Wow, are you ever wrong. It doesn't take that much energy to grow a crystal and then slice it into thin segments.
No, not at all. Processing huge quantities of raw silicon to achieve the purity you need. Mixing it with the appropriate doping agents. Cooking the log and cutting slices off it, which then need to be etched and doped with the opposite polarity of silicon. And then you need to package it and attach leads to it. All for a 0.6V/cell and 400mW of energy in full sunlight.
And solar cells are solid state devices, they tend to last for hundreds of years before they stop working.
Sure they do. By extension, then, you've never had a semiconductor device fail? (After all, they last for hundreds of years but have really only been popular for 40 years or so.)
Semiconductors *do* fail. Sometimes, the doped regions at their PN junctions change spontaeously and the device in question goes leaky or open. Sometimes they get damaged by static electricity, perhaps a lightning strike nearby. And sometimes they simply crack from thermal cycling, a problem exacerbated by the size of the dies.
Oops. What's this? The die is the size of the solar cell and therefore a chunk of silicon so big that it makes a Pentium III appear modest? Made of brittle silicon, which is basically glass processed in neat ways? And you're going to expose it to full sunlight and then full night every day and expect it's going to last for hundreds of years?
Learn a little about semiconductor engineering, please. Unless you know what a pin contact transistor is, or what the forward voltage of a germanium PN junction is, please feel free to restrain yourself from commenting - or voting - while your definite lack of understanding of the topic puts us all in peril.
Battery, fuel cell, or flywheel.
Battery/flywheel = inefficient.
Battery = full of nasty, toxic chemicals, the more efficient the battery, the more nasty and toxic the chemicals. And they need to be replaced every couple of years. If the battery in your car is x square feet in size to run a ~1300W motor (your starter) for 15 minutes (good battery, approximate amount of total time you could crank your engine and still have the battery sort of work), how big do you think the batteries to run Los Angeles from dusk to dawn are going to have to be?
Again, it's best for you to cease deciding how the world should work from the depths of your ninth-grade education.
Of course battery technology still sucks, but it is getting better.
Yup. We wanted to play MP3s using ENIAC and decided it wasn't feasible. So now we've got this UNIVAC all hooked up and ready to go...
The only problem is that secondary (rechargable) battery technology was quite mature in the 1940s. Alas, it doesn't move as fast as the computer industry.
Or maybe you are being such a retard for an April fools joke?
This retard apparently has a greater understanding of electrical and mechanical engineering than you do, my friend.
Ok, I gota bitch about the Nuclear power plants NOT being a problem thing. Shit, where the hell have you been?? Ever heard of the Columbia river? That large one on the west coast, Lewis and Clark, all that?
Turns out it is now polluted by nuclear waste, not very nice. In another few years Hanfords storage bins are gona be leaking even more into it, what did the goverment say? Nothing, reported it, issue dropped.
Sure. And Three Mile Island blew up, also through mismanagement, and Chernobyl too, therefore, nuclear power will always be leaking stuff or blowing up plants and killing people.
Windows 2000 gave me a blue screen. Therefore, there's no way that computers can ever be stable, so we shouldn't use them.
Heh, nice to know.
Yup. Nice to know.
You see, nuclear power plants create waste. ALOT of waste in fact, a whole lot of very DANGERIOUS waste.
One pellet of U-238 dioxide, a cylinder of black ceramic 1 centimeter in diameter by 1 centimeter long, over the year it stays in a CANDU nuclear reactor, will produce more energy than burning a ton of coal.
Shit, coal, hell, say inside, where a gas mask, you can DO something about air pollution, or at least you can avoid it.
Sure. You can stop breathing. Because as you burn that ton of coal, it combines with several tons of the gasses that make up air.
One ton of coal leaves the chimney as several tons of sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Not to mention the soot. Ever been downwind of a coal plant?
But that little pellet is never more than the little pellet.
Heh, Lead Clothing is about the only way to escape from radiation.
Or keeping the radioactive material far away from human contact. Maybe lead clothing for the radioactive materials? Stopping breathing air and drinking water are the only ways you'll be able to avoid the SO2, CO2 and soot from a coal plant.
Aren't they right? Really, The communists and the environmentalists are right about coal power plants. Nuclear power is less immediatly damaging, and many environmenatlists do not
protest them.
I never argued that fossil fuel power wasn't evil. It's necessary, because it's pretty damned hard to build a nuclear plant with today's public outcry and the usual not-in-my-backyard syndrome.
Those same individuals who are picketing coal power plants for emissions reasons are also helping to prevent the construction of new nuclear plants through any number of activist means.
Many of which are advertised on websites.
Now, I find it interesting that they have no banner ads up begging for volunteers to pedal the stationary generating bicycles that power their servers. Ergo, I must conclude that their servers are powered by one of the coal or nuclear power plants they despise so much.
Hypocrisy is part and parcel of environmentalism.
(the problem with nuclear power is mainly one of public oppinion, not of "environmentalist" concerns).
A measurable percentage of the North American population thinks Elvis Presley is still alive. Another measurable percentage thinks they've been on an alien craft. 20% think that the moon landings never happened. Every shopping mall has a lottery kiosk, and every newspaper has an astrology column.
So, you tell me if public opinion should be relevant.
Therein lies the failure of democracy.
Just because Americans are too PROFIT oriented to make any real attempts to work on/fund projects to find alternative sources of energy, does not mean that they do not exist
Alas, there are too many CEOs and CFOs who don't look beyond the next quarter's results. So? They will fail. They will not profit as handsomely as those companies who take the risk and push the edges. Eventually, they are doomed to fail through their own apathy, ineptitude and sluggishness, as they're forced to play R&D catchup or pay huge licensing costs for the new technologies developed by teir competition.
Examples? Look at Intel.
There is plenty of alternative energy research going on. Come on. Big Oil may be afraid of the huge infrastructure costs of moving over to some other primary energy source, but the stakes are so high that you'd better believe that they're going to try their best to maintain their current position. Esso/Exxon stations pumping vegetable oil instead of diesel fuel can still be profitable, they know that.
Besides, no transition of this magnitude can be done overnight, either. If the average car lasts ten years, then full capacity in the new fuel won't be needed for ten years. The transition would actually be spread over several decades.
As he was trying to explain this apparent trajedy to me, he got pretty pissed because I had fallen off my chair laughing. Oh, where would we be today without people like this to provide us with this sort of knee-slapping hilarity...
Alas, voting is a right bestowed on the gullible simpletons, too. The only failure of democracy is that everyone gets a chance to be heard, even if they're simply wrong.
Uhhh... I think that there'd be no actual effect on the moon, since the energy expended bringing the tides higher and lower would instead end up (minutely) being harnessed to make electricity.
As in, you're not making the moon do any more work, you're simply harnessing that which it already does.
A more immediate problem with tidal power (and why it will never be allowed) is that the same communists and environmentalists who don't want gas, coal or nuclear power plants will protest this too because it will cause a marine devastation of a scope unparalleled by all the hydroelectic dams in the world all put together.
Evidently, when the dead fish start washing ashore near the tidal power plant, all those same people who were promoting it as environmentally friendly will freak out about how it's another sign of corporate evil and human greed.
Then, they'll tell us we all need solar power, and that it has to be done. Never mind the fact that it takes more energy to make a solar cell than it harnesses over its lifetime, or the fact that we'll have to somehow save up this meager energy during night time...
Nuclear power sucks, but until fusion is practical, it's the least evil way of producing our energy. And unless there's some great solution to all the inefficiencies of solar cells and wind power, I'd bet money that 20 years from now, we'll still be having this idiotic, repetitive argument.
Remember, these are all technologies that were said to be practical at the first Earth Day in 1969. Where are they now? Still not practical. Still not possible.
When was the last time you saw an AMD commercial on TV? Compare that with the Blue Man Group ads for the Pentium 4 that intel runs just about every hour on every channel.
Perhaps if Intel spent as much money on R & D as they do on airwave saturation with the stupid chimes and the inanity of the Blue Man Group, AMD's taillights wouldn't be so far ahead of them.
When winter comes the gorillas will freeze to death.
Unless polar bear genes are spliced in.
This moth thing really upsets and disturbs me. In fact, I'm sure that a lot of my other posts will prove that I am the anti-environmentalist. No, I don't dump old tires into streams. But I *do* think that sooner or later the world's petroleum was gonna be combined with oxygen somehow, and nature probably wouldn't be as stoichiometrically correct as a modern car engine.
Further, I'm very much in favor of genetic manipulation. I think it's great. It really is harnessing life. But, like electricity which we harnessed, and then the power of the atom, there are risks that must be carefully controlled, though they shouldn't dissuade us from using the tools we discover/invent. After all, you can cut yourself, but does that dissuade you from using a pair of scissors?
Having said that, releasing the moth - or any other genetically engineered plant/creature - is as cavalier, fundamentally unsound, and will look like as bad an idea in retrospect, as building an object out of ferrous metals and other things that are denser than water, deciding that it is impossible to sink said object made of materials which are denser than water, and then steaming at high speed through the North Atlantic in an early April night almost thirty years prior to the invention of radar.
Macrovision merely targets the black areas of your vertical blanking interval. VHS VCRs use this area to set their record level. Screw around with the VCR's recording level and you interfere with its ability to copy stuff.
*Unfortunately*, as a collector of antique TV sets, and as someone who enjoys watching old movies and Honeymooners reruns on them, Macrovision upsets the purpose of the vertical blanking interval, defiles the NTSC standard, and makes several of my TV sets roll vertically round about when your videotaped copy would be flashing between bright and dark. This is very much a problem with very old (1940s and 1950s TV sets) because even when they were new, they tended to be rickety and unstable. 40+ tubes and hundreds of paper capacitors = even when they were new, you'd turn it on and wait 20 minutes before the set is stable enough to watch.
Now, because you're not going to use this to make personal copies of DVDs to VHS or like you'd use an "educational-purposes" pay-TV decoder, how do you scrub Macrovision? Simple. Build a circuit with an LM1881 chip that resets a counter when the vertical pulse happens. Turn on a circuit that clamps the video signal at 0 IRE (0.3V) during each scan line until the counter has counted out 25 scan lines. Release the clamp and wait until the next vertical pulse.
Or, just run the raw video into the Video In jacks on an old Beta VCR, then back out the Video Out jacks to your VHS machine. VCRs usually regenerate crucial parts of the video signal as they pass it, and Beta VCRs don't set their recording level from the vertical interval.
Hey, anyone looking to hire a computer geek with lots of broadcast video and audio engineering skills? Perfect blend of skills for streaming media websites! E-mail me.
Lemme nominate a part which I would place between 2 and 3; give it number 2.5 on your list.
CMOS batteries. Especially on those nasty generic motherboards that are too cheap to have any provision for replacement. (ie. no battery socket, no 4 pin connector with the jumper cap over the middle two, etc.)
Either ditch the board or break out the soldering iron.
So I am an extremist because I am concerned because all of the IT managers above me are White even though Houston Texas is ~25% Hispanic and ~20% Black?
Probably, yes.
What does that tell you? So Hispanics and Blacks aren't very interested in careers in the IT field. What do you want to do, start discriminating against white people because they're the only ones who apparently get into the field?
Fine. As a white person, I'm concerned that there aren't many white people in the NBA. Let's put affirmative action in place there!
Don't give me some baloney about lack of fiscal opportunity, either. I'm sure that it wouldn't be very tough for a little kid in the projects to get his hands on an old 486 if he tried. My parents didn't get a computer until I bought them a Pentium 166 several years ago, and yet, despite being a high school dropout, I managed to work my way up to an engineering and IT administration position at one of the biggest airports in North America.
Oh yeah, and I did it all myself, without government or social support. I worked my ass off.
Actually the refreshing lack of "patriotism" is why I would like to move to a more progressive country like Canada...
Great! If we look even remotely similar, we could pull a passport swap, and not have to worry about those nasty immigration procedures. I'm sure we'd both be happier and therefore more useful to our adopted lands.
I'm 6'4", 175lbs, dark brown hair and eyes. I can suntan pretty dark, too. I'm not really swarthy, but I can pull it off if I need to.
As for "progressive", yeah, if you define socialism as progressive even though it promotes laziness, I suppose Canada is progressive.
I bet you've never been here, have you?
Yet, as a Slashdot contributor and reader, you're probably in the IT field, and probably quite affluent. Betcha just can't wait to see what taxes here are like. Or the lesser opportunity because fewer companies will locate here because of the high taxes.
And ya know, $100,000,000 of Canadian taxpayers' money went to Nortel last year. And does every year. Since Canada has about 1/10th the tax base of the United States, you figure that one out.
Isn't Nortel a private company and supposed to survive on its own?
Apparently, our definitions of "progressive" are divergent at best.
Ha ha ha! That is a good one. Actually the Whites in the U.S. are the ones that "celebrate" the 4th of July. To minorities it is just another day off from work.
Hmmmm... Probably has something to do with George Double-Ya's Texas. I've done The Fourth in Manhattan, DC, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo. The party seems to involve most every race.
African Americans are pissed off at being kidnapped and sold into slavery by White people.
How about sold to Europeans by their African ancestors?
Yes, slavery was wrong. No, the Europeans shouldn't have done it. And no, it shouldn't have been allowed to continue for as long as it did.
So, speaking as a white person, I'm sorry.
But it's not my fault. It's not my father's fault. Or my grandfather's fault. Or my great grandfather's fault. In fact, like most caucasions in North America (and my family has been in North America since 1753), my family has never owned slaves.
So, like most white people, I think I have a right to be pissed off for people throwing slavery back in my face.
Native American are pissed off that they almost got exterminated by White people in a genocidal war.
The Micmacs, Algonquins and Iroquois can definitely be mad at my ancestors for that.
Chicanos are pissed off at the fact that our land got stolen from us by White people.
Like California? Texas? Hell, the whole southwest?
Didn't they lose a war there?
Fine, then. As a Canadian, and therefore a subject of the British throne, the nasty colonists who won the Revolutionary War stole land that should belong to Her Majesty.
I guess Hitler should be mad that after claiming half of Europe for Germany, that he had it "stolen" from him by war.
Or, coming from my Anglo-Saxon roots, I'm really pissed off that the Romans stole France from the Celtics.
Similarily, did that land belong to the Chicanos, or didn't it belong to the Mayans, Incans and Aztecs? You know, Hispanics are not native to Mexico. So, you're complaining that land that your people stole from the aboriginals only 300 years earlier has been stolen?
Heheh. I'd be grateful. I'm sure that you have far more opportunity in Texas than you would in Mexico. Based on US Border Patrol activities in that area, it seems that lots of other Chicanos feel differently from you.
Gimme a break. You spout sheer idiocy.
Please read some U.S. history before moving here. We have enough ignorant people here as it stands...
Rest assured, I have.
And you'd do well to get a realistic viewpoint and an understanding of world history.
well, that certainly sounds good, considering i'm driving an hour a day every day to/from work on a suspended license because i can't get enough time off work during court hours to actually get my friggin license reinstated, thanks to a large mass of parking tickets that my dad told me he paid 8 years ago.
Ugh. I suggest you get another job and another father. Then you'll be better equipped to deal with the parking tickets.
Excuse me, but evolution "science" is not science. At least not the same way that physics is science. Can you observe evolution? REmember, I am not asking about natural selection. I am not asking about so-called similarities between species. I am asking you to show me the observable evolution.
[sigh] Such tired rhetoric.
It's over. Science won. There is no god. When you die, you will be a rotting piece of meat in the ground just like the rest of us. Get over it already.
You know, plenty of evil has been done in the name of Atheism too (just ask Mao and Stalin and Pot). The problem isn't religion, its us. Religion just becomes the excuse- the same as atheism is the excuse for communist kill-fests.
For sure. Though the examples you cite are athiesm used to elevate the communist party to the level of god, to attempt to quell any uprising that could be incited by a church.
There is nothing so profoundly wrong as a baptist's emphatic position when questioned: "I just know". Riiiiiiight. That's a cop-out demonstration of one who is incapable of free thought, justification of a position, and logical thinking divorced of opinion.
But at least athiesm is based in science, and is therefore correct.
Darwin's Theory of Evolution: Jehovah's Witnesses won't take blood transfusions based on outdated (by 2000 years or 20 years, take your pick!) notions of safety. Smart Jehovah's Witnesses bail, hardcore ones eventually die from bloodloss after knocking on the wrong doors. Darwin is proved, rational people everywhere celebrate that they're no longer being harassed by idiots trying to "save" them at ungodly hours on Sunday mornings.
My favorite thing to do to them when they ring my doorbell, is to ask them to pray with me. I lead:
Dear Jesus Christ,
Dear Jesus Christ,
Our Lord and Saviour,
Our Lord and Saviour,
Whom we love so much
Whom we love so much
Thank you for this beautiful day
Thank you for this beautiful day
And please help to see that
And please help to see that
All those nasty heathen Baptists get struck down
[Wry grin of guilty pleasure] All those nasty heathen Baptists get struck down
With inoperable colon cancer.
With inoperable... Huh?
Amen.
About 50% of the time, they actually complete the prayer with me. The fact that even 10% of them complete the prayer is disturbing; clearly proving that Christian right is neither.
I'm so glad that religion is there to provide mankind with such a perfectly correct, rational and loving moral compass.
(Actually, I'm happier with the idea of scientific proof of evolution, since, by extension, it proves the bible wrong, and therefore sets the stage for defamation lawsuits against all the world's bible-thumping invisible-man-watching-me rubes.)
I'm so glad that the Catholic Church is running around telling people not to use condoms in places like Uganda.
This is a modern equivalent to the smallpox-infested blankets. You really should read your history books someday.
Religion is the single most dangerous invention of mankind, and it serves only to comfort those simple enough to believe in it.
Finally, you work in the technology field. I visited your website.
Technology, lest you be confused, is merely the application of science.
Science, in case you didn't know, has always been scorned and beaten down by religion.
Yet, science, while not perfect, has greatly advanced the human condition, and is the root cause of far less of the world's wars than religion.
So, how is it that you can reconcile your position as a religious individual with your career which is made possible by science, the greatest enemy of your faith?
It seems to me that the two are mutually exclusive, and yet it apparently poses no problem to you.
Thrall me with your acumen, for you are apparently wiser than I.
If Americans school start having to teach Judaic/Christian creationism, that would of course mean they ought to teach Hindu creationism, Jainist creationism, Nordic teutonic pagan creationism, Gallo-Roman creationism, & Celtic creationism too, etc, etc, etc. Afterall we can't descriminate in favour of one or 2 religions in particullar.
No, because the USA is, conceptually, a melting pot. The best that every culture of immigrants has to offer is seamlessly assimilated into the American culture. Where else can you buy pizza, tacos and beef on weck in the same restaurant?
This applies to religion, too. If schools were to teach religion, it would probably be the one with the greatest quantity of highly vocal, organized and ardent supporters. Bible-thumping creationist southern Baptists. Ugh.
However, at least it alleviates the equivalent confusion which exists in Canada:
Canada embraces "multiculturalism", which means that you maintain your culture and traditions when you immigrate. This experiment has so far resulted in a place where petty squabbles abound: can a Seikh RCMP officer wear a turban? Should a Ugandan immigrant drive around in a car that he's been able to afford *only* because of opportunities granted to him by his new country, with a bumper sticker that says "I Love Uganda" in the trademark rainbow-foil?
Finally, is it right that Tamil warfare occurs in two parts of the world, Sri Lanka, and 5 minutes down the street from my house?
This is all divisive. To use the Sri Lankan example, if a couple of immigrants bump into each other about as far from their native land as you can possibly get without leaving the atmosphere, wouldn't you expect that they could get along, and put the bee-ess behind them? If they can't do that, what are the hopes that Canada's large populations of Iranian and Iraqi refugees could ever get along?
If Canada ever went to war with China, whose side would Markham be on?
Frankly, I really don't care what color someone's skin is. I think man has advanced beyond that point now; the only people who care about that are skinheads and other extremists. And Canada needs immigrants to sustain its economy. My concern, and frustration, is when literally hundreds of cultures, with mutually exclusive traditions, are thrust together in an experiment with very dangerous potential. And one where loyalty and patriotism aren't demanded or required of Canada's new Canadians.
One where, in fact, lawsuits have been won on the basis that since Canada is a multicultural society, you can't encourage patriotism, since it's exclusive of the non-Canadian cultures that make up the country.
In other words, Canadians are having their own laws used against them to erode the traditional images of the RCMP officer, the beer-swilling bilingual hockey player, the lumberjack in the snow. And it's not being replaced with anything solid or concrete that promotes a national identity.
My family has traced back its family tree to Nova Scotia in 1753. My family was part of Canada long before it was Canada. And yet, this is yet another one of the many reasons that I yearn to move to the United States, at least partially for the solidarity and strength of a patriotism that the Canadian government seems more interested in eroding than encouraging.
At least in the United States, everyone pulls together on the 4th of July. That happens less and less here every Canada Day.
So, my question is: Does anyone else really think that the existence of a cyber-court would attract start-ups to Detroit, Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo?
No. The night life in Ann Arbor is enough to attract startups.
MmMMmmmm... Ann Arbor. The faded but salvagable grandeur and history of Detroit. The excitement of dodging potholes on the I-75 through Hamtramck. The friendly people, the eastern Mid-West "Can Do" attitude. I love Michigan.
I drive a 1976 Dodge Ram pickup truck; for winter traction, I've got most of a crushed Honda Prelude in the back. And my old Dodge feels far more at home flying down Woodward than it does flying down Yonge Street.
The ability to contest a parking ticket online, without having to take a day off work to avoid paying a $20 ticket, is just the icing on the cake. This is a good idea whose time has come.
Since it is just me and businesses I know and work with closely, I may just cut of Asia, since none of us do business there anyway. If they can't configure their servers correctly, I don't want to receive *anything* from them. Anyone else thought of doing this?
Can't do it in my case, we do business in Asia.
If the sending host (not the relay) is still pingable when I receive the spam, I either send 'em a ping of death (quick and efficient, they're all running Windows) or I portscan the crap out of them so that they can get paranoid.
Oh, and lots of nasty messages to the incompetent mailserver admin.
is it illegal to actually send unsolicited postal mail?... if it isn't why would it be illegal to send electronic mail?...
Sending junk snail-mail costs the advertiser money. (Printing & postage)
Sending junk e-mail costs the *recipient* money. (Network bandwidth,/var/spool/mail/user space)
I don't like the government in my life any more than anyone else. What I want is the legal right to be able to DoS or in any other way attack the system sending me mail.
By the time spammers learn enough about computers to lock down their systems, it's likely that they'll be inundated with spam themselves.
I read about TI's integrated circuit invention, hand wired components. They totally missed the point about integrated circuits.
For sure, Jack Kilby's invention was more about fitting two transistors into one package with reduced manufacturing costs, than it was about connecting the two transistors to each other.
That followed very quickly, before TI made the IC public.
As for the hand-wired, yeah, at the time, almost all transistors were what is called a "point contact" transistor. They weren't the familiar robust N and P sandwich that we know now. Back then, most transistors included at least one hand-wired connection. Logically, therefore, two transistors on one piece of silicon will require two hand-wired connections, and that's how it was. While mass-production is one of the most sacred features of our perceptions of transistors and ICs, back then, the one hand-made connection on each one wasn't considered to be a big deal: the alternative was still vacuum tubes, which often have a lot of hand-made connections. Take a close look at the inside of a vacuum tube and you might even see pencil-marks from the QC department on the plate.
Point-contact transistors basically died out in the early 1960s. (Fragile, expensive, low beta, low power capability, noisy, inconsistent, etc...)
Hah! I had a TI 99/4A and that giganto "military spec" expansion housing was fucking ridiculous. (I wouldn't be shocked if it was a converted minicomputer part.)
It was. TI has often said that the whole system architecture of the TI-99/4A was a scaled-down TI-990 minicomputer system.
There *are* a few problems with it, though - and they're all based on the fact that when the computer was designed and introduced in 1979, more than half of the cost of the system would have been the 16k of RAM that it had, had the RAM been a full 16 bits wide.
For cost reasons, sadly, they multiplexed the bus down to 8 bits outside the system, and put all the RAM onto the TMS9918 video processor. All RAM was then called through the video chip. Slow.
There was some cache RAM on the 16 bit bus, and if I recall correctly (been a while since I fired up Editor/Assembler on one of those things), there was also some 16 bit wide scratchpad built into the TMS9900 CPU chip.
One of the more popular recent TI-99/4A hacks has been to stick static RAM chips on top of the cache RAM, build some address decode logic, and actually move the 32K RAM expansion onto the 16 bit bus. 30% speed increase with only a few wire-wrapped connections, it's very nice.
Amazingly overbuilt. But most of the TI systems that ended up with collectors still work to this day. You can't say that about Commodore 64s, with their *lovely* aluminized cardboard RF shields and high-performance serial disk drives.
Anyway, nobody wanted military spec expansion at the twice the cost of the computer. Users wanted cheap slots and cards like Apple and IBM had.
That problem was more TI's marketing department's fault.
Their idea was to saturate the market with consoles, which were built (relatively) cheaply. And then, TI was going to make their money as people lined up to buy disk systems, memory expansions, speech synthesizers, etc.
TI agressively tried to stop other companies from making hardware or software for their systems. They suppressed technical information on the system and went so far as to design a "Version 2.2" QI-console, which ignored the aftermarket cartridges that hadn't been made by TI. So, while MunchMan was a good game in its own right, you couldn't play PacMan on a V2.2 TI-99/4A - that was an Atari-made cartridge.
Unfortunately, they completely overestimated the interest that most people would have in their computers. On the other side of the coin, they underestimated things, too: as shipped, the TI-99/4A was pretty useless. It was assumed that people would program in BASIC as a hobby, but that no one would ever want to go beyond that.
It wasn't until 1981 - two years after the TI first came out - that the Editor/Assembler, MiniMemory and P-Code Pascal Development Systems came out. After all, in TI's view, no one wanted to learn a complicated programming language.
Marketing also has to be blamed for their disastrous advertising. While Vic-20 boxes were screaming "Vic-20 - the FRIENDLY computer, with COLOR and MUSIC", TI's advertising was Bill Cosby looking lonely. Of course, the TI blew the Vic-20 - and arguably the C-64 - out of the water in *every* respect, but consumers still ran to the Commies.
Towards the end, while TI-99/4As were selling in K-Mart for $99 each, it's estimated that TI was losing $50 on the sale of each one. They pulled the plug October 19, 1983.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it's Microsoft's own special view of the world -- but I still feel that it was answering the questions clearly and coherently
I wonder how long it took for them to brainwash him from vi to notepad when he got to Redmond....
No, not at all. Processing huge quantities of raw silicon to achieve the purity you need. Mixing it with the appropriate doping agents. Cooking the log and cutting slices off it, which then need to be etched and doped with the opposite polarity of silicon. And then you need to package it and attach leads to it. All for a 0.6V/cell and 400mW of energy in full sunlight.
And solar cells are solid state devices, they tend to last for hundreds of years before they stop working.Sure they do. By extension, then, you've never had a semiconductor device fail? (After all, they last for hundreds of years but have really only been popular for 40 years or so.)
Semiconductors *do* fail. Sometimes, the doped regions at their PN junctions change spontaeously and the device in question goes leaky or open. Sometimes they get damaged by static electricity, perhaps a lightning strike nearby. And sometimes they simply crack from thermal cycling, a problem exacerbated by the size of the dies.
Oops. What's this? The die is the size of the solar cell and therefore a chunk of silicon so big that it makes a Pentium III appear modest? Made of brittle silicon, which is basically glass processed in neat ways? And you're going to expose it to full sunlight and then full night every day and expect it's going to last for hundreds of years?
Learn a little about semiconductor engineering, please. Unless you know what a pin contact transistor is, or what the forward voltage of a germanium PN junction is, please feel free to restrain yourself from commenting - or voting - while your definite lack of understanding of the topic puts us all in peril.
Battery, fuel cell, or flywheel.Battery/flywheel = inefficient.
Battery = full of nasty, toxic chemicals, the more efficient the battery, the more nasty and toxic the chemicals. And they need to be replaced every couple of years. If the battery in your car is x square feet in size to run a ~1300W motor (your starter) for 15 minutes (good battery, approximate amount of total time you could crank your engine and still have the battery sort of work), how big do you think the batteries to run Los Angeles from dusk to dawn are going to have to be?
Again, it's best for you to cease deciding how the world should work from the depths of your ninth-grade education.
Of course battery technology still sucks, but it is getting better.Yup. We wanted to play MP3s using ENIAC and decided it wasn't feasible. So now we've got this UNIVAC all hooked up and ready to go...
The only problem is that secondary (rechargable) battery technology was quite mature in the 1940s. Alas, it doesn't move as fast as the computer industry.
Or maybe you are being such a retard for an April fools joke?This retard apparently has a greater understanding of electrical and mechanical engineering than you do, my friend.
Ok, I gota bitch about the Nuclear power plants NOT being a problem thing. Shit, where the hell have you been?? Ever heard of the Columbia river? That large one on the west coast, Lewis and Clark, all that?
Turns out it is now polluted by nuclear waste, not very nice. In another few years Hanfords storage bins are gona be leaking even more into it, what did the goverment say? Nothing, reported it, issue dropped.
Sure. And Three Mile Island blew up, also through mismanagement, and Chernobyl too, therefore, nuclear power will always be leaking stuff or blowing up plants and killing people.
Windows 2000 gave me a blue screen. Therefore, there's no way that computers can ever be stable, so we shouldn't use them.
Heh, nice to know.
Yup. Nice to know.
You see, nuclear power plants create waste. ALOT of waste in fact, a whole lot of very DANGERIOUS waste.
One pellet of U-238 dioxide, a cylinder of black ceramic 1 centimeter in diameter by 1 centimeter long, over the year it stays in a CANDU nuclear reactor, will produce more energy than burning a ton of coal.
Shit, coal, hell, say inside, where a gas mask, you can DO something about air pollution, or at least you can avoid it.
Sure. You can stop breathing. Because as you burn that ton of coal, it combines with several tons of the gasses that make up air.
One ton of coal leaves the chimney as several tons of sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Not to mention the soot. Ever been downwind of a coal plant?
But that little pellet is never more than the little pellet.
Heh, Lead Clothing is about the only way to escape from radiation.
Or keeping the radioactive material far away from human contact. Maybe lead clothing for the radioactive materials? Stopping breathing air and drinking water are the only ways you'll be able to avoid the SO2, CO2 and soot from a coal plant.
Any better ideas there, sport?
Thrall me with your oh-so-evident acumen.
Aren't they right? Really, The communists and the environmentalists are right about coal power plants. Nuclear power is less immediatly damaging, and many environmenatlists do not protest them.
I never argued that fossil fuel power wasn't evil. It's necessary, because it's pretty damned hard to build a nuclear plant with today's public outcry and the usual not-in-my-backyard syndrome.
Those same individuals who are picketing coal power plants for emissions reasons are also helping to prevent the construction of new nuclear plants through any number of activist means.
Many of which are advertised on websites.
Now, I find it interesting that they have no banner ads up begging for volunteers to pedal the stationary generating bicycles that power their servers. Ergo, I must conclude that their servers are powered by one of the coal or nuclear power plants they despise so much.
Hypocrisy is part and parcel of environmentalism.
(the problem with nuclear power is mainly one of public oppinion, not of "environmentalist" concerns).A measurable percentage of the North American population thinks Elvis Presley is still alive. Another measurable percentage thinks they've been on an alien craft. 20% think that the moon landings never happened. Every shopping mall has a lottery kiosk, and every newspaper has an astrology column.
So, you tell me if public opinion should be relevant.
Therein lies the failure of democracy.
Just because Americans are too PROFIT oriented to make any real attempts to work on/fund projects to find alternative sources of energy, does not mean that they do not existAlas, there are too many CEOs and CFOs who don't look beyond the next quarter's results. So? They will fail. They will not profit as handsomely as those companies who take the risk and push the edges. Eventually, they are doomed to fail through their own apathy, ineptitude and sluggishness, as they're forced to play R&D catchup or pay huge licensing costs for the new technologies developed by teir competition.
Examples? Look at Intel.
There is plenty of alternative energy research going on. Come on. Big Oil may be afraid of the huge infrastructure costs of moving over to some other primary energy source, but the stakes are so high that you'd better believe that they're going to try their best to maintain their current position. Esso/Exxon stations pumping vegetable oil instead of diesel fuel can still be profitable, they know that.
Besides, no transition of this magnitude can be done overnight, either. If the average car lasts ten years, then full capacity in the new fuel won't be needed for ten years. The transition would actually be spread over several decades.
As he was trying to explain this apparent trajedy to me, he got pretty pissed because I had fallen off my chair laughing. Oh, where would we be today without people like this to provide us with this sort of knee-slapping hilarity...
Alas, voting is a right bestowed on the gullible simpletons, too. The only failure of democracy is that everyone gets a chance to be heard, even if they're simply wrong.
How serious a problem is this?
Uhhh... I think that there'd be no actual effect on the moon, since the energy expended bringing the tides higher and lower would instead end up (minutely) being harnessed to make electricity.
As in, you're not making the moon do any more work, you're simply harnessing that which it already does.
A more immediate problem with tidal power (and why it will never be allowed) is that the same communists and environmentalists who don't want gas, coal or nuclear power plants will protest this too because it will cause a marine devastation of a scope unparalleled by all the hydroelectic dams in the world all put together.
Evidently, when the dead fish start washing ashore near the tidal power plant, all those same people who were promoting it as environmentally friendly will freak out about how it's another sign of corporate evil and human greed.
Then, they'll tell us we all need solar power, and that it has to be done. Never mind the fact that it takes more energy to make a solar cell than it harnesses over its lifetime, or the fact that we'll have to somehow save up this meager energy during night time...
Nuclear power sucks, but until fusion is practical, it's the least evil way of producing our energy. And unless there's some great solution to all the inefficiencies of solar cells and wind power, I'd bet money that 20 years from now, we'll still be having this idiotic, repetitive argument.
Remember, these are all technologies that were said to be practical at the first Earth Day in 1969. Where are they now? Still not practical. Still not possible.
When was the last time you saw an AMD commercial on TV? Compare that with the Blue Man Group ads for the Pentium 4 that intel runs just about every hour on every channel.
Perhaps if Intel spent as much money on R & D as they do on airwave saturation with the stupid chimes and the inanity of the Blue Man Group, AMD's taillights wouldn't be so far ahead of them.
but it's a well known fact that the best engineers are imported from england.
For sure!
Why is it that the British like warm beer?
Because Lucas makes refrigerators.
Hmmm...
British Reliant. American Reliant. (Yeah, okay, it's actually a Canadian Reliant now living in Scotland.)
At least North American Reliants have 4 wheels. So there.
When winter comes the gorillas will freeze to death.
Unless polar bear genes are spliced in.
This moth thing really upsets and disturbs me. In fact, I'm sure that a lot of my other posts will prove that I am the anti-environmentalist. No, I don't dump old tires into streams. But I *do* think that sooner or later the world's petroleum was gonna be combined with oxygen somehow, and nature probably wouldn't be as stoichiometrically correct as a modern car engine.
Further, I'm very much in favor of genetic manipulation. I think it's great. It really is harnessing life. But, like electricity which we harnessed, and then the power of the atom, there are risks that must be carefully controlled, though they shouldn't dissuade us from using the tools we discover/invent. After all, you can cut yourself, but does that dissuade you from using a pair of scissors?
Having said that, releasing the moth - or any other genetically engineered plant/creature - is as cavalier, fundamentally unsound, and will look like as bad an idea in retrospect, as building an object out of ferrous metals and other things that are denser than water, deciding that it is impossible to sink said object made of materials which are denser than water, and then steaming at high speed through the North Atlantic in an early April night almost thirty years prior to the invention of radar.
No moths.
Macrovision merely targets the black areas of your vertical blanking interval. VHS VCRs use this area to set their record level. Screw around with the VCR's recording level and you interfere with its ability to copy stuff.
*Unfortunately*, as a collector of antique TV sets, and as someone who enjoys watching old movies and Honeymooners reruns on them, Macrovision upsets the purpose of the vertical blanking interval, defiles the NTSC standard, and makes several of my TV sets roll vertically round about when your videotaped copy would be flashing between bright and dark. This is very much a problem with very old (1940s and 1950s TV sets) because even when they were new, they tended to be rickety and unstable. 40+ tubes and hundreds of paper capacitors = even when they were new, you'd turn it on and wait 20 minutes before the set is stable enough to watch.
Now, because you're not going to use this to make personal copies of DVDs to VHS or like you'd use an "educational-purposes" pay-TV decoder, how do you scrub Macrovision? Simple. Build a circuit with an LM1881 chip that resets a counter when the vertical pulse happens. Turn on a circuit that clamps the video signal at 0 IRE (0.3V) during each scan line until the counter has counted out 25 scan lines. Release the clamp and wait until the next vertical pulse.
Or, just run the raw video into the Video In jacks on an old Beta VCR, then back out the Video Out jacks to your VHS machine. VCRs usually regenerate crucial parts of the video signal as they pass it, and Beta VCRs don't set their recording level from the vertical interval.
Hey, anyone looking to hire a computer geek with lots of broadcast video and audio engineering skills? Perfect blend of skills for streaming media websites! E-mail me.
Lemme nominate a part which I would place between 2 and 3; give it number 2.5 on your list.
CMOS batteries. Especially on those nasty generic motherboards that are too cheap to have any provision for replacement. (ie. no battery socket, no 4 pin connector with the jumper cap over the middle two, etc.)
Either ditch the board or break out the soldering iron.
So I am an extremist because I am concerned because all of the IT managers above me are White even though Houston Texas is ~25% Hispanic and ~20% Black?
Probably, yes.
What does that tell you? So Hispanics and Blacks aren't very interested in careers in the IT field. What do you want to do, start discriminating against white people because they're the only ones who apparently get into the field?
Fine. As a white person, I'm concerned that there aren't many white people in the NBA. Let's put affirmative action in place there!
Don't give me some baloney about lack of fiscal opportunity, either. I'm sure that it wouldn't be very tough for a little kid in the projects to get his hands on an old 486 if he tried. My parents didn't get a computer until I bought them a Pentium 166 several years ago, and yet, despite being a high school dropout, I managed to work my way up to an engineering and IT administration position at one of the biggest airports in North America.
Oh yeah, and I did it all myself, without government or social support. I worked my ass off.
Actually the refreshing lack of "patriotism" is why I would like to move to a more progressive country like Canada...Great! If we look even remotely similar, we could pull a passport swap, and not have to worry about those nasty immigration procedures. I'm sure we'd both be happier and therefore more useful to our adopted lands.
I'm 6'4", 175lbs, dark brown hair and eyes. I can suntan pretty dark, too. I'm not really swarthy, but I can pull it off if I need to.
As for "progressive", yeah, if you define socialism as progressive even though it promotes laziness, I suppose Canada is progressive.
I bet you've never been here, have you?
Yet, as a Slashdot contributor and reader, you're probably in the IT field, and probably quite affluent. Betcha just can't wait to see what taxes here are like. Or the lesser opportunity because fewer companies will locate here because of the high taxes.
And ya know, $100,000,000 of Canadian taxpayers' money went to Nortel last year. And does every year. Since Canada has about 1/10th the tax base of the United States, you figure that one out.
Isn't Nortel a private company and supposed to survive on its own?
Apparently, our definitions of "progressive" are divergent at best.
Ha ha ha! That is a good one. Actually the Whites in the U.S. are the ones that "celebrate" the 4th of July. To minorities it is just another day off from work.Hmmmm... Probably has something to do with George Double-Ya's Texas. I've done The Fourth in Manhattan, DC, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo. The party seems to involve most every race.
African Americans are pissed off at being kidnapped and sold into slavery by White people.How about sold to Europeans by their African ancestors?
Yes, slavery was wrong. No, the Europeans shouldn't have done it. And no, it shouldn't have been allowed to continue for as long as it did.
So, speaking as a white person, I'm sorry.
But it's not my fault. It's not my father's fault. Or my grandfather's fault. Or my great grandfather's fault. In fact, like most caucasions in North America (and my family has been in North America since 1753), my family has never owned slaves.
So, like most white people, I think I have a right to be pissed off for people throwing slavery back in my face.
Native American are pissed off that they almost got exterminated by White people in a genocidal war.The Micmacs, Algonquins and Iroquois can definitely be mad at my ancestors for that.
Chicanos are pissed off at the fact that our land got stolen from us by White people.Like California? Texas? Hell, the whole southwest?
Didn't they lose a war there?
Fine, then. As a Canadian, and therefore a subject of the British throne, the nasty colonists who won the Revolutionary War stole land that should belong to Her Majesty.
I guess Hitler should be mad that after claiming half of Europe for Germany, that he had it "stolen" from him by war.
Or, coming from my Anglo-Saxon roots, I'm really pissed off that the Romans stole France from the Celtics.
Similarily, did that land belong to the Chicanos, or didn't it belong to the Mayans, Incans and Aztecs? You know, Hispanics are not native to Mexico. So, you're complaining that land that your people stole from the aboriginals only 300 years earlier has been stolen?
Heheh. I'd be grateful. I'm sure that you have far more opportunity in Texas than you would in Mexico. Based on US Border Patrol activities in that area, it seems that lots of other Chicanos feel differently from you.
Gimme a break. You spout sheer idiocy.
Please read some U.S. history before moving here. We have enough ignorant people here as it stands...Rest assured, I have.
And you'd do well to get a realistic viewpoint and an understanding of world history.
well, that certainly sounds good, considering i'm driving an hour a day every day to/from work on a suspended license because i can't get enough time off work during court hours to actually get my friggin license reinstated, thanks to a large mass of parking tickets that my dad told me he paid 8 years ago.
Ugh. I suggest you get another job and another father. Then you'll be better equipped to deal with the parking tickets.
Excuse me, but evolution "science" is not science. At least not the same way that physics is science. Can you observe evolution? REmember, I am not asking about natural selection. I am not asking about so-called similarities between species. I am asking you to show me the observable evolution.
[sigh] Such tired rhetoric.
It's over. Science won. There is no god. When you die, you will be a rotting piece of meat in the ground just like the rest of us. Get over it already.
so don't assume that everyone who attends services SOMEWHERE can instantly be branded a clueless lemming.
Believing that there's an invisible being staring down at you all the time is rationale enough to be branded clueless. Even certifiable.
And since it's a social thing, and lemmings tend to be social, I think it *is* rather apropos.
You know, plenty of evil has been done in the name of Atheism too (just ask Mao and Stalin and Pot). The problem isn't religion, its us. Religion just becomes the excuse- the same as atheism is the excuse for communist kill-fests.
For sure. Though the examples you cite are athiesm used to elevate the communist party to the level of god, to attempt to quell any uprising that could be incited by a church.
There is nothing so profoundly wrong as a baptist's emphatic position when questioned: "I just know". Riiiiiiight. That's a cop-out demonstration of one who is incapable of free thought, justification of a position, and logical thinking divorced of opinion.
But at least athiesm is based in science, and is therefore correct.
Darwin's Theory of Evolution: Jehovah's Witnesses won't take blood transfusions based on outdated (by 2000 years or 20 years, take your pick!) notions of safety. Smart Jehovah's Witnesses bail, hardcore ones eventually die from bloodloss after knocking on the wrong doors. Darwin is proved, rational people everywhere celebrate that they're no longer being harassed by idiots trying to "save" them at ungodly hours on Sunday mornings.
My favorite thing to do to them when they ring my doorbell, is to ask them to pray with me. I lead:
Dear Jesus Christ,
Dear Jesus Christ,
Our Lord and Saviour,
Our Lord and Saviour,
Whom we love so much
Whom we love so much
Thank you for this beautiful day
Thank you for this beautiful day
And please help to see that
And please help to see that
All those nasty heathen Baptists get struck down
[Wry grin of guilty pleasure] All those nasty heathen Baptists get struck down
With inoperable colon cancer.
With inoperable... Huh?
Amen.
About 50% of the time, they actually complete the prayer with me. The fact that even 10% of them complete the prayer is disturbing; clearly proving that Christian right is neither.
If someone calls themselves a Christian but attempts to destroy someone, do you really think they are a Christian?
Fred Phelps seems to think so:
www.godhatesfags.com
I'm so glad that religion is there to provide mankind with such a perfectly correct, rational and loving moral compass.
(Actually, I'm happier with the idea of scientific proof of evolution, since, by extension, it proves the bible wrong, and therefore sets the stage for defamation lawsuits against all the world's bible-thumping invisible-man-watching-me rubes.)
I'm so glad that the Catholic Church is running around telling people not to use condoms in places like Uganda.
This is a modern equivalent to the smallpox-infested blankets. You really should read your history books someday.
Religion is the single most dangerous invention of mankind, and it serves only to comfort those simple enough to believe in it.
Finally, you work in the technology field. I visited your website.
Technology, lest you be confused, is merely the application of science.
Science, in case you didn't know, has always been scorned and beaten down by religion.
Yet, science, while not perfect, has greatly advanced the human condition, and is the root cause of far less of the world's wars than religion.
So, how is it that you can reconcile your position as a religious individual with your career which is made possible by science, the greatest enemy of your faith?
It seems to me that the two are mutually exclusive, and yet it apparently poses no problem to you.
Thrall me with your acumen, for you are apparently wiser than I.
If Americans school start having to teach Judaic/Christian creationism, that would of course mean they ought to teach Hindu creationism, Jainist creationism, Nordic teutonic pagan creationism, Gallo-Roman creationism, & Celtic creationism too, etc, etc, etc. Afterall we can't descriminate in favour of one or 2 religions in particullar.
No, because the USA is, conceptually, a melting pot. The best that every culture of immigrants has to offer is seamlessly assimilated into the American culture. Where else can you buy pizza, tacos and beef on weck in the same restaurant?
This applies to religion, too. If schools were to teach religion, it would probably be the one with the greatest quantity of highly vocal, organized and ardent supporters. Bible-thumping creationist southern Baptists. Ugh.
However, at least it alleviates the equivalent confusion which exists in Canada:
Canada embraces "multiculturalism", which means that you maintain your culture and traditions when you immigrate. This experiment has so far resulted in a place where petty squabbles abound: can a Seikh RCMP officer wear a turban? Should a Ugandan immigrant drive around in a car that he's been able to afford *only* because of opportunities granted to him by his new country, with a bumper sticker that says "I Love Uganda" in the trademark rainbow-foil?
Finally, is it right that Tamil warfare occurs in two parts of the world, Sri Lanka, and 5 minutes down the street from my house?
This is all divisive. To use the Sri Lankan example, if a couple of immigrants bump into each other about as far from their native land as you can possibly get without leaving the atmosphere, wouldn't you expect that they could get along, and put the bee-ess behind them? If they can't do that, what are the hopes that Canada's large populations of Iranian and Iraqi refugees could ever get along?
If Canada ever went to war with China, whose side would Markham be on?
Frankly, I really don't care what color someone's skin is. I think man has advanced beyond that point now; the only people who care about that are skinheads and other extremists. And Canada needs immigrants to sustain its economy. My concern, and frustration, is when literally hundreds of cultures, with mutually exclusive traditions, are thrust together in an experiment with very dangerous potential. And one where loyalty and patriotism aren't demanded or required of Canada's new Canadians.
One where, in fact, lawsuits have been won on the basis that since Canada is a multicultural society, you can't encourage patriotism, since it's exclusive of the non-Canadian cultures that make up the country.
In other words, Canadians are having their own laws used against them to erode the traditional images of the RCMP officer, the beer-swilling bilingual hockey player, the lumberjack in the snow. And it's not being replaced with anything solid or concrete that promotes a national identity.
My family has traced back its family tree to Nova Scotia in 1753. My family was part of Canada long before it was Canada. And yet, this is yet another one of the many reasons that I yearn to move to the United States, at least partially for the solidarity and strength of a patriotism that the Canadian government seems more interested in eroding than encouraging.
At least in the United States, everyone pulls together on the 4th of July. That happens less and less here every Canada Day.
So, my question is: Does anyone else really think that the existence of a cyber-court would attract start-ups to Detroit, Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo?
No. The night life in Ann Arbor is enough to attract startups.
MmMMmmmm... Ann Arbor. The faded but salvagable grandeur and history of Detroit. The excitement of dodging potholes on the I-75 through Hamtramck. The friendly people, the eastern Mid-West "Can Do" attitude. I love Michigan.
I drive a 1976 Dodge Ram pickup truck; for winter traction, I've got most of a crushed Honda Prelude in the back. And my old Dodge feels far more at home flying down Woodward than it does flying down Yonge Street.
The ability to contest a parking ticket online, without having to take a day off work to avoid paying a $20 ticket, is just the icing on the cake. This is a good idea whose time has come.
Since it is just me and businesses I know and work with closely, I may just cut of Asia, since none of us do business there anyway. If they can't configure their servers correctly, I don't want to receive *anything* from them. Anyone else thought of doing this?
Can't do it in my case, we do business in Asia.
If the sending host (not the relay) is still pingable when I receive the spam, I either send 'em a ping of death (quick and efficient, they're all running Windows) or I portscan the crap out of them so that they can get paranoid.
Oh, and lots of nasty messages to the incompetent mailserver admin.
is it illegal to actually send unsolicited postal mail?... if it isn't why would it be illegal to send electronic mail?...
Sending junk snail-mail costs the advertiser money. (Printing & postage)
Sending junk e-mail costs the *recipient* money. (Network bandwidth, /var/spool/mail/user space)
I don't like the government in my life any more than anyone else. What I want is the legal right to be able to DoS or in any other way attack the system sending me mail.
By the time spammers learn enough about computers to lock down their systems, it's likely that they'll be inundated with spam themselves.
I read about TI's integrated circuit invention, hand wired components. They totally missed the point about integrated circuits.
For sure, Jack Kilby's invention was more about fitting two transistors into one package with reduced manufacturing costs, than it was about connecting the two transistors to each other.
That followed very quickly, before TI made the IC public.
As for the hand-wired, yeah, at the time, almost all transistors were what is called a "point contact" transistor. They weren't the familiar robust N and P sandwich that we know now. Back then, most transistors included at least one hand-wired connection. Logically, therefore, two transistors on one piece of silicon will require two hand-wired connections, and that's how it was. While mass-production is one of the most sacred features of our perceptions of transistors and ICs, back then, the one hand-made connection on each one wasn't considered to be a big deal: the alternative was still vacuum tubes, which often have a lot of hand-made connections. Take a close look at the inside of a vacuum tube and you might even see pencil-marks from the QC department on the plate.
Point-contact transistors basically died out in the early 1960s. (Fragile, expensive, low beta, low power capability, noisy, inconsistent, etc...)
Hah! I had a TI 99/4A and that giganto "military spec" expansion housing was fucking ridiculous. (I wouldn't be shocked if it was a converted minicomputer part.)
It was. TI has often said that the whole system architecture of the TI-99/4A was a scaled-down TI-990 minicomputer system.
There *are* a few problems with it, though - and they're all based on the fact that when the computer was designed and introduced in 1979, more than half of the cost of the system would have been the 16k of RAM that it had, had the RAM been a full 16 bits wide.
For cost reasons, sadly, they multiplexed the bus down to 8 bits outside the system, and put all the RAM onto the TMS9918 video processor. All RAM was then called through the video chip. Slow.
There was some cache RAM on the 16 bit bus, and if I recall correctly (been a while since I fired up Editor/Assembler on one of those things), there was also some 16 bit wide scratchpad built into the TMS9900 CPU chip.
One of the more popular recent TI-99/4A hacks has been to stick static RAM chips on top of the cache RAM, build some address decode logic, and actually move the 32K RAM expansion onto the 16 bit bus. 30% speed increase with only a few wire-wrapped connections, it's very nice.
Amazingly overbuilt. But most of the TI systems that ended up with collectors still work to this day. You can't say that about Commodore 64s, with their *lovely* aluminized cardboard RF shields and high-performance serial disk drives.
Anyway, nobody wanted military spec expansion at the twice the cost of the computer. Users wanted cheap slots and cards like Apple and IBM had.That problem was more TI's marketing department's fault.
Their idea was to saturate the market with consoles, which were built (relatively) cheaply. And then, TI was going to make their money as people lined up to buy disk systems, memory expansions, speech synthesizers, etc.
TI agressively tried to stop other companies from making hardware or software for their systems. They suppressed technical information on the system and went so far as to design a "Version 2.2" QI-console, which ignored the aftermarket cartridges that hadn't been made by TI. So, while MunchMan was a good game in its own right, you couldn't play PacMan on a V2.2 TI-99/4A - that was an Atari-made cartridge.
Unfortunately, they completely overestimated the interest that most people would have in their computers. On the other side of the coin, they underestimated things, too: as shipped, the TI-99/4A was pretty useless. It was assumed that people would program in BASIC as a hobby, but that no one would ever want to go beyond that.
It wasn't until 1981 - two years after the TI first came out - that the Editor/Assembler, MiniMemory and P-Code Pascal Development Systems came out. After all, in TI's view, no one wanted to learn a complicated programming language.
Marketing also has to be blamed for their disastrous advertising. While Vic-20 boxes were screaming "Vic-20 - the FRIENDLY computer, with COLOR and MUSIC", TI's advertising was Bill Cosby looking lonely. Of course, the TI blew the Vic-20 - and arguably the C-64 - out of the water in *every* respect, but consumers still ran to the Commies.
Towards the end, while TI-99/4As were selling in K-Mart for $99 each, it's estimated that TI was losing $50 on the sale of each one. They pulled the plug October 19, 1983.
Great machine. Terrible execution.
Fact: BigBlockMopar works for Texas Instruments.
Ha! I wish!
Resumes are available, I'd move to Lubbock in a second.
its a troll cos it has no relevance to the story.
Wasn't the story about iptables?
Isn't iptables the new kernel's replacement for the venerable (and fun!) ipchains?
Isn't it therefore relevent to state that there are alternatives to the new firewalling features in Linux, which may have other advantages?
I'm confused. Thrall me with your acumen.