That was cause diskdoctor thought it had done a good job of getting back the data on the disk. More usually it meant that you needed Jesus to get your data back.
Urk. I think that was something that I'd very carefully closed away into a little, isolated part of my mind, sealed up, and walked away from, hoping that it would never corrode its way out through the barriers that I had built...
With my whopping 2.5 megs of ram I used to run a "sticky disk" in RAM of 880k. The disk stored system files in non-volatile memory.
Yup. I did that too. A500, Workbench 2.1, 20 meg SCSI hard disk.
Even though the 880k of RAM could have been better used for program space, I found that the performance penalty of having the system files on a slow band-stepper hard drive was such that the memory hit was less obtrusive.
And, I had a later-revision A500, into which I'd plopped a Fat Agnes chip. With a little hacking, of course, it was possible to set up the memory expansion on the bottom of the A500 to become an extra 512k of Chip RAM; the 2 megs in my hard disk controller setup was the Fast RAM.
The only reason I bring this up is that, if nothing else, the Amiga is a great source of inside jokes, like "Guru Meditation Errors" and "volatile memory"...
Or, if you've been downloading too much off the local high-speed (2400 baud!) Warez BBS, "Your Amiga is alive..."
Ya know, a Mac says, "Sorry, a System Error has occurred"; Windows tells you that "This program has performed an illegal operation" or any number of other nasty things.
But, besides Eudora 3.x ("Eudora is tired of waiting for the system to respond."), can anyone else think of any really nasty or sarcastic error messages like the Guru Meditation Error?
Actually when you land in Canada you have to pay a landing fee of about $1000 per adult and (I guess here) $200 for children. Also you have to prove that you have enough money to support yourself and the family for six months - for a family of three this means a little over $10,000.
As you'd indicated earlier in your posting, you were from an Eastern European country.
For one thing, your command of the English language is excellent; you write better than most people for whom English is a first language.
However, what you say is only partially true. In your case, yes, this was the routine. Obviously, you came from one of the more "civilized" of the Eastern European countries: Poland or the Czech/Slovak republics, etc., as opposed to having been from someplace like Albania.
The majority of Canada's new immigrants last year were from China. Human rights issues in China really don't concern me beyond the fact that Canada shouldn't be trading with China if we find their government's behavior reprehensible. Instead, the Canada continues to trade with China, and rather than making the Chinese government bear the costs of their unacceptable human rights infractions, the Canadian government makes me bear them by allowing huge numbers of unqualified Chinese people in, and then giving most of them settlement bonuses. Now, I have no quarrels with the Chinese people: they're human beings, and they see opportunity that they wouldn't have in China. My problem is that more than 50% of my income goes to taxes to fund humanitarian projects that can better be operated in other ways.
Essentially, the Canadian government makes me pay for the ineptitude and abuses of the governments of countries that I really don't care about.
As a young Canadian taxpayer who sees my quality of life eroded by the day through stupid socialist policies that pander to everyone but the taxpayer, I'm enraged.
I'm forced to invest more than 50% of my earnings every pay cycle into the government at all levels, and I have nothing to show for it. I have bad roads, bad schools, bad water, bad health care and the biggest farce of a military this side of Iraq. But, it's reassuring to know that my government spends money instead on schizophrenic foreign policies ("China, you're bad, but we'll still buy stuff from you."), the CRTC which ensures that 40% of everything broadcast by a Canadian radio station is a Tragically Hip song that they've already played three times that day, and giving two airlines permission to become a monopoly and then being surprised when quality of service suffers.
My government couldn't find its own asshole with both hands and a flashlight. They don't represent me, they don't represent my views, they don't even provide the services that they claim to when they tax me. Now I know what it is to feel raped.
We just imported a bunch of Canadians where I work (company closed their office) - and we're all pronouncing "about" like "aboot" now! Damn Canadians! At least they're learning to surf now.
Heheh... Well, my native accent is an Ottawa-area accent, so I sound just like Peter Jennings.
I spend a lot of time in southeastern Michigan and Western New York since I have large numbers of friends in both those places. Since I hate looking (or sounding) like a tourist wherever I go, I've adopted the general "midwestern" accent to the point that people I meet from there are surprised to find out that I'm from the Toronto area.
It makes things so much better in restaurants, especially:
Q: What's the difference between a Canadian and a canoe?
A: A canoe tips.
Sounding Canadian can mean your soup is served cold.
Perhaps I am a moron; however, your reply to my posting did absolutely nothing to convince me that you're right and I'm wrong.
I'm not sure where Indian chip fab people come into things. Where, in my original posting, did it refer to them?
Your complete and utter lack of any ability to divide your thoughts into separate and distinct paragraphs makes me question, in approximate order, your intelligence, the clarity of your thought processes and finally your capability with the English language.
Excuse me, but wasn't it the now-vice-presidential candidate and Democratic Senator Leiberman that spearheaded the entire games rating process in the first place?
Of course. But Lieberman speaks from a more educated position on the computer industry than does the Republican party.
After all, Al Gore invented the internet.
Both parties make me sick, though the Democrats are clearly the lesser of the two evils.
Remember, the Republicans want to make the country into a religious state. If you want to live in a religious state, move to Iran. I hear real estate in Tehran is cheap.
''Common sense should tell us that positively reinforcing sadistic behavior, as these games do, cannot be good for our children,'' said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.
Thank God Kansas Republicans are here to help us all with common sense. After all, between saving our kids from both video games and Darwinian theory, we owe a debt of gratitude to the forward-thinking minds of Kansas conservatives.
Especially when Americans are laid off because, "If the foreigner gets laid off, he will have to leave the country!" I was actually told that when I was laid off! (even though I had more time with the company and an equivolent education)
I doubt that's the case, though it might be what you're told.
I'm in a hiring and firing position myself, and when I have to make the tough choices, it's based simply on who fits in best around the workplace.
Literally, I once kept one guy because the other guy didn't go to company picnics. They were both equally qualified and had similar tenure; the difference was that the guy who went to company picnics had a better attitude about both the company and his co-workers. Going to company parties and stuff is very often symbolic of someone who both likes the company and the people that they spend 40+ hours a week with.
I say that if there are national or emigrant citizens that can do the job (or are willing to learn), they should get hired first.
As a Canadian citizen who yearns to emigrate to the United States, I agree fully with you. This is great problem with Canada, and it is symptomatic of one of the many problems that makes me fed up with sending 50%+ of my income to Ottawa with nothing to show in return for my tax monies invested.
However, I think I may be accused of being a little bit more moderate than you are:
If there are more jobs, fine hire foreigners. But don't put a citizen in the unemployment line so you can hire a foreigner, that costing the nation more in the end (unemployment, welfare, low moral, crime...) even if your company sees a short term gain.
Not true. The population of the United States or Canada isn't growing fast enough on its own to maintain the same rate of economic growth as we're used to. Therefore, immigrants are necessary to be new employees and therefore new consumers.
Immigrants start 18% of all new businesses in Canada; I'm sure the numbers are similar in the US. They're also more likely to attend post-secondary education.
My problem with immigration is the quality of the immigrants that Canada is allowing in. First off, I know a husband and wife pair who are both British doctors, and they can't immigrate to Canada, because they're not from a "downtrodden" enough country. Canada currently has a shortage of medical professionals (mostly because they complete school, subsidized by the government, then immediately head off to the warmer, freer and greener pastures south of the border). The immigrants that Canada lets in - in fact, embraces with open arms and settlement bonuses ($$) are from all-nature of third-world lands with no employable skills or capability in either of Canada's official languages. Eventually, they get jobs as gas station attendants, hotel chambermaids or convenience store clerks. And yet a pair of British doctors can't get in.
I'm all for immigration, but I want them to learn the official languages of Canada. I want them to integrate into Canadian society. And I want the preference to be given to those with useable skills prior to those allowed in because they're from third-world countries.
I assure you, when I move to the United States, it will be with the goal (and responsibility) of Citizenship in mind; not coming in, taking advantage of and culturally diluting the American way of life.
Hiring foreign help should be a stop gap measure until the nation's population can catch up to the demand, NOT general practice to lower the bottom line or to keep Uncle Joe in the country.
Without immigration, the economy will not grow, and recession will be the result. Unless everybody starts having lots and lots of children.
I'm working with an H1B colleague who changed jobs and told me he didn't have much trouble doing it. He just found the new job first, got the paperwork rolling and then gave two weeks notice on his old job. This isn't rocket science.
Unless you get your ass canned first, and are left to find new employment.
In which case, the United States of America is probably better off without you.
If you've got an H1B computer geek that you need to fire and replace, let's talk.
Canadian citizen longing to get out of this socialist land; loyal, hard working and versatile.
I consider myself a very poor (no money) audiophile.
That just means it's time to get out the big book on electrical engineering and the soldering iron...
Older, good-quality stereo equipment is a good place to start. Tubes can be good, but while I like tubes for preamps, you want to keep them away from vibration (microphonics); either way, I recommend a good solid state output stage, because tubes are high-impedance devices, they drive speakers through output transformers, and they're neat inductive devices which cause all sorts of equally neat inductive effects in your frequency response and THD plots. MOSFET amps are really nice since they have a very low output impedance, but if the amplifier isn't very heavy, it probably doesn't have a power transformer to match the current that it should be able to drive. Every three watts of rated power should weigh about 1 pound. Therefore, if the amp says it's 100 watts and weighs 10 pouds, it's probably not really capable of doing 100 watts.
Car stereos and computer speakers aren't rated in watts. They're rated in "w", the official unit for "wishful thinking".
Heat your soldering iron up and replace all the potentiometers, all the resistors, all the capacitors, all the switches. Get yourself some nice Sovtek, Mullard or vintage American tubes at a music store or order them from Antique Electronics Supply in Tempe AZ. Find new low-noise versions of the transistors in your amp's output stage. It's cheap, takes only a few bucks and a few hours of your time, and you can put together a great system for very little money.
Oh yeah, and if the old stereo you choose to hack is *too* perfect, don't do it. Some of these amps have collector value or fan clubs that would want to see a good one preserved . Usually, a beater that doesn't work will work after replaceing the stuff I listed above.
Speakers? I run AR-4s; I'd also run anything else Acoustic Research made in the 1970s. Anything Celestion, anything Klipsche, anything vintage Bose...
I go digital to my amp (I still need a good noise gate though)and I find that MP3s at the fixed 128Kb rate have some serious digital artifacts,
Oh yeah. They're great as background music. In the car, for example, you'd never hear the noise over the sound of the car. But I can barely stand to listen to 128kbps in my listening room.
And ya know, the digital artifacts are somehow more objectionable than the tape hiss or turntable ruble of days gone by. I guess it's just that the noise that compression introduces has no soothing natural equivalent... at least tape hiss can sound like something comforting and normal, like a waterfall or a leaking barbeque tank...
Now if I could only get a motherboard that didn't introduce it's own digital noise into the mix I'd be happy, but alas I am poor.
Just remember that, as long as the status of logic lines isn't changed (ie. 1 stays 1, 0 stays 0) as the data enters the digital to analog converter, you're clear. Digitally introduced noise would cause all sorts of other things, since it wouldn't just affect stuff going to your D/A converter - it would affect the contents of your computer's data and address buses, too: you'd be lucky to even get a BSoD, let alone audio that still played.
Any noise will be picked up in the analog stages. So, keep the analog stages as far as possible from the digital stages. Use chokes, bypass capacitors and large filters on the power feeding the resistor ladder in the D/A stage and the output buffers that follow. Keep the analog section physically away from the digital section, and keep the analog and digital sides independantly shielded to a good, strong ground.
It could be done with existing stuff... anyone got a schematic for a first generation SoundBlaster 16? (Older cards look easier to hack since they're less integrated.)
For example, DVD and Digital Cable TV, while techincally superior in its delivery capabilities and compactness, sucks in my opinion - digital artifacts are quite visible in "shading" amongst other things.
I agree completely. I prefer a Betacam or 3/4" professional videotape, and failing that a good home Beta machine or analog cable feed.
The Beta machines don't screw up the chrominance quite the same way even the best modern VHS machines do, and neither one of them has the jerky and artificial rendering of a DVD.
Note that the DVD has *not* been embraced as a professional format: most TV stations are shipping around digital Betacam (almost no compression), analog Betacam/Betacam SP, or burning their own analog video discs.
Now, with MP3s so out in the open, people are embracing 128Kbps MP3s as "CD quality". Personally, I think this is a statement made by someone who is no where near the category of Audiophile.
Okay. Here's a bit of an issue.
I worked for years as a professional sound technician. I've done sound for Garth Brooks, Harry Belafonte and the Three Tenors.
I've had self-proclaimed audiophiles (who double as lawyers and dentists during the day) ask my why it is that I don't have Monster Cable connecting my stack of Crown amplifiers to the TurboSound bins suspended from the stadium roof. Or, why I don't use vinyl. Or why I don't use sonic CD stabilizers (the green rings) or other similar crap that people who don't know anything like to use.
Now, not knowing whether or not to class you as that kind of audiophile, or the kind I am, I will defend the MP3 this way: they do sound pretty damned good when they get above 160kbps. In fact, I can't consistantly tell them apart, above 160kbps.
But, I agree, the majority of people seem to think that the 128kbps MP3 is CD-quality. I'd suggest that the 160kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from CD-quality. But remember, you do live in a world that has embraced VHS over Beta, and where people still buy pre-recorded 1-7/8IPS cassette tapes. Quality is not what people want.
As for me, I really want to do some more R/D on my old SoundBlaster 16. I'd love to be able to get the D/A converters out of the RF field inside the computer's case. (I've already managed to extricate the analog buffer amplifiers.) Newer sound cards are very hard to hack this way.
My listening setup is a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4s connected to a Sound A-5000 solid-state amplifier. The preamp stages of the Sound A-5000 have been replaced with a 12AT7 preamp board that I designed. Surface-mounted, ground-plane, fine quality components, DC heaters for the tubes, etc. S/N over 98dB on the amplifier. THD is less than my equipment can measure. And, as any real audiophile knows, the only thing on par with a pair of AR-4s is a pair of Celestion Ditton 44s.
FM-radio channel has generally a 200khz bandwidth(in u.s.) reserved to it. It is going to use lot less, but this is to prevent interference between stations.
Yeah, I didn't count that, since it's not actually carrying data. In fact, the FCC doesn't like to license stations less than 500kHz apart. 'Course, New York and L.A. are big markets...
Stereo pilot is at 19khz if i'm not terribly mistaken.
Yeah... I've been thinking more of MTS stereo on TV, which is basically just the same thing as FM stereo with a different pilot frequency.
All frequencies higher than 18khz or so are filtered out(so that they don't mess with stereo carrier). 40khz bandwidth is a good estimate..
Well, remember, they're not filtered out, they're modulated into the additive and difference signals. The (L+R) signal that you hear on a mono FM radio, then the pilot which turns on the FM stereo circuits, then the (L-R) difference signal which is used to create the stereo image. All that space is available under such a scheme.
Increased bandwidth does have a bigger impact, however. Would probably want to use frequency bands over 1ghz where a bandwidth of 500khz-1mhz is obtainable..
Why, when you can basically run a dozen 56k modems slingshotted through the same given bandwidth? Use the bandwidth efficiently, and you don't actually need the 500-1,000kHz bandwidth.
Besides, UHF/microwave sucks. It's way too position dependant. I don't want a Walkman that has to be moved three feet to the left before I'm able to receive the Howard Stern show again. Since UHF/microwave tend to bounce off lots of things, reflections and self-cancelling signals are going to be a constant pain in the ass.
Wow, now all those blueprints for nuclear weapons I downloaded might be useful! (Seriously, they say it's safe from terrorists.)" Granted, it does look like you have to be a registered purchaser
That's the key. So long as that is safe from being screwed with.
Even if I were to break in and order some uranium from them, I doubt they'd deliver it to my house, anyway. I'm sure it would have to be a radiologically-licensed lab.
I had initially figured it would be some sort of novelty website, selling natural uranium for people. Natural uranium (U238) is basically lead, but a little bit heavier and with different chemical properties. Not very radioactive, quite harmless unless you ingest it (like almost all heavy metals). But they appear to offer a search among a variety of isotopes and pellet configurations, so the fuel is suited to different reactor types.
and it's not plutonium or anything
Well, all American light-water moderated reactors run on U-235. "Enriched" uranium. It's an isotope that occurs in nature - it's uranium but with a few less neutrons than usual. This makes it more prone to fission, and therefore more useful as fuel. Chemically, it's ordinary uranium, but just a little heavier, so it's separated from U238 with a physical, not chemical, process.
U235 is dangerous. It's more dangerous than many isotopes of plutonium. For example, Pu239 is dangerous as all hell - but chemically, not because of the alpha particles it throws off.
Remember, Japan got to taste-test a Uranium and a Plutonium bomb.
but the whole thought amuses me, in a science project gone awry way..
Nah. People are just afraid of nuclear anything. Just take some precautions. Bad things will happen from time to time (as they always do when technology fails). But, nuclear technology is a boon to mankind. No one would ever suggest that we give up aviation because a plane crashes. No informed person would advocate that we give up nuclear technology because there was an idiot at the controls at Chernobyl. As we've learned from plane crashes, we learn from criticality accidents and mishaps.
Ionizing smoke detectors save more lives each year than all the people who have died as a result of Chernobyl.
And on the ceiling in your bedroom, that little smoke detector contains one of the wonderful by-products of the plutonium produced for the arms race: Americium 241. Alpha emitter, so it creates a positive electrostatic field around itself. Half-life of 49 years. Fairly active stuff. And you have, in your bedroom, about 1 microcurie of the stuff. Even if you open your smoke detector, as long as you never eat or inhale your smoke detector, you're perfectly safe: alpha emitters are harmless outside your body (alpha particles can't pass through skin) but if you get them in your body, you're in trouble.
Criticality of Am241 occurs at about 2 curies. From that, you'd get a big blue flash, a lot of heat, and a lot of weird cancers. So, head down to Home Depot, and order 2,000 good and fresh smoke detectors. Pull them all apart and get the Am241 out of them. Keep two separate, but equal, piles of Am241 chunks. Melt them down in separate containers, and pour them into molds that have complementary shapes. Put them, always spaced about a foot apart, in the container of your choice. Use conventional explosives to force the two of them together. There ya go. You're now a nuclear power, ready to take on India or Pakistan. Kinda makes you wonder why it took them so long to get that far. (Canada had to sell each country a CANDU nuclear reactor back in the 1970s, for "civilian use". Good idea. Thanks. Yet another way that the Canadian government makes me feel proud to be a Canadian. <sigh>)
There's nothing to it, the cost is only a few grand, and all the info required is basic and common knowledge; most of it you could acquire at any good municipal library. But, I assure you, you won't get to build your little nuke. Someone in the Feds will discover you've got a very strange interest in smoke detectors.
They say that its possible to transmit 100 channels of 128kbps MP3 over an FM channel. Anyone can say more about this?
Well, the bandwidth of an ordinary PSTN telephone line (not DSL!) is only from about 300Hz to about 3kHz. And in that bandwidth, the practical transmission limit, the current state of the art, seems to be stuck at 56k.
You can't stream a 128kbps MP3 at 56kbps. Not in real time, as radio implies.
What's the bandwidth of a conventional FM radio station? 20kHz or so carrier deviation for mono. To light up the stereo light, the stereo pilot must be found, and that runs at about 21kHz carrier deviation, if I recall. A full FM stereo signal takes a carrier wave an modulates it about 44kHz either way, so 40kHz bandwidth is probably a practical conservative estimate and has easy enough numbers to work around.
Since a 56k modem uses quadrature amplitude modulation on ?4? simultaneous carriers in a total bandwidth of 2.7kHz (3000Hz top end - 300 Hz bottom end), then how many carriers could you stuff into a 40kHz wide data channel?
Piker. 17 years. Back in the days of 4.1BSD on a Vax 11/780. And Unix V7 on a PDP-11/70.
Okay, man, ya got me.
I did actually own a PDT-11 once, about ten years ago, shortly after I moved out on my own.
It had several serial ports on the back for connecting to terminals (and came with a DEC VT-100, which I still have) and teletypes (I did get rid of the DEC LA-36, it was too fscking big).
Two eight inch diskette drives. And when you flipped up the lid, there was a processor (I think it was an 8080) and 16 k of RAM. Circa about 1976.
I *think* it was a very small client/server computer setup, but I don't know for sure; I never was able to get it to fire up, and no one seems to know what the PDT (not PDP) was.
What skills would a most benefit a computer historian, and where are such people needed? Does such a job exist in any but the largest of companies now?
Nah, I doubt it. I'm sure that most of the old information and stuff that might have been on vintage machines has long been rendered obsolete or transferred off onto a newer computer.
Antique computers, like antique radios or antique TV sets, will never have any value except to Hollywood for use as props and as toys for hobbyists and collectors.
Let's face facts: my Trinitron uses a lot less power than my 1954 General Electric TV set. The Sony has stereo sound, a remote control, goes beyond channel 13 and - get this - it's color! But the old GE is a really neat piece of history, and while I only ever turn it on every now and then, it has a prominent place in my living room.
Now, here's a funny thing: ubiquitous as the TV set is, it has, perhaps, been a victim of its own success. There are less pre-WWII TV sets out there now than there are Stradavarius violins. 1950s and 1960s TV sets are getting rare, too. People tend to hang onto old radios because they're usually rather small or have more decorative cabinets.
There are lots of antique radio museums and collectors around the world, but there are only a handful of antique TV collections. (One of the best is the MZTV Museum in Toronto.)
Early computers are even less useful, from a practical standpoint, than a 40-year-old TV set; at least anyone can figure out how to use the 40-year-old TV, but few of us here could use even a 20-year-old computer effectively. Old TV sets often had gorgeous woodwork and great polished brass and chrome accents that were futuristic for their day. Early computers had that sort of retro feeling of "high-tech" too - a plastic prop out of the movie "Tron". But they lack the handmade qualities of earlier antique electronics.
So, what's the fate of my Commodore 64 in twenty years? Cherished museum piece that people will love to turn on, try out and admire; or will it be reviled and ridiculed for its age, simplicity and primitive design?
What are the pros and cons of this idea versus conventional gas-powered cars and the ideas of battery powered and fuel cell powered cars?
Well, for one thing, the car isn't actually burning nitrogen. It's just using some of its physical properties to store energy.
Burning nitrogen is something that you want t avoid doing in an automobile engine. In fact, your car has an "EGR" system ("Exhaust Gas Recirculation") which pumps a controlled amount of exhaust back into the engine to be re-burned. This helps to dilute the air/fuel mix in the engine and therefore lower the temperature of the combustion. Lower temperature = less nitrogen burning = less NOx emissions = less yellow haze over the city. If your state or province does an emissions test, you're going to fail it if your EGR system doesn't work.
Safety issues? In the event of an accident is being flash-frozen better than being burned to death or dissolved by battery acid?
Well, the risks are the same as carrying around tanks of LPG (liquified propane gas) or compressed natural gas. If they rupture but don't ignite, it'll get pretty damned cold. Since the nitrogen won't burn under normal conditions, I think you're still better off than you would be in a LPG/Natural Gas car. And, I'd suggest, a mechanical explosion caused by a compressed tank blowing up is probably more surviveable than a thermal explosion like a Ford Pinto gas tank.
What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?
Air is what, 78% nitrogen anyway? It's not an issue. You'll be taking nitrogen out of the air, compressing it, and then releasing it as the vehicle drives. It's not an issue at all, it's as environmentally benign as a hydrogen powered car (but a lot safer).
My only question is what powers the compressors that fill the pressurized tanks of nitrogen? That's really where the energy that runs the car is coming from; it's just being stored in a format that is convenient to a mobile vehicle. (Similiarily, a hydrogen vehicle will not be *powered* by hydrogen, it'll be powered by whatever actually broke the hydrogen away from the oxygen in a water molecule. (Chemical reaction, electrolysis of water, etc.) Hydrogen is just a convenient means of storing and carrying the energy.)
I wonder how easy it is to keep the nitrogen cold, too.
Keep it compressed to the liquid state in the vehicle's fuel tanks. Release it as you need it. As you decrease its pressure, it will evaporate at a boil from a liquid state to a gaseous state. As it evaporates, it will maintain the usual temperature one associates with liquid nitrogen.
Similarily, when water boils, it maintains the contant temperature of 100c (212F) until all the liquid water is gone. (Or you seal up the vessel to increase the pressure - car cooling systems are usually good to about 120c because they keep the coolant (mostly water with some ethylene glycol to prevent freezing) under a pressure of 10-15PSI above atmospheric. Some later steam locomotives managed to get liquid water to 200-300 degrees celsius.)
It's interesting to consider what things will look like in 50 or 100 years, though. Will cars still be the dominant form of transport for Americans?
Yes. The car isn't going away. Public transit, no matter how good, is too slow, inefficient, and full of derelicts and other disgusting people who lean on you or let their kids puke on your Armani pants. This is why I drive. Now, if I worked right downtown, the economics of parking would probably make me take the TTC. But since I live and work in the 'burbs, and my workplace provides parking, there's no question that I'll keep driving.
Besides, driving is fun. It's in our blood. Imagine asking any typical North American to give up his or her TV sets? Same thing but worse.
One of the major tenets of a big application and its development is full and complete documentation of it before you even write the first line of code... Why do you think things struggle with the interface so much, people tend to just hack code before really considering globally the implications of somethings
Exactly. The freewheeling lack of centralized control that makes Linux such a hacker's paradise (and therefore gets it into servers everywhere) is also the number one liability blocking its adoption into a desktop environment.
Silly questions, like who will be the standard desktop - Gnome or KDE - serve to confuse new users, slow down developers and generally make the OS less attractive to users. Though you and I like the freedom.
Ok, moderators, since I said pro-RedHat and, even worse, pro-MS things, I expect to lose heaps of karma. Do your worst.
It appears that it's impossible to exceed a karma of 50 points. And those fifty points are rapidly collected, often from the things that you feel are most inflammatory.
I'm relatively new to Linux; though I've been a UNIX user for 12 years (I was on the Internet before hypertext), my RH6 installation was my first ever experience as being logged in as root.
Teething into this thing for the past few months, I've got Apache running, Samba, Xwindows with AfterStep and Gnome, all the while firewalling my DSL connection from my home LAN. Now, I'm working on a webserver for my work, a division of Litton. I've been living and breathing Linux (RH6 and now 6.2) for this time.
It's had its ups and its downs, and I'm glad to see that someone else agrees with me. For my desktop machine, I'd be perfectly happy with Winodws 95B if it didn't crash all the time, and if I could make one window not steal focus from another. But Windows as a server? No way.
Linux on the desktop? Not yet. Soon, but not yet. Fortunately, Linux appears to have evolved the opposite way from most other operating systems, with sophisticated technical features in place, secure and fully developed, as the user interface and software base starts to mature.
As for the choice of Red Hat, well, for a Linux newbie, it has everything I need, all the support I need is just a few mouseclicks away, and hell, there are even books on RH6 in the discount bin at the computer book store. From everything I hear, SuSE and Debian are probably technically superior, but that does me no good if I can't figure out how to get my network cards working.
Hmm, maybe I didn't mean Teac. Perhaps I was thinking of a bunch of blank tapes I was looking through recently. My memory sucks, but now I'm thinking the cheap decks were Akai, not Teac. (hey, how different can they be - they've both got 4 letters).
<sigh> Akai is a division of Mitsubishi. They made some high-end consumer electronics, but mostly they build synth controllers and other accessories for professional musicians.
They also made probably the best engineered line of open reel decks to ever be sold to consumers en masse: The Akai M8, otherwise known as the Roberts 770X (this was back in 1965, when Japanese consumer electronics were very primitive, so the Anglo-Saxon name was essential).
These things had a near bulletproof steel transport, would run at 15 inches per second tape speed (with a capstan adapter), and used a really neat head biasing system that Akai called the "Cross-Field". To this day, and after years of working professionally in the audio and video business, I have yet to see another machine that can rewind an 1,800 foot reel of tape in 90 seconds (fast rewinding can save your ass if you're a pro). What a noise they make. The motor sounded like it was powering a big air conditioner, and the rest of the machanism was so wonderfully tactile and solid.
To this day, a 1965 Akai M8/Roberts 770X, in good working shape, is worth $300+ privately, though I've seen them sell in music stores for over $700. Not bad for a machine that retailed under $200 new (in 1965 dollars).
I've got an Akai M8 and an M9, two Roberts 770X (one of them is a parts machine, it was in a flood), a Roberts 970X, two Akai 1800 SDs, and an Akai 1800SS four-track. These things are lovely, and compete very nicely with Otari and Teac/Tascam open reel decks of the era. Several early albums were recorded on these machines; Led Zeppelin reportedly used them along with Ferrographs.
And, I'll tell you, when you've loaded up your Akai M8 with a set of brand new Sovtek (the Russians make the best tubes in the world) tubes, tossed on your 15 IPS capstan adapter, and threaded through a polyster CrO2 tape, you can make that thing sing.
The theme from "The Kids in the Hall" was recorded on my M8, way back in 1990? 1991? Can't remember anymore, but I was gigging on weekends then. Great machine.
Ahh! That explains it! (The color monitor on my late 80's Macintosh went pink a while ago, and it was in fact a Trinitron tube.)
NO! All color picture tubes will tend to go pinkish, not just Trinitrons. A Trinitron is an excellent and high-tech picture tube, but it's really only an incremental improvement over the other inline tubes, which are themselves only an incremental improvement over a traditional delta (triangular gun arrangement) picture tube.
There will be no revolutionary picture tube. The revolution will occur when LCD displays are perfected to a point where all new TV sets and computer monitors have LCD displays. (I don't think the plasma display is going to be revolutionary, they have too many of the same problems as picture tubes.)
I think the difference is that the Sony product is the premium product; Sony can afford to build the things to last. As a result, the picture tube wears out before the electronics fail. Usually, with cheaper stuff, the electronics fail before the picture tube starts to wear out.
you lame north americans DONT KNOW what Beer (with a capital beer because it is proper beer as in Britain) is stuff that has texture
it is also known as bitter
Yes, the word "bitter" is very quaint. Just like being a country of snaggle-toothed tea-obsessed monarchists, driving on the wrong side of the road, paying 4 quid for a gallon of petrol, and having cars equipped with boots and bonnets. And while the North American NTSC TV standard is far less than ideal, I won't get into a debate of the ocular perils of PAL's 50Hz refresh for a few extra scanning lines.
While I'd agree with a previous reply that some of the best beers in the world are from Belgium, I've also been highly impressed with German beers. And I do love some of the smaller UK beers that we get over here.
But I do have to take issue with your slam of North American mass-processed beers. Some of them are really good; the fact that something is mass-market doesn't necessarily mean that it is of inferior quality. Some of them reek, but many of them are quite good. All of them are well adapted to the North American marketplace, which generally regards beer as a refreshing drink - not to the elite status of meal replacement with which the Irish have endowed it.
BTW, I'm of Irish and Scottish blood, and to make matters worse, I'm a Taffy by birth and went to a boarding school. I feel perfectly entitled and justified to take the piss out of my British friends from time to time.
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Urk. I think that was something that I'd very carefully closed away into a little, isolated part of my mind, sealed up, and walked away from, hoping that it would never corrode its way out through the barriers that I had built...
And now look at what you've done.
Yeah. The strain of the virus that I caught didn't do anything overtly destructive. It just replicated.
Not that bad floppies were uncommon on the Amiga...How could you tell that you had a virus?
Yup. I did that too. A500, Workbench 2.1, 20 meg SCSI hard disk.
Even though the 880k of RAM could have been better used for program space, I found that the performance penalty of having the system files on a slow band-stepper hard drive was such that the memory hit was less obtrusive.
And, I had a later-revision A500, into which I'd plopped a Fat Agnes chip. With a little hacking, of course, it was possible to set up the memory expansion on the bottom of the A500 to become an extra 512k of Chip RAM; the 2 megs in my hard disk controller setup was the Fast RAM.
The only reason I bring this up is that, if nothing else, the Amiga is a great source of inside jokes, like "Guru Meditation Errors" and "volatile memory"...Or, if you've been downloading too much off the local high-speed (2400 baud!) Warez BBS, "Your Amiga is alive..."
Ya know, a Mac says, "Sorry, a System Error has occurred"; Windows tells you that "This program has performed an illegal operation" or any number of other nasty things.
But, besides Eudora 3.x ("Eudora is tired of waiting for the system to respond."), can anyone else think of any really nasty or sarcastic error messages like the Guru Meditation Error?
Yeah, and I have Firestone Radial ATX tires on my truck, too.
Oh well.
As you'd indicated earlier in your posting, you were from an Eastern European country.
For one thing, your command of the English language is excellent; you write better than most people for whom English is a first language.
However, what you say is only partially true. In your case, yes, this was the routine. Obviously, you came from one of the more "civilized" of the Eastern European countries: Poland or the Czech/Slovak republics, etc., as opposed to having been from someplace like Albania.
The majority of Canada's new immigrants last year were from China. Human rights issues in China really don't concern me beyond the fact that Canada shouldn't be trading with China if we find their government's behavior reprehensible. Instead, the Canada continues to trade with China, and rather than making the Chinese government bear the costs of their unacceptable human rights infractions, the Canadian government makes me bear them by allowing huge numbers of unqualified Chinese people in, and then giving most of them settlement bonuses. Now, I have no quarrels with the Chinese people: they're human beings, and they see opportunity that they wouldn't have in China. My problem is that more than 50% of my income goes to taxes to fund humanitarian projects that can better be operated in other ways.
Essentially, the Canadian government makes me pay for the ineptitude and abuses of the governments of countries that I really don't care about.
As a young Canadian taxpayer who sees my quality of life eroded by the day through stupid socialist policies that pander to everyone but the taxpayer, I'm enraged.
I'm forced to invest more than 50% of my earnings every pay cycle into the government at all levels, and I have nothing to show for it. I have bad roads, bad schools, bad water, bad health care and the biggest farce of a military this side of Iraq. But, it's reassuring to know that my government spends money instead on schizophrenic foreign policies ("China, you're bad, but we'll still buy stuff from you."), the CRTC which ensures that 40% of everything broadcast by a Canadian radio station is a Tragically Hip song that they've already played three times that day, and giving two airlines permission to become a monopoly and then being surprised when quality of service suffers.
My government couldn't find its own asshole with both hands and a flashlight. They don't represent me, they don't represent my views, they don't even provide the services that they claim to when they tax me. Now I know what it is to feel raped.
Heheh... Well, my native accent is an Ottawa-area accent, so I sound just like Peter Jennings.
I spend a lot of time in southeastern Michigan and Western New York since I have large numbers of friends in both those places. Since I hate looking (or sounding) like a tourist wherever I go, I've adopted the general "midwestern" accent to the point that people I meet from there are surprised to find out that I'm from the Toronto area.
It makes things so much better in restaurants, especially:
Q: What's the difference between a Canadian and a canoe?
A: A canoe tips.
Sounding Canadian can mean your soup is served cold.
(Further diatribe omitted to save bandwidth.)
Perhaps I am a moron; however, your reply to my posting did absolutely nothing to convince me that you're right and I'm wrong.
I'm not sure where Indian chip fab people come into things. Where, in my original posting, did it refer to them?
Your complete and utter lack of any ability to divide your thoughts into separate and distinct paragraphs makes me question, in approximate order, your intelligence, the clarity of your thought processes and finally your capability with the English language.
Perhaps you replied to the wrong message?
Ignore my brilliance only at your own peril.
Of course. But Lieberman speaks from a more educated position on the computer industry than does the Republican party.
After all, Al Gore invented the internet.
Both parties make me sick, though the Democrats are clearly the lesser of the two evils.
Remember, the Republicans want to make the country into a religious state. If you want to live in a religious state, move to Iran. I hear real estate in Tehran is cheap.
Quoted from USA Today:
''Common sense should tell us that positively reinforcing sadistic behavior, as these games do, cannot be good for our children,'' said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.Thank God Kansas Republicans are here to help us all with common sense. After all, between saving our kids from both video games and Darwinian theory, we owe a debt of gratitude to the forward-thinking minds of Kansas conservatives.
I doubt that's the case, though it might be what you're told.
I'm in a hiring and firing position myself, and when I have to make the tough choices, it's based simply on who fits in best around the workplace.
Literally, I once kept one guy because the other guy didn't go to company picnics. They were both equally qualified and had similar tenure; the difference was that the guy who went to company picnics had a better attitude about both the company and his co-workers. Going to company parties and stuff is very often symbolic of someone who both likes the company and the people that they spend 40+ hours a week with.
I say that if there are national or emigrant citizens that can do the job (or are willing to learn), they should get hired first.As a Canadian citizen who yearns to emigrate to the United States, I agree fully with you. This is great problem with Canada, and it is symptomatic of one of the many problems that makes me fed up with sending 50%+ of my income to Ottawa with nothing to show in return for my tax monies invested.
However, I think I may be accused of being a little bit more moderate than you are:
If there are more jobs, fine hire foreigners. But don't put a citizen in the unemployment line so you can hire a foreigner, that costing the nation more in the end (unemployment, welfare, low moral, crime...) even if your company sees a short term gain.Not true. The population of the United States or Canada isn't growing fast enough on its own to maintain the same rate of economic growth as we're used to. Therefore, immigrants are necessary to be new employees and therefore new consumers.
Immigrants start 18% of all new businesses in Canada; I'm sure the numbers are similar in the US. They're also more likely to attend post-secondary education.
My problem with immigration is the quality of the immigrants that Canada is allowing in. First off, I know a husband and wife pair who are both British doctors, and they can't immigrate to Canada, because they're not from a "downtrodden" enough country. Canada currently has a shortage of medical professionals (mostly because they complete school, subsidized by the government, then immediately head off to the warmer, freer and greener pastures south of the border). The immigrants that Canada lets in - in fact, embraces with open arms and settlement bonuses ($$) are from all-nature of third-world lands with no employable skills or capability in either of Canada's official languages. Eventually, they get jobs as gas station attendants, hotel chambermaids or convenience store clerks. And yet a pair of British doctors can't get in.
I'm all for immigration, but I want them to learn the official languages of Canada. I want them to integrate into Canadian society. And I want the preference to be given to those with useable skills prior to those allowed in because they're from third-world countries.
I assure you, when I move to the United States, it will be with the goal (and responsibility) of Citizenship in mind; not coming in, taking advantage of and culturally diluting the American way of life.
Hiring foreign help should be a stop gap measure until the nation's population can catch up to the demand, NOT general practice to lower the bottom line or to keep Uncle Joe in the country.Without immigration, the economy will not grow, and recession will be the result. Unless everybody starts having lots and lots of children.
Just choose the immigrants wisely.
Unless you get your ass canned first, and are left to find new employment.
In which case, the United States of America is probably better off without you.
If you've got an H1B computer geek that you need to fire and replace, let's talk.
Canadian citizen longing to get out of this socialist land; loyal, hard working and versatile.
GetMeAGreenCard@yahoo.com
Oops. My bad. So much for doing math in my head, I always seem to lose the decimal.
Ya know, I never do that when I'm calculating capacitor values and reactance and stuff like that.
...
Better call ahead for that order. Maybe get them to bump up the credit limit on your Home Depot card.
That just means it's time to get out the big book on electrical engineering and the soldering iron...
Older, good-quality stereo equipment is a good place to start. Tubes can be good, but while I like tubes for preamps, you want to keep them away from vibration (microphonics); either way, I recommend a good solid state output stage, because tubes are high-impedance devices, they drive speakers through output transformers, and they're neat inductive devices which cause all sorts of equally neat inductive effects in your frequency response and THD plots. MOSFET amps are really nice since they have a very low output impedance, but if the amplifier isn't very heavy, it probably doesn't have a power transformer to match the current that it should be able to drive. Every three watts of rated power should weigh about 1 pound. Therefore, if the amp says it's 100 watts and weighs 10 pouds, it's probably not really capable of doing 100 watts.
Car stereos and computer speakers aren't rated in watts. They're rated in "w", the official unit for "wishful thinking".
Heat your soldering iron up and replace all the potentiometers, all the resistors, all the capacitors, all the switches. Get yourself some nice Sovtek, Mullard or vintage American tubes at a music store or order them from Antique Electronics Supply in Tempe AZ. Find new low-noise versions of the transistors in your amp's output stage. It's cheap, takes only a few bucks and a few hours of your time, and you can put together a great system for very little money.
Oh yeah, and if the old stereo you choose to hack is *too* perfect, don't do it. Some of these amps have collector value or fan clubs that would want to see a good one preserved . Usually, a beater that doesn't work will work after replaceing the stuff I listed above.
Speakers? I run AR-4s; I'd also run anything else Acoustic Research made in the 1970s. Anything Celestion, anything Klipsche, anything vintage Bose...
I go digital to my amp (I still need a good noise gate though)and I find that MP3s at the fixed 128Kb rate have some serious digital artifacts,Oh yeah. They're great as background music. In the car, for example, you'd never hear the noise over the sound of the car. But I can barely stand to listen to 128kbps in my listening room.
And ya know, the digital artifacts are somehow more objectionable than the tape hiss or turntable ruble of days gone by. I guess it's just that the noise that compression introduces has no soothing natural equivalent... at least tape hiss can sound like something comforting and normal, like a waterfall or a leaking barbeque tank...
Now if I could only get a motherboard that didn't introduce it's own digital noise into the mix I'd be happy, but alas I am poor.Just remember that, as long as the status of logic lines isn't changed (ie. 1 stays 1, 0 stays 0) as the data enters the digital to analog converter, you're clear. Digitally introduced noise would cause all sorts of other things, since it wouldn't just affect stuff going to your D/A converter - it would affect the contents of your computer's data and address buses, too: you'd be lucky to even get a BSoD, let alone audio that still played.
Any noise will be picked up in the analog stages. So, keep the analog stages as far as possible from the digital stages. Use chokes, bypass capacitors and large filters on the power feeding the resistor ladder in the D/A stage and the output buffers that follow. Keep the analog section physically away from the digital section, and keep the analog and digital sides independantly shielded to a good, strong ground.
It could be done with existing stuff... anyone got a schematic for a first generation SoundBlaster 16? (Older cards look easier to hack since they're less integrated.)
I agree completely. I prefer a Betacam or 3/4" professional videotape, and failing that a good home Beta machine or analog cable feed.
The Beta machines don't screw up the chrominance quite the same way even the best modern VHS machines do, and neither one of them has the jerky and artificial rendering of a DVD.
Note that the DVD has *not* been embraced as a professional format: most TV stations are shipping around digital Betacam (almost no compression), analog Betacam/Betacam SP, or burning their own analog video discs.
Now, with MP3s so out in the open, people are embracing 128Kbps MP3s as "CD quality". Personally, I think this is a statement made by someone who is no where near the category of Audiophile.Okay. Here's a bit of an issue.
I worked for years as a professional sound technician. I've done sound for Garth Brooks, Harry Belafonte and the Three Tenors.
I've had self-proclaimed audiophiles (who double as lawyers and dentists during the day) ask my why it is that I don't have Monster Cable connecting my stack of Crown amplifiers to the TurboSound bins suspended from the stadium roof. Or, why I don't use vinyl. Or why I don't use sonic CD stabilizers (the green rings) or other similar crap that people who don't know anything like to use.
Now, not knowing whether or not to class you as that kind of audiophile, or the kind I am, I will defend the MP3 this way: they do sound pretty damned good when they get above 160kbps. In fact, I can't consistantly tell them apart, above 160kbps.
But, I agree, the majority of people seem to think that the 128kbps MP3 is CD-quality. I'd suggest that the 160kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from CD-quality. But remember, you do live in a world that has embraced VHS over Beta, and where people still buy pre-recorded 1-7/8IPS cassette tapes. Quality is not what people want.
As for me, I really want to do some more R/D on my old SoundBlaster 16. I'd love to be able to get the D/A converters out of the RF field inside the computer's case. (I've already managed to extricate the analog buffer amplifiers.) Newer sound cards are very hard to hack this way.
My listening setup is a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4s connected to a Sound A-5000 solid-state amplifier. The preamp stages of the Sound A-5000 have been replaced with a 12AT7 preamp board that I designed. Surface-mounted, ground-plane, fine quality components, DC heaters for the tubes, etc. S/N over 98dB on the amplifier. THD is less than my equipment can measure. And, as any real audiophile knows, the only thing on par with a pair of AR-4s is a pair of Celestion Ditton 44s.
<grin>
Yeah, I didn't count that, since it's not actually carrying data. In fact, the FCC doesn't like to license stations less than 500kHz apart. 'Course, New York and L.A. are big markets...
Stereo pilot is at 19khz if i'm not terribly mistaken.Yeah... I've been thinking more of MTS stereo on TV, which is basically just the same thing as FM stereo with a different pilot frequency.
All frequencies higher than 18khz or so are filtered out(so that they don't mess with stereo carrier). 40khz bandwidth is a good estimate..Well, remember, they're not filtered out, they're modulated into the additive and difference signals. The (L+R) signal that you hear on a mono FM radio, then the pilot which turns on the FM stereo circuits, then the (L-R) difference signal which is used to create the stereo image. All that space is available under such a scheme.
Increased bandwidth does have a bigger impact, however. Would probably want to use frequency bands over 1ghz where a bandwidth of 500khz-1mhz is obtainable..Why, when you can basically run a dozen 56k modems slingshotted through the same given bandwidth? Use the bandwidth efficiently, and you don't actually need the 500-1,000kHz bandwidth.
Besides, UHF/microwave sucks. It's way too position dependant. I don't want a Walkman that has to be moved three feet to the left before I'm able to receive the Howard Stern show again. Since UHF/microwave tend to bounce off lots of things, reflections and self-cancelling signals are going to be a constant pain in the ass.
That's the key. So long as that is safe from being screwed with.
Even if I were to break in and order some uranium from them, I doubt they'd deliver it to my house, anyway. I'm sure it would have to be a radiologically-licensed lab.
I had initially figured it would be some sort of novelty website, selling natural uranium for people. Natural uranium (U238) is basically lead, but a little bit heavier and with different chemical properties. Not very radioactive, quite harmless unless you ingest it (like almost all heavy metals). But they appear to offer a search among a variety of isotopes and pellet configurations, so the fuel is suited to different reactor types.
and it's not plutonium or anythingWell, all American light-water moderated reactors run on U-235. "Enriched" uranium. It's an isotope that occurs in nature - it's uranium but with a few less neutrons than usual. This makes it more prone to fission, and therefore more useful as fuel. Chemically, it's ordinary uranium, but just a little heavier, so it's separated from U238 with a physical, not chemical, process.
U235 is dangerous. It's more dangerous than many isotopes of plutonium. For example, Pu239 is dangerous as all hell - but chemically, not because of the alpha particles it throws off.
Remember, Japan got to taste-test a Uranium and a Plutonium bomb.
but the whole thought amuses me, in a science project gone awry way..Nah. People are just afraid of nuclear anything. Just take some precautions. Bad things will happen from time to time (as they always do when technology fails). But, nuclear technology is a boon to mankind. No one would ever suggest that we give up aviation because a plane crashes. No informed person would advocate that we give up nuclear technology because there was an idiot at the controls at Chernobyl. As we've learned from plane crashes, we learn from criticality accidents and mishaps.
Ionizing smoke detectors save more lives each year than all the people who have died as a result of Chernobyl.
And on the ceiling in your bedroom, that little smoke detector contains one of the wonderful by-products of the plutonium produced for the arms race: Americium 241. Alpha emitter, so it creates a positive electrostatic field around itself. Half-life of 49 years. Fairly active stuff. And you have, in your bedroom, about 1 microcurie of the stuff. Even if you open your smoke detector, as long as you never eat or inhale your smoke detector, you're perfectly safe: alpha emitters are harmless outside your body (alpha particles can't pass through skin) but if you get them in your body, you're in trouble.
Criticality of Am241 occurs at about 2 curies. From that, you'd get a big blue flash, a lot of heat, and a lot of weird cancers. So, head down to Home Depot, and order 2,000 good and fresh smoke detectors. Pull them all apart and get the Am241 out of them. Keep two separate, but equal, piles of Am241 chunks. Melt them down in separate containers, and pour them into molds that have complementary shapes. Put them, always spaced about a foot apart, in the container of your choice. Use conventional explosives to force the two of them together. There ya go. You're now a nuclear power, ready to take on India or Pakistan. Kinda makes you wonder why it took them so long to get that far. (Canada had to sell each country a CANDU nuclear reactor back in the 1970s, for "civilian use". Good idea. Thanks. Yet another way that the Canadian government makes me feel proud to be a Canadian. <sigh>)
There's nothing to it, the cost is only a few grand, and all the info required is basic and common knowledge; most of it you could acquire at any good municipal library. But, I assure you, you won't get to build your little nuke. Someone in the Feds will discover you've got a very strange interest in smoke detectors.
Well, the bandwidth of an ordinary PSTN telephone line (not DSL!) is only from about 300Hz to about 3kHz. And in that bandwidth, the practical transmission limit, the current state of the art, seems to be stuck at 56k.
You can't stream a 128kbps MP3 at 56kbps. Not in real time, as radio implies.
What's the bandwidth of a conventional FM radio station? 20kHz or so carrier deviation for mono. To light up the stereo light, the stereo pilot must be found, and that runs at about 21kHz carrier deviation, if I recall. A full FM stereo signal takes a carrier wave an modulates it about 44kHz either way, so 40kHz bandwidth is probably a practical conservative estimate and has easy enough numbers to work around.
Since a 56k modem uses quadrature amplitude modulation on ?4? simultaneous carriers in a total bandwidth of 2.7kHz (3000Hz top end - 300 Hz bottom end), then how many carriers could you stuff into a 40kHz wide data channel?
I think it's exponentially more.
This sounds very exciting.
Okay, man, ya got me.
I did actually own a PDT-11 once, about ten years ago, shortly after I moved out on my own.
It had several serial ports on the back for connecting to terminals (and came with a DEC VT-100, which I still have) and teletypes (I did get rid of the DEC LA-36, it was too fscking big).
Two eight inch diskette drives. And when you flipped up the lid, there was a processor (I think it was an 8080) and 16 k of RAM. Circa about 1976.
I *think* it was a very small client/server computer setup, but I don't know for sure; I never was able to get it to fire up, and no one seems to know what the PDT (not PDP) was.
Thoughts?
Nah, I doubt it. I'm sure that most of the old information and stuff that might have been on vintage machines has long been rendered obsolete or transferred off onto a newer computer.
Antique computers, like antique radios or antique TV sets, will never have any value except to Hollywood for use as props and as toys for hobbyists and collectors.
Let's face facts: my Trinitron uses a lot less power than my 1954 General Electric TV set. The Sony has stereo sound, a remote control, goes beyond channel 13 and - get this - it's color! But the old GE is a really neat piece of history, and while I only ever turn it on every now and then, it has a prominent place in my living room.
Now, here's a funny thing: ubiquitous as the TV set is, it has, perhaps, been a victim of its own success. There are less pre-WWII TV sets out there now than there are Stradavarius violins. 1950s and 1960s TV sets are getting rare, too. People tend to hang onto old radios because they're usually rather small or have more decorative cabinets.
There are lots of antique radio museums and collectors around the world, but there are only a handful of antique TV collections. (One of the best is the MZTV Museum in Toronto.)
Early computers are even less useful, from a practical standpoint, than a 40-year-old TV set; at least anyone can figure out how to use the 40-year-old TV, but few of us here could use even a 20-year-old computer effectively. Old TV sets often had gorgeous woodwork and great polished brass and chrome accents that were futuristic for their day. Early computers had that sort of retro feeling of "high-tech" too - a plastic prop out of the movie "Tron". But they lack the handmade qualities of earlier antique electronics.
So, what's the fate of my Commodore 64 in twenty years? Cherished museum piece that people will love to turn on, try out and admire; or will it be reviled and ridiculed for its age, simplicity and primitive design?
Well, for one thing, the car isn't actually burning nitrogen. It's just using some of its physical properties to store energy.
Burning nitrogen is something that you want t avoid doing in an automobile engine. In fact, your car has an "EGR" system ("Exhaust Gas Recirculation") which pumps a controlled amount of exhaust back into the engine to be re-burned. This helps to dilute the air/fuel mix in the engine and therefore lower the temperature of the combustion. Lower temperature = less nitrogen burning = less NOx emissions = less yellow haze over the city. If your state or province does an emissions test, you're going to fail it if your EGR system doesn't work.
Safety issues? In the event of an accident is being flash-frozen better than being burned to death or dissolved by battery acid?Well, the risks are the same as carrying around tanks of LPG (liquified propane gas) or compressed natural gas. If they rupture but don't ignite, it'll get pretty damned cold. Since the nitrogen won't burn under normal conditions, I think you're still better off than you would be in a LPG/Natural Gas car. And, I'd suggest, a mechanical explosion caused by a compressed tank blowing up is probably more surviveable than a thermal explosion like a Ford Pinto gas tank.
What is the environmental impact of letting tons of nitrogen a day escape into the atmosphere?Air is what, 78% nitrogen anyway? It's not an issue. You'll be taking nitrogen out of the air, compressing it, and then releasing it as the vehicle drives. It's not an issue at all, it's as environmentally benign as a hydrogen powered car (but a lot safer).
My only question is what powers the compressors that fill the pressurized tanks of nitrogen? That's really where the energy that runs the car is coming from; it's just being stored in a format that is convenient to a mobile vehicle. (Similiarily, a hydrogen vehicle will not be *powered* by hydrogen, it'll be powered by whatever actually broke the hydrogen away from the oxygen in a water molecule. (Chemical reaction, electrolysis of water, etc.) Hydrogen is just a convenient means of storing and carrying the energy.)
I wonder how easy it is to keep the nitrogen cold, too.Keep it compressed to the liquid state in the vehicle's fuel tanks. Release it as you need it. As you decrease its pressure, it will evaporate at a boil from a liquid state to a gaseous state. As it evaporates, it will maintain the usual temperature one associates with liquid nitrogen.
Similarily, when water boils, it maintains the contant temperature of 100c (212F) until all the liquid water is gone. (Or you seal up the vessel to increase the pressure - car cooling systems are usually good to about 120c because they keep the coolant (mostly water with some ethylene glycol to prevent freezing) under a pressure of 10-15PSI above atmospheric. Some later steam locomotives managed to get liquid water to 200-300 degrees celsius.)
It's interesting to consider what things will look like in 50 or 100 years, though. Will cars still be the dominant form of transport for Americans?Yes. The car isn't going away. Public transit, no matter how good, is too slow, inefficient, and full of derelicts and other disgusting people who lean on you or let their kids puke on your Armani pants. This is why I drive. Now, if I worked right downtown, the economics of parking would probably make me take the TTC. But since I live and work in the 'burbs, and my workplace provides parking, there's no question that I'll keep driving.
Besides, driving is fun. It's in our blood. Imagine asking any typical North American to give up his or her TV sets? Same thing but worse.
Exactly. The freewheeling lack of centralized control that makes Linux such a hacker's paradise (and therefore gets it into servers everywhere) is also the number one liability blocking its adoption into a desktop environment.
Silly questions, like who will be the standard desktop - Gnome or KDE - serve to confuse new users, slow down developers and generally make the OS less attractive to users. Though you and I like the freedom.
It appears that it's impossible to exceed a karma of 50 points. And those fifty points are rapidly collected, often from the things that you feel are most inflammatory.
I'm relatively new to Linux; though I've been a UNIX user for 12 years (I was on the Internet before hypertext), my RH6 installation was my first ever experience as being logged in as root.
Teething into this thing for the past few months, I've got Apache running, Samba, Xwindows with AfterStep and Gnome, all the while firewalling my DSL connection from my home LAN. Now, I'm working on a webserver for my work, a division of Litton. I've been living and breathing Linux (RH6 and now 6.2) for this time.
It's had its ups and its downs, and I'm glad to see that someone else agrees with me. For my desktop machine, I'd be perfectly happy with Winodws 95B if it didn't crash all the time, and if I could make one window not steal focus from another. But Windows as a server? No way.
Linux on the desktop? Not yet. Soon, but not yet. Fortunately, Linux appears to have evolved the opposite way from most other operating systems, with sophisticated technical features in place, secure and fully developed, as the user interface and software base starts to mature.
As for the choice of Red Hat, well, for a Linux newbie, it has everything I need, all the support I need is just a few mouseclicks away, and hell, there are even books on RH6 in the discount bin at the computer book store. From everything I hear, SuSE and Debian are probably technically superior, but that does me no good if I can't figure out how to get my network cards working.
<sigh> Akai is a division of Mitsubishi. They made some high-end consumer electronics, but mostly they build synth controllers and other accessories for professional musicians.
They also made probably the best engineered line of open reel decks to ever be sold to consumers en masse: The Akai M8, otherwise known as the Roberts 770X (this was back in 1965, when Japanese consumer electronics were very primitive, so the Anglo-Saxon name was essential).
These things had a near bulletproof steel transport, would run at 15 inches per second tape speed (with a capstan adapter), and used a really neat head biasing system that Akai called the "Cross-Field". To this day, and after years of working professionally in the audio and video business, I have yet to see another machine that can rewind an 1,800 foot reel of tape in 90 seconds (fast rewinding can save your ass if you're a pro). What a noise they make. The motor sounded like it was powering a big air conditioner, and the rest of the machanism was so wonderfully tactile and solid.
To this day, a 1965 Akai M8/Roberts 770X, in good working shape, is worth $300+ privately, though I've seen them sell in music stores for over $700. Not bad for a machine that retailed under $200 new (in 1965 dollars).
I've got an Akai M8 and an M9, two Roberts 770X (one of them is a parts machine, it was in a flood), a Roberts 970X, two Akai 1800 SDs, and an Akai 1800SS four-track. These things are lovely, and compete very nicely with Otari and Teac/Tascam open reel decks of the era. Several early albums were recorded on these machines; Led Zeppelin reportedly used them along with Ferrographs.
And, I'll tell you, when you've loaded up your Akai M8 with a set of brand new Sovtek (the Russians make the best tubes in the world) tubes, tossed on your 15 IPS capstan adapter, and threaded through a polyster CrO2 tape, you can make that thing sing.
The theme from "The Kids in the Hall" was recorded on my M8, way back in 1990? 1991? Can't remember anymore, but I was gigging on weekends then. Great machine.
NO! All color picture tubes will tend to go pinkish, not just Trinitrons. A Trinitron is an excellent and high-tech picture tube, but it's really only an incremental improvement over the other inline tubes, which are themselves only an incremental improvement over a traditional delta (triangular gun arrangement) picture tube.
There will be no revolutionary picture tube. The revolution will occur when LCD displays are perfected to a point where all new TV sets and computer monitors have LCD displays. (I don't think the plasma display is going to be revolutionary, they have too many of the same problems as picture tubes.)
I think the difference is that the Sony product is the premium product; Sony can afford to build the things to last. As a result, the picture tube wears out before the electronics fail. Usually, with cheaper stuff, the electronics fail before the picture tube starts to wear out.
Yes, the word "bitter" is very quaint. Just like being a country of snaggle-toothed tea-obsessed monarchists, driving on the wrong side of the road, paying 4 quid for a gallon of petrol, and having cars equipped with boots and bonnets. And while the North American NTSC TV standard is far less than ideal, I won't get into a debate of the ocular perils of PAL's 50Hz refresh for a few extra scanning lines.
While I'd agree with a previous reply that some of the best beers in the world are from Belgium, I've also been highly impressed with German beers. And I do love some of the smaller UK beers that we get over here.
But I do have to take issue with your slam of North American mass-processed beers. Some of them are really good; the fact that something is mass-market doesn't necessarily mean that it is of inferior quality. Some of them reek, but many of them are quite good. All of them are well adapted to the North American marketplace, which generally regards beer as a refreshing drink - not to the elite status of meal replacement with which the Irish have endowed it.
BTW, I'm of Irish and Scottish blood, and to make matters worse, I'm a Taffy by birth and went to a boarding school. I feel perfectly entitled and justified to take the piss out of my British friends from time to time.