I am not sure that this has happened.)
That being said the Hubble was an oops because they did spend billions on it and there was an error with it. However I would defend the hubble because after the fix the thing works as well as anyone could expect.
The Wrights and many other inventors worked in secret in order to try to prevent people from stealing their ideas. This leads some dreamers to believe that the inventor from their country really invented the airplane and just didn't tell enough people. Ok, there are some facts that work against the Wrights having been the first to be in the air:
The Wrights did not invent the wing, or the propellor. Hang gliders had been around long before the Wrights and they first got interested in flying when playing with a toy helicopter when they were kids. Not only that but lighter than air devices had also been flying long before the Wrights.
The 1903 flier that flew on Dec. 17 was very unstable and probably was only able to fly because there was a large amount of wind that day.
Having said that there are a lot of things in favor of the Wrights.
Although the 1903 flier was useless the brothers went back to work improving it and by most accounts by 1904 or so they did indeed have a heavier than air plane that could take off and land and could be controlled in the air.
After securing all of the patents the Wrights went on exibition showing off their invention to everyone who wanted to see it. For most people the first time they saw an airplane it was a Wright plane.
The Wrights eventually ended up manufactoring and selling their planes to anyone who could afford it; they thought that their planes would become as common as motor cars. And just about everyone who made a plane after the Wrights used many of their ideas.
In the end however does it really matter who invented the airplane or what country they were from? The important thing is that roughly 100 years ago today a HUMAN BEING did what only birds had done before -- took to the air in a heavier than air aircraft. I think that is something we can all be proud of.
Sure you can tell exactly how fast it is going (not moving) but you will have no clue as to where it is in space!
Ok, I was wrong. Nobody can know everything about everything. You still didn't answer the original question. Except for some memory addresses that were set in stone because of how the 8088 was designed, why couldn't the creators of the IBM PC set up the memory address space differently than they did -- perhaps more efficiently. 640k may seemed like a lot in the late 70's/early 80's but it became clear later that having even a little bit more would have been a good thing.
As far as I know the only memory address that is set in stone is 0. This is the address that the cpu first checks when it is booting and therefore there must be some rom there to tell the computer how to boot itself. Other than that I suppose the creators of the IBM PC could have split the memory anyway they wanted. I don't see how it really matters, they had to split it up somehow. I believe that later they decided that not all of the 384K needed to be reserved, parts of it became HMA. Don't you remember editing your config.sys and autoexec.bat in DOS so all of the drivers would load in the HMA leaving the lower 640K free for memory hungry programs? Wasn't there a "load high" command you had to stick in there? Been a long time I don't remember the exact command
Right now everyone's media is pre-formated in FAT -- a filesystem that has been around so long and is so simple that just about every operating system on the planet can read it. If MS starts charging for people to use FAT maybe everyone will simply invent their own file system and force windows users to install a driver in order to be able to read the new media. It may take awhile for the new filesystem to be ported to linux. Maybe in the near future you won't be able to use the latest digital camera with a linux system because linux can't read the filesystem that the camera uses. Also what if each digital camera company invents their own filesystem? Maybe cameras from Cannon will work under linux but not cameras from Sony? At the very least if they have to pay money to use FAT then they will no doubt pass the cost on to the consumer which means we will pay an MS tax just to use any preformatted media.
I don't know about you, but IMO standard NTSC is fine for most hollywood movies on most small screen TVs. Maybe if I had a 300 foot monster TV I would want more resolution (Mmmm 300 foot TV! pixels the size of your head!) So I am perfectly happy with my current DVD selection. So when everyone else sells back their standard DVD collection in order to make way for the super duper high res DVD, I will be busy buying up all of their old standard DVDs for a fraction of the cost they paid for them.
This just looks like ultra wide band communication to me -- just with a different buzz word attached. They probably just pulse an electromagnet on and off to produce a digital signal that is picked up by the reciever. When you vary the intensity of a magnetic field you produce electro magnetic radiation. Since they are pulses and not a signal modulated at sum carrier frequency the frequency spectrum that is emmited is across a large spectrum. Hence the name ultra wide band communication. Because of the way UWB signal propigate (different frequencies propigate at different speeds and have different absorption rates) the signals don't propigate as far as regular RF signals (well they propigate the information is just lost.)
Read "The Victorian Internet" by I forget who wrote it. It is about the telegraph and how all the things we thought were new in the 90's had really been around for 100 years or so (chat rooms, compression, data security) and it talks about the first time some nut decided to put a big cable under the ocean to connect continents. It is a really cool book!
The biggest issue I have with OO.org is that it is too much like MS Office for my taste :) Give me latex any day (especially when you are writing scientific papers.) When I use OO.org I find that almost all of the features and some of the annoyances from MS office are reproduced. Maybe it is just me. If you like MS office I don't see why you wouldn't like OO.org.
There are those that believe that we should stop all genetic engineering research right now because we shouldn't be "playing God." Others think that we cannot afford to stop genetic engineering research as the technology could be used to cure many illnesses and benefit mankind. This is one of the first comercially available genetically modified creature, but it probably won't be the last. Right now it is just a fish. What's next? Genetically modified food? People? Somebody someday will probably want to make sure that their children are smarter than a Nobel prize winner and more beautiful than a model and won't be afraid to fund the research to make it happen.
I don't think we should take the fear of what could happen if this fish or others like it were released into the wild too lightly. Right now there is a plant that was bred to live in aquariums that was released into the wild and is now basically killing much of the native plants and animals that live in the Mediterranean sea. And who could forget the snake fish that was released into a lake in Maryland. Anyone living in Australia I am sure will be able to come up with many examples of what can happen if you introduce even a seemingly innocent animal into an ecosystem where it does not belong. We have screwed up the ecosystem enough times by introducing animals that were cross bred naturally who knows what would happen if we release a creature that was genetically modified by man into the wild. We have to be sure that this fish CANNOT reproduce on its own no matter what happens. And we have to be sure that if you create a genetically modified animal and then sell it to the public one day some idiot is going to release it into the wild. And if there is even the smallest chance that a genetically modified animal can somehow reproduce we have to respect Murphy's law on this and conclude that the fish WILL reproduce.
I personally look at genetic engineering the same way I look at nuclear power. Both have great potential to benefit mankind. Maybe nuclear power can be used to solve the energy crisis, maybe genetic engineering can be used to cure cancer. We should not just dissmiss either technology as being evil. But both are VERY dangerous and could potentially screw up the environment big time -- they could even be used to make it so that planet Earth can no longer support human life.
I personally think that the Glofish is more than just a fish but maybe I am wrong on that one.
Maybe if my dad were head of the CIA and then a senator I could have gone to Harvard and then gotten all B's as well. Also, I went to college at a university that you probably never have heard of -- and then I went to grad school at a snooty school I am sure everyone has heard of. I can tell you that just because you haven't heard of a school doesn't mean it is easy to get all A's -- and just because a school is world famous doesn't mean that it is difficult to get good grades there (although it may be difficult to get into that school but if your parent's are able to make a large enough donation you can probably get in almost anywhere.)
The expo said that it was dedicated to 8-bit commodore computers but only really mentioned the C64 and 128. I still have my Vic 20 in my house (although I haven't plugged it in for a while.) Did the expo just ignore the Pet and the Vic20?
The Vic20 was the first computer I ever programed for (and I believe it was the first computer Linus ever programed for as well.) I just had a cassette tape deck and an expansion memory card that was hacked to allow one to play programs that were ripped from game carts (my uncle supplied the expansion card -- first time I ever heard of the concept of computer piracy.)
Later I bought a 300 baud phone modem for it but my attempt (in the late 90's) to use it to connect to my university's internet ISP failed.
I didn't know what all the Peek and Poke commands did I just new that it would make the computer play music and change the color of the screen (I was like 12 at the time) if I poked to the correct number. So when my family got our first IBM XT I noticed it had GW-Basic which I thought was just like the basic on the Vic-20. So of course I issued the exact same peek and poke commands in GW-basic as I did on my old vic-20 in an attmept to make the XT play music. It wasn't until I was a little older that I learned why poking to random memory addresses might not be such a good idea. Luckly I think the worst thing that ever happened was that it froze the machine up.
How do you pronounce Xen? Is it "Zen" like xenon, or "X-en" like x-ray?
You can get these all over the place. Even Edmund scientific sells them:d uct.cfm ?productid=1904
http://www.edmundoptics.com/IOD/DisplayPro
Try googling sapphire windows.
Sapphire is great! Extremely durable and transparent well into the infrared -- that is why they use them for protective domes on heat seaking missiles as well as other cool applications.
You guys all know this happened before!m l
http://blackout.gmu.edu/events/tl1965.ht
History repeats itself and in some of the same cities. You would think almost 40 years later we would know how to stop this from happening.
Your system ran anyway even though the 12V line was running at 13.2V? I wonder how sensitive mobos really are to voltage fluctuations. They often do have lots of caps and voltage regulators that clean the power for any circuit that is sensitive. Also switching power supplies can have trouble regulating the power if there is no load. Maybe the 12V line wasn't regulated well because nothing was using the 12V line?
It depends on what encoding scheme you are using. If you are using NRZ then yes, the zeros are no signal and therefore they "bend" quite easily. Although if there is a bend then you might have increased dispersion; your pulse would then spread and it might make a 0 look more like a 1. However I don't think they usually use NRZ (could be wrong about that.) I think usually they use something else like manchester where zero is when you go from a high signal to a low signal while a one is when you go from low to high (http://www.erg.abdn.ac.uk/users/gorry/course/phy- pages/man.html.) The bending problem would therefore effect both zeros and ones. The problem with NRZ is that your transmitter and reciever have to be synchronized. If the reciever's timing get's off it may think that bit 6 is really bit 7. I think this is why serial ports have stop bits. I know this was a joke but it brings up interesting points :)
Actually, it is my understanding that sometimes having too small of a load can be bad for a switching power suppplies. I am pretty sure I heard somewhere that if you turned on some older power supplies with no load you could actually break the power supply -- although I could be wrong about that. And I am sure that if you do put some load on the supply it should be ok. Anyway, I would suggest finding out how much current you really need and then buying a supply that is rated a bit higher than that. Use the money you save to buy more toys :) If it does limit the life of the supply then who cares -- most of them last so darn long anyway that it doesn't matter. Do you care if the supply on your 386 dies? Some people might, I don't. If you are worried about the life of the supply I would be more interested in the reputation of the company that makes the supply than the wattage of the supply. Call me old fashion but I think that if a manufactorer rates their product for a certain wattage you should be able to draw that much power almost indefinitely and not have any problems. If this isn't the case then that company is just sucks! It would be interesting if someone did post the reliability of different brands. You can't always tell if the more expensive ones really will outlast the cheap ones. Of course even if you don't push your supply and you do buy one from a good company sometimes they might still die too soon -- life just sucks sometimes!