Not the one that's around now, but the first one from back in 1994. The Internet was just starting to take off, and Microsoft wanted to kill it. The Microsoft Network was a non-TCP/IP non-Internet network that was supposed to be a Microsoft controlled version of the internet. I saw a presentation on it by some Microsoft manager back in 1994/1995 at some Washington Software Association event. They did a demonstration of an "MSN-brower" connecting to an "MSN-site" to view some "MSN-pages" and buy some toner cartridges. Supposedly it was real, but who knows.... Someone asked if Browser X (that would be Netscape) could use the Microsoft Network, and the answer was "No, only Microsoft will be able to create software for the Microsoft Network." I predicted it would be an utter failure, and it was. Microsoft couldn't innovate their way out a paper bag, much less out innovate everyone on the Internet. Microsoft's thinking was that there was nothing else one could want with the Internet but one store where you could buy toner cartidges.
Microchannel aka MCA was what IBM made for the PS/2's. It's a 32-bit bus that pre-dates VLB and PCI. The PS/1 might have something different or just be plain ISA, I don't know. It probably didn't have MCA, since that's what the expensive PS/2s were for.
I know of official test cases aren't made public, so that the officials can cover up their mistakes. But does anyone else provide test cases they made up after the contest? In my experience, dealing with corner cases you didn't think of is one of the hardest things to get right.
I'd be interested in seeing what sort of CO2 impact ethanol actually has (how much removed by corn when growing, how much released when the corn is fermented, how much released when the stalks decompose, and how much is released when the alcohol is burned). The net impact would be none. All the carbon in the corn came from CO2. When the process is complete and the ethanol is burned, all the carbon that was in the corn has to end up somewhere. Unless the corn-ethanol process produces millions of tons of carbon rich ash that is buried in the ground, all the carbon that was in the corn ended up back in the atmosphere. Ethanol doesn't remove carbon from the atmosphere (no matter how you make it, even from sugar cane). To do that, you would have to grow the corn and then bury it in the ground.
Ethanol is supposed to be a more efficient way of using oil. The oil is used to produce corn and refine the corn into ethanol, which produces slightly more energy than just burning the oil directly. The corn captured some energy from the sun that ends up in the ethanol. You can think of ethanol as hybrid oil+solar energy. In the case of corn, it's 90% oil and 10% solar, if that. Sugar cane is much better, but needs to be grown closer to the equator where there is more sunlight. Only Hawaii and the southern parts of Florida, Louisiana and Texas can grow sugar cane in the US.
The negative side of ethanol is that the net positive side is very small to non-existant. It takes a lot of nearly as much oil to produce the ethanol from corn as the ethanol saves. The best figured I've seen is it takes 1 barrel of oil to produce the ethanol equivalent of 1.2 barrels of oil. And then you have to take into account the other side effects of corn production, the pesticides, the fertilizer run-off, the phosphate use, etc. Ethanol from corn is more of a government gift to to corn farmers than it is an effective means of reducing dependence on foreign oil or CO2 emissions. It would be far more cost effective to spend the money in a way that reduces energy use, like replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact-flourescent or funding ways of making cities less car dependent.
Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 and was estimated to have released 500,000 times more CO2 then was *ever* created by man. I hope the Kyoto deal has a clause to keep those evil volcanoes under control.
Did you just make that up, or did another head in the sand crazy tell it to you?
You're completely and utterly wrong. Not even close. Man made emissions of CO2 are over 25 billion metric tons per year (that's 2003, it will be more now). Mt. Pinatubo released 42 million metric tons of CO2. Man made sources of CO2 are nearly 500 times greater each year than what Mt. Pinatubo released! And an eruption like My. Pinatubo only occurs about every hundred years.
So anonymous coward, are you an aide for Senator Boxer or do you work for a denfense contractor? How many of those airplanes weren't in combat zones? Zero. How many people were killed by cars in the same time period? Millions.
Just the added cost of this system to airfare will kill people. The more flying costs, the more people will choose to drive. Because driving is so much more dangerous than flying, the more people drive the more people will die. The number of people who will die from cars because of this sytem is much greater than the number who could possibly be saved from the imaginary missle threat.
This system is just pork for defense contractors and Senators trying to promote themselves by saying they're "saving you from the terrorists!" The reality is that this system will kill Americans, not save them.
This system of Boxer's will kill thousands of Americans just to enrich a few defense contractors who have bribed her. How?
It will cost billions of dollars. That's billions of dollars which won't save a single life, as no passenger jet has even been brought down by a missle outside a combat zone. That's billions of dollars that won't get spent on something that will save lives, like making our roads safer or prenatal care. Choosing to spend money on a worthless defense against a non-existant missle threat is exactly the same as taking the money away from where it could do good. This system will kill Americans, not save lives.
proved to be more expensive to operate than their fossil-fueled counterparts That's only because costs of the pollution from the fossil-fueled ships isn't counted. The cancer and respiratory problems from the pollution has a very significant healthcare cost. Then there is the enviromental cost. Damage to commercial fishing because of oxygen depletion in the oceans and acidification of lakes and streams. Populated islands getting submerged. Storms destroying major cities. That's just what's happening so far, its going to get much much worse. The balance sheet may say, "100 tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere: cost $0" but the real cost is far higher.
When ever you read about someone with this wonderful used fryer-oil powered vehicle, they're always taking it on some cross-country trip. Is that because if they stay in one place they use up all the fryer-oil from the local restaurants?
I'm only half joking about that. The people who advocate this stuff have the same program as the Verizon employees who can't understand the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents. They just don't seem to grasp the orders of magnitude difference between the amount of corn oil this country produces vs the amount of crude oil it consumes.
It used to be that CPUs didn't come with floating point units. You had to buy a 287 or 387 to go with your 286 or 386, and they weren't cheap either. I think we paid $400 for a 20 MHz 387 back in the early 90s. Around the end of the 386s' use in desktops, competitors to Intel (Weitek, Cyrix, some others I think) had produced 387 compatible chips that were faster and cheaper than Intel's. For the 486, Intel decided to integrate the floating point unit, which made it pretty much impossible to buy someone else's chip. Sure there were technical merits to that, but I'm sure that fact that it killed any possible competition in the FPU market wasn't lost on Intel's execs.
Trying to bundle products is nothing new. A company that makes a whole package doesn't like it when parts of the package can be bought from other companies. Instead of just competing for the whole package (and the few companies who can provide that), they need to compete for each individual part, and every company that can make any one of those parts. If AMD puts the GPU in the CPU, then it's pretty hard for nvidia get OEM's to include their GPU. Nvidia will have to build a CPU that's as good as AMD's, and that's not going to happen any time soon.
In the English language, it is normal to pronounce the letters in an acronym separately.
You're wrong about that, if you look at the definition of an acronym, it refers to abbreviations that are pronounced as words. In fact, if you pronounce the individual letters, it's not an acronym but just an abbreviation or initialism.
I doesn't seem possible that they would lose the anti-SLAPP lawsuit, but they did. They can lose this too. Copyright law is different depending on the size of the holder of the copyrights. If massive copyright holder like a record studio thinks their copyrights are getting violated, the FBI investigates. This never happens if an open source project has its copyrights violated.
And QAM is not the most efficient, as we're putting about 45megabit into the 6MHz channels for OTA HD broadcasting...
Actually, QAM is more efficient. The ATSC standard uses 8-VSB for OTA, which provides about 19.2 Mbits/sec of usable bandwidth. 256-QAM, which is used by almost all digital cable systems, provides around 38 Mbits/sec of bandwidth in the same 6 MHz channel. 256-QAM requires a much higher signal-to-noise ratio for quasi error free reception, and isn't suitable for OTA.
No, is can handle digital cable. It has an ATSC demodulator that can do QAM or VSB. What it can't handle is encrypted digital cable. In the US, that means only your HD local stations on cable can be received, since the FCC requires they be unencrypted, and everything else will be encrypted. In Canada there is no such regulation, and so it appears that everything is encrypted.
The statistics are just fatalities per million exposure hours. "Living" just refers to other causes of death not listed. Like heart disease or lung cancer.
Your common sense is completely wrong. The reason you think bicycling is dangerous is because you don't do it. It's unknown to you, and so you fear it.
Data from Failure Analysis Associates, fatalities per million exposure hours:
Skydiving 128.77 General Flying 15.58 Motorcycling 8.80 Scuba Diving 1.98 Living 1.53 Swimming 1.07 Snowmobiling.88 Motoring.47 Water skiing.28 Bicycling.26 Airline Flying.15 Hunting.08
Bicycling is much safer than driving, not more dangerous. And that's just looking at injury statistics. If your fat lazy ass dies from heart disease at 35, you're still dead aren't you? There are ZERO health benefits from sitting on your ass driving a car. There many health benefits from aerobic exercise, like riding a bike. When you consider the whole picture, accidents and health, cyclists are by far the safest people on the road. Driving a car for an hour decreases your life expectancy, riding a bicycle for an hour increases it. To put it another way, if it's a choice between driving a car or staying home, your're better off staying home. If it's a choice between riding a bike and staying home, you're better off riding a bike.
CableCARD is one of the only HD technologies out there that's trying to save consumers money and increase competition amongst receivers. Renting one is cheaper than renting a cable box. It allows you to get a set top box that you like, rather than the one they chose, many of which force you to see advertisements where you'd rather not.
So where is this competition? Where are these cablecard receiver that don't force you to watch advertisements? There aren't any! CableCard is fake competition. The media companies and the cable companies control the licensing of CableCard. The won't license it to anyone who might compete with them. The cable companies are open to competition, they just get to choose who is allowed to compete with them and have absolute veto power over anything their competitors may produce.
There is no card for a computer that supports CableCard. You can't even buy a set top box that supports CableCard. The only CableCard hardware you can buy is a TV, which of course won't output the content in any way except to the screen. You can't even buy the CableCards, you must rent them from the cable company. The media companies are using CableCard to lock out any competition in the DVR market, so you're only choice will be hardware approved by the media companies that operates in the way they want. That means no 30 second skip, no burning to DVD, no transferring from one DVR to another, and the ability of the media companies to block recording of any content they choose.
The HDMI output from a cable company set top box is encrypted, making that card useless for capturing it. That card is for capturing the unencrypted output from an HD camera. Hardware to capture HD component signals is more expensive, and since it's uncompressed it produces a huge amount of data. In order to be practical, you need to compress in real time, and hardware to compress HD in real time is very expensive.
I had some CF spotlights in a reflector housing. They sucked. Took a long time to warm up and didn't produce nearly as much light as a normal bulb did.
Even if you wanted a 1 watt night-light, there are no 1W CF bulbs because a 1W CF bulb would be terrible. There also aren't any 500 watt flourescent bulbs, because at that power level sodium vapor lights are much more efficient.
Another problem with LEDs is that they are much more sensitive to heat. Even just 5 watt LEDs need major effort to heat sink.
Don't believe the advertising copy, they play fast and loose with facts!
If you look at the effeciency of one of the best high-power white LEDs, the Luxeon K2, it produces 60 lumens at 1.197 watts, for about 50 lumens/watt. A typical CF bulb (reading off the package) is 900 lumens and 14 watts, for 64 lumens/watt. If you look at a higher power verison of the Luxeon K2, it's 120 lumens in 3.72 watts for only 32 lumens/watt.
White LEDs are NOT seven times more efficient than flourescent bulbs, they are LESS efficient.
Consider the price too. I bought those 900 lumen CF bulbs at Home Depot for about $1.75 each. The white Luxeon K2 is $3.45 each for a less efficient (45 lumens) binning, you would need 20 of them to make a 900 lumen light bulb. And that's just for the LEDs, you'd still need electronics (which are not 100% efficient themselves!) to make an actual bulb. For example, that clearance bulb at ThinkGeek is $25 for a bulb with the power of one 60 lumen K2 LED. 15 of those $25 ThinkGeek bulbs would cost $375 and have the light output of just one $1.75 CF bulb!
The only advantage of LEDs is that they are more efficient the less powerfull they are. CF is more efficient the more powerfull it is. If you look at normal lightbulbs in the 900 lumen range, CF wins by a lot. If you look at something small like a one watt flashlight, there are no 1 watt CF bulbs, so LEDs are best.
I take it it's been ported to non-Alphas? All the device drivers still written in C? I wrote the IP fragment reassembler and NFS filesystem for SPIN years ago. Didn't know modula-3, but I managed to make the my code work anyway.
I had an arcnet setup one year in my dorm with the people across the hall. The campus ethernet would only allow one computer to be active per room (switch with 1 MAC address per port limit). We had the linux machines setup as routers, so we could get to the internet via our ethernet, or via the arcnet across the hall to another computer. We could get multiple computers that way, as long the ethernet switch only saw one MAC address, it didn't matter how many IPs you had behind it. We could have used a second ethernet network, but the arcnet cards were like $4 and the switch was real cheap, ethernet was somewhat more at the time, and you get this cool arc0 device in Linux.
My first real kernel programming was trying to network boot a 20 Mhz 386 with no hard drive and just an arcnet card from another linux machine. Put the kernel on floppy, and used a NFS root filesystem. The problem was that RARP in Linux, used to get the IP address, didn't support Arcnet. It only supported ethernet and some ham radio network. So I had to add arcnet support the linux RARP code. Actually got it working and compiled a kernel on a 20 MHz 386 with 9 MB of ram.
I'm pretty sure the PC version was the first to come out, so my box would have predated all the other versions. It looked like the Amiga version was from 1992 from what I found online, vs 1990 for the PC. Sega was probably even later. The box is back at my parents' place, if they haven't thrown it out by now, but I think it had a big "actual game graphics" sticker on it.
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Not the one that's around now, but the first one from back in 1994. The Internet was just starting to take off, and Microsoft wanted to kill it. The Microsoft Network was a non-TCP/IP non-Internet network that was supposed to be a Microsoft controlled version of the internet. I saw a presentation on it by some Microsoft manager back in 1994/1995 at some Washington Software Association event. They did a demonstration of an "MSN-brower" connecting to an "MSN-site" to view some "MSN-pages" and buy some toner cartridges. Supposedly it was real, but who knows.... Someone asked if Browser X (that would be Netscape) could use the Microsoft Network, and the answer was "No, only Microsoft will be able to create software for the Microsoft Network." I predicted it would be an utter failure, and it was. Microsoft couldn't innovate their way out a paper bag, much less out innovate everyone on the Internet. Microsoft's thinking was that there was nothing else one could want with the Internet but one store where you could buy toner cartidges.
Microchannel aka MCA was what IBM made for the PS/2's. It's a 32-bit bus that pre-dates VLB and PCI. The PS/1 might have something different or just be plain ISA, I don't know. It probably didn't have MCA, since that's what the expensive PS/2s were for.
I know of official test cases aren't made public, so that the officials can cover up their mistakes. But does anyone else provide test cases they made up after the contest? In my experience, dealing with corner cases you didn't think of is one of the hardest things to get right.
Ethanol is supposed to be a more efficient way of using oil. The oil is used to produce corn and refine the corn into ethanol, which produces slightly more energy than just burning the oil directly. The corn captured some energy from the sun that ends up in the ethanol. You can think of ethanol as hybrid oil+solar energy. In the case of corn, it's 90% oil and 10% solar, if that. Sugar cane is much better, but needs to be grown closer to the equator where there is more sunlight. Only Hawaii and the southern parts of Florida, Louisiana and Texas can grow sugar cane in the US.
The negative side of ethanol is that the net positive side is very small to non-existant. It takes a lot of nearly as much oil to produce the ethanol from corn as the ethanol saves. The best figured I've seen is it takes 1 barrel of oil to produce the ethanol equivalent of 1.2 barrels of oil. And then you have to take into account the other side effects of corn production, the pesticides, the fertilizer run-off, the phosphate use, etc. Ethanol from corn is more of a government gift to to corn farmers than it is an effective means of reducing dependence on foreign oil or CO2 emissions. It would be far more cost effective to spend the money in a way that reduces energy use, like replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact-flourescent or funding ways of making cities less car dependent.
Did you just make that up, or did another head in the sand crazy tell it to you?
You're completely and utterly wrong. Not even close. Man made emissions of CO2 are over 25 billion metric tons per year (that's 2003, it will be more now). Mt. Pinatubo released 42 million metric tons of CO2. Man made sources of CO2 are nearly 500 times greater each year than what Mt. Pinatubo released! And an eruption like My. Pinatubo only occurs about every hundred years.
Just the added cost of this system to airfare will kill people. The more flying costs, the more people will choose to drive. Because driving is so much more dangerous than flying, the more people drive the more people will die. The number of people who will die from cars because of this sytem is much greater than the number who could possibly be saved from the imaginary missle threat.
This system is just pork for defense contractors and Senators trying to promote themselves by saying they're "saving you from the terrorists!" The reality is that this system will kill Americans, not save them.
It will cost billions of dollars. That's billions of dollars which won't save a single life, as no passenger jet has even been brought down by a missle outside a combat zone. That's billions of dollars that won't get spent on something that will save lives, like making our roads safer or prenatal care. Choosing to spend money on a worthless defense against a non-existant missle threat is exactly the same as taking the money away from where it could do good. This system will kill Americans, not save lives.
When ever you read about someone with this wonderful used fryer-oil powered vehicle, they're always taking it on some cross-country trip. Is that because if they stay in one place they use up all the fryer-oil from the local restaurants?
I'm only half joking about that. The people who advocate this stuff have the same program as the Verizon employees who can't understand the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents. They just don't seem to grasp the orders of magnitude difference between the amount of corn oil this country produces vs the amount of crude oil it consumes.
It used to be that CPUs didn't come with floating point units. You had to buy a 287 or 387 to go with your 286 or 386, and they weren't cheap either. I think we paid $400 for a 20 MHz 387 back in the early 90s. Around the end of the 386s' use in desktops, competitors to Intel (Weitek, Cyrix, some others I think) had produced 387 compatible chips that were faster and cheaper than Intel's. For the 486, Intel decided to integrate the floating point unit, which made it pretty much impossible to buy someone else's chip. Sure there were technical merits to that, but I'm sure that fact that it killed any possible competition in the FPU market wasn't lost on Intel's execs.
Trying to bundle products is nothing new. A company that makes a whole package doesn't like it when parts of the package can be bought from other companies. Instead of just competing for the whole package (and the few companies who can provide that), they need to compete for each individual part, and every company that can make any one of those parts. If AMD puts the GPU in the CPU, then it's pretty hard for nvidia get OEM's to include their GPU. Nvidia will have to build a CPU that's as good as AMD's, and that's not going to happen any time soon.
I doesn't seem possible that they would lose the anti-SLAPP lawsuit, but they did. They can lose this too. Copyright law is different depending on the size of the holder of the copyrights. If massive copyright holder like a record studio thinks their copyrights are getting violated, the FBI investigates. This never happens if an open source project has its copyrights violated.
Actually, QAM is more efficient. The ATSC standard uses 8-VSB for OTA, which provides about 19.2 Mbits/sec of usable bandwidth. 256-QAM, which is used by almost all digital cable systems, provides around 38 Mbits/sec of bandwidth in the same 6 MHz channel. 256-QAM requires a much higher signal-to-noise ratio for quasi error free reception, and isn't suitable for OTA.
No, is can handle digital cable. It has an ATSC demodulator that can do QAM or VSB. What it can't handle is encrypted digital cable. In the US, that means only your HD local stations on cable can be received, since the FCC requires they be unencrypted, and everything else will be encrypted. In Canada there is no such regulation, and so it appears that everything is encrypted.
The statistics are just fatalities per million exposure hours. "Living" just refers to other causes of death not listed. Like heart disease or lung cancer.
So where is this competition? Where are these cablecard receiver that don't force you to watch advertisements? There aren't any! CableCard is fake competition. The media companies and the cable companies control the licensing of CableCard. The won't license it to anyone who might compete with them. The cable companies are open to competition, they just get to choose who is allowed to compete with them and have absolute veto power over anything their competitors may produce.
There is no card for a computer that supports CableCard. You can't even buy a set top box that supports CableCard. The only CableCard hardware you can buy is a TV, which of course won't output the content in any way except to the screen. You can't even buy the CableCards, you must rent them from the cable company. The media companies are using CableCard to lock out any competition in the DVR market, so you're only choice will be hardware approved by the media companies that operates in the way they want. That means no 30 second skip, no burning to DVD, no transferring from one DVR to another, and the ability of the media companies to block recording of any content they choose.
The HDMI output from a cable company set top box is encrypted, making that card useless for capturing it. That card is for capturing the unencrypted output from an HD camera. Hardware to capture HD component signals is more expensive, and since it's uncompressed it produces a huge amount of data. In order to be practical, you need to compress in real time, and hardware to compress HD in real time is very expensive.
I had some CF spotlights in a reflector housing. They sucked. Took a long time to warm up and didn't produce nearly as much light as a normal bulb did.
Even if you wanted a 1 watt night-light, there are no 1W CF bulbs because a 1W CF bulb would be terrible. There also aren't any 500 watt flourescent bulbs, because at that power level sodium vapor lights are much more efficient.
Another problem with LEDs is that they are much more sensitive to heat. Even just 5 watt LEDs need major effort to heat sink.
If you look at the effeciency of one of the best high-power white LEDs, the Luxeon K2, it produces 60 lumens at 1.197 watts, for about 50 lumens/watt. A typical CF bulb (reading off the package) is 900 lumens and 14 watts, for 64 lumens/watt. If you look at a higher power verison of the Luxeon K2, it's 120 lumens in 3.72 watts for only 32 lumens/watt.
White LEDs are NOT seven times more efficient than flourescent bulbs, they are LESS efficient.
Consider the price too. I bought those 900 lumen CF bulbs at Home Depot for about $1.75 each. The white Luxeon K2 is $3.45 each for a less efficient (45 lumens) binning, you would need 20 of them to make a 900 lumen light bulb. And that's just for the LEDs, you'd still need electronics (which are not 100% efficient themselves!) to make an actual bulb. For example, that clearance bulb at ThinkGeek is $25 for a bulb with the power of one 60 lumen K2 LED. 15 of those $25 ThinkGeek bulbs would cost $375 and have the light output of just one $1.75 CF bulb!
The only advantage of LEDs is that they are more efficient the less powerfull they are. CF is more efficient the more powerfull it is. If you look at normal lightbulbs in the 900 lumen range, CF wins by a lot. If you look at something small like a one watt flashlight, there are no 1 watt CF bulbs, so LEDs are best.
I take it it's been ported to non-Alphas? All the device drivers still written in C? I wrote the IP fragment reassembler and NFS filesystem for SPIN years ago. Didn't know modula-3, but I managed to make the my code work anyway.
I had an arcnet setup one year in my dorm with the people across the hall. The campus ethernet would only allow one computer to be active per room (switch with 1 MAC address per port limit). We had the linux machines setup as routers, so we could get to the internet via our ethernet, or via the arcnet across the hall to another computer. We could get multiple computers that way, as long the ethernet switch only saw one MAC address, it didn't matter how many IPs you had behind it. We could have used a second ethernet network, but the arcnet cards were like $4 and the switch was real cheap, ethernet was somewhat more at the time, and you get this cool arc0 device in Linux.
My first real kernel programming was trying to network boot a 20 Mhz 386 with no hard drive and just an arcnet card from another linux machine. Put the kernel on floppy, and used a NFS root filesystem. The problem was that RARP in Linux, used to get the IP address, didn't support Arcnet. It only supported ethernet and some ham radio network. So I had to add arcnet support the linux RARP code. Actually got it working and compiled a kernel on a 20 MHz 386 with 9 MB of ram.
I'm pretty sure the PC version was the first to come out, so my box would have predated all the other versions. It looked like the Amiga version was from 1992 from what I found online, vs 1990 for the PC. Sega was probably even later. The box is back at my parents' place, if they haven't thrown it out by now, but I think it had a big "actual game graphics" sticker on it.