Heh..it seems pr0n invades ALL aspects of the Internet -- even the 5K contest.
Check out the Pixxxel Chix. Hilarious! Just think of what "video strip poker" whould look like on the Atari 2600 and you'll get the idea--it's a great spoof of the typical smut site and quite impressive for 5K!
So, if someone forgets to lock his car door when he pops into 7-11, his car is "public domain" and it's his loss if a punk "borrows" it for a joyride and smashes it up? According you your logic, since everyone can access the car, everyone can do whatever they want with it. Sure it was stupid to leave the door unlocked, but IT IS STILL ILLEGAL.
Another thought comes to mind. Maybe nobody should list their phone numbers--after all, that DOES make your phone number public domain. I guess that gives everyone the RIGHT to make threatening or lewd phone calls at 3 a.m. to anyone they please--at least by your logic.
This isn't an issue about the content of the site--it could be communistrepublic.org for all I care. Ideally, everyone should be entitled to have their opinion heard, including Aldridge. However, Aldridge went FAR BEYOND free expression and a few troll and flamebait posts. He deliberately and persistently abused his privleges with the intent of hampering someone else's freedom of expression. If he holds strong opinions he could have posted more reasonable counter-arguments within the terms of service. He could have set up an "alternative" site and widely advertised the URL. Whatever his opinion, there are ways of expressing it without harassing others.
This isn't "abstract BS". With rights come responsibility. This is a case of someone acting irresponsibly with the intent of taking away the rights of another.
DSL in Alberta, Canada is typically $35 to $100 per month--and yes, this IS in Canadian dollars (think $22 to $65 per month in US$). If the CO is in your back yard, you can get 4-7 megabits/sec download speed, but more realistically you can expect about 2 Mbps. Upload is about 1 Mbps (and seems to work at that speed as advertised).
My DSL service in Calgary is about $100/month. I subcribe to the "basic business" service, which is maximum 7 Mps/1 Mbps, and includes a fixed 8 IP subnet (one network, one broadcast, one modem/gateway and 5 to use as I please--I only really needed 1 FIXED IP but they didn't give out 1 fixed IP at a time) and no restrictions on running servers (it is specifically advertised as an allowed feature).
I've heard that Alberta is arguably the most advanced juristiction in North America with respect to connectivity (or right up there--it's a very subjective statement). It may be due to the large presence of tech companies like Nortel and soon Motorola. The petroleum industry might also be a big factor in driving the technology (with its SCADA and instrumentation requirements). Other than Alberta, the Ottawa area would probably be comparably connected, as would Vancouver since these areas have a large high-tech economic presence. Anyone from these areas care to comment on the quality and price of their high-bandwidth service?
Well, SOME of the CBC doesn't suck. However, it's news programming has quite an obvious editorial slant (rather socialist and rather easy on the governing federal Liberal party--they don't piss them off lest they lose their funding). And when they are critical of the government, they side with the socialist NDP because they're the only other federal party that supports massive government funding of the CBC--the Alliance, BQ and Conservatives certainly don't have a track record of being CBC sympathisers. In other programming, they tend to be Toronto-centric, since most of management is in that area.
I have some problems with both the CBC AND the implementation of V-chip technology--that problem being that some government-appointed bureaucracy steers both. Ultimately, the government decides what is appropriate content and for whom for both(and don't say the CBC is independent of government influence--the government can manipulate the CBC because it controls its funding).
Society can come to a consensus on what is grossly violent, sexual or profane, but the line gets fuzzy with simple nudity, violence on newscasts or "dialogue" and "situations". A few years ago, the technology was tested in Edmonton. More than a few testers were surprised kids could view violence on the news, but "Mrs. Doubtfire" was deemed to have "adult content--sexual/mature situations" because Robin Williams was cross-dressing. I fear too many parents will rely on V-chip-equipped TVs for parenting, and allow those in government or industry-controlled bodies who make these sort of wacky decisions to to the parenting.
To fix the CBC, it should be modelled after PBS in the US. PBS relies on funding from multiple sources--viewers, corporations, government and so on. It doesn't have to cave to commercial interests, nor is it obligated to represent the government in a less-than-critial light. PBS most definitely DOESN'T suck, and there are a lot of Canadians that donate to northern PBS stations (Boston, Detroit, Seattle, etc). I'm sure they would support a re-invented CBC, as would current CBC viewers. The CBC could then be truly Canadian, not just Liberal-Central-Canadian.
On the problem of kids exposed to TV violence, no technology can do that. The only REAL solution is to acutally start parenting kids again. YOU are the best person to judge what is appropriate for your kids to watch. One thing that stands out for me is that when I watched TV or movies as a young child, one or both of my parents was ALWAYS in the same room--not sometimes--ALWAYS--until I got a bit older. And I wasn't sheltered from much content--if there was violence or a sensitive subject there was discussion about it.
BOTH are examples of something I find distasteful--individuals feeling entitles to have government or some other institution to do everything for them. TV is so commercial, but we don't want to commit our own time or money to change it--lets just let the government use our tax money to "solve" the problem. As a result, we get programming unencumbered by commercial pressures that STILL sucks and is encumbered by governmental pressures. TV violence is corrupting our kids--but supervising EVERYTHING our kids watch? That's so much work--we feel so much more secure with a V-chip to do it for us. The result: kids watch other kids on the TV news shooting up schools and are curious why they can't watch cartoons on Saturday morning, not knowing it was because bugs bunny wore a dress or the coyote mutilated himself again.
Our individual rights and freedoms are not without cost--we pay for them with individual RESPONSIBILITIES. EVERY TIME we let government or anyone else take care of those responsibilities we lose a little freedom. In matters as critical as criminal justice it is worth the loss of a little freedom for basic personal safety--but is "safe" TV programming really worth losing any rights or freedoms over?
Actually, there isn't that much different, because there already ARE "alternatives"--existing PS2 games and games for other platforms which don't rely on on-line validation. Only REALLY GOOD games that were ONLY ON THE PS2 would have a snowball's chance in hell.
Let's outline the facts that make this scheme retarded:
1. You have to be wired to even use the game. What if you are in an RV and went camping, and it started to rain and you wanted to pass the time playing the PS2 you brought along? What if you have a snazzy new PS2-equipped Ford Behemoth Extra-Gigantic edition SUV and you want to keep you kids occupied on a long trip? No can do, without a wireless system with good coverage (non-existant today, at least at reasonable prices). Also, is the connection dial-up? Better supply a toll-free line or validation through a standard internet connection so those in Tumbleweed, Saskatchewan don't have to pay long-distance every time they fire up the ol' PS2...
2. One option allows for the game's ID to be validated against a machine's ID the first time it is used, to restrict the game to one machine. This is SEVERELY retarded, because this disallows legitimate use of the game. What about rentals (a lucrative stream of money)? What happens if you want to lend a game out (NOT so it can be copied), or play it on a friend's PS2 and big TV? You'd have to bring you PS2 with you to play your game! What happens if your PS2 breaks? All your games are useless with a replacement unit, unless you phone or e-mail Sony to re-set your games (I imagine that would have to be annoying and time consuming enough to deter users from abusing the service)
3. How long will Sony support the games? Will Abandonware become useless? Will they assure us that the auth system (and thus the games) will work in 10 to 20 years? (Sound unreasonable? I STILL enjoy playing Ladybug, Venture and so on on my Coleco--19 years after they were made and 10 years after the entire company bit the dust)
4. Privacy. Big Brother Sony can have a list of ALL the PS2's in use in the world and the games that are used on each one, and how often. Enough said.
5. The PS2 works without this cripple-ware scheme with existing games--ie. it is "optional". The only way cripple-ware schemes like this would work would be if the entire industry colluded to make a standard cripple-ware scheme and made it mandatory for ALL NEW SOFTWARE. That would take a long time and could possibly invite trouble from government competition bureaus (aka trust busters). For this idea not to be a complete dud, all software vendors would have to decide it is worth the hassle to accomodate the hassle and lost revenue caused by the issues mentioned above. Otherwise Sony would have to make it a mandatory condition for every PS2 license. Then game makers will say "screw this--we'll stick with the much larger base of PC owners and N64s, and make the snazzy new edition for the X-BOX instead of the PS2"...
This idea definitely has merit to be nominated for the DivX "most retarded corporate idea" award...
A lot of e-commerce solutions work that way--the payment gateway is a CGI interface that requires a dollar amount as one of the parameters, and thus the reason for getting the price from the client. That is why the result page should look calculate the outstanding balance and not complete the purchase unless or until it is zero. FYI there is a solution that doesn't require submitting the price over CGI though...
I worked on an e-commerce site that used a Perl module as the interface to the payment gateway. The customer inputs didn't include price at all. A mod_perl handler (you could use a normal CGI script as well) recovered the price from a database based on SKUs and quantities and submitted it through the transaction object (then sent to the bank encrypted). That way, the payment interface is not directly linked to the customer via CGI. It isn't really much more work.
One thing that wasn't touched on in the feature article was encryption and security. I was a bit dismayed that some "canned" shopping cart solutions advertised that they were "secure" when they were not. The web page and CGI data was of course served up in https, but often credit card data was stored in CLEAR TEXT somewhere on the server, or sent IN THE CLEAR to the payment gateway. One "solution" I saw (geared towards smaller operations) involved collecting credit card info on a secure page, then E-MAILING IT IN THE CLEAR to the merchant to be keyed into their POS terminal manually! WTF is that?
Well, at least I'm comforted in the fact that the tech-stock-tanking will take out some of these losers--the past dot-com-mania fostered a "don't worry, be crappy" attitude. In this climate dot-coms now have to prove their viability and competence.
I'm not a religious person and try my best to have an open mind, and I have to agree. Scientists who use these new facts about our genome to discount scientific creationism are defending their own religion. Evolutionary science is in fact a religious belief of sorts held by athiests (IMHO athieism is a religion--the belief only in one's self--despite the literal definition "without religion"). Just as many devoutly religious people will NEVER believe in evolution, many scientists would never accept creationism as fact, even in the face of convincing evidence. Scientists are human just like everyone else, and as objective as they try to be they are influenced by their personal biases, politics and so on.
Without the ability to travel back in time and witness natural history, BOTH evolution and creationism are theories in the scientific sense. DNA evidence, fossil records and all other scientific evidence has simply made evolution the most credible scientific theory in the opinion of most scientists. "Scientific Creationism" simply uses scientific observations (sometimes the same ones evolutionists use) to advance a different theory.
For example, here is another way of interpreting the FACT that we share most of our DNA with even the lowly bacteria: a supreme being or force would design the universe to be orderly and efficient. DNA molecules--even in bacteria--are miraculously complex and ingeniously designed. If it worked on single-cell life forms, why not build on that for all other life? For the geeks out there think of it like this: what if you were the "supreme coder" and you wrote a killer object with a real cool interface on your first major project? Wouldn't you re-use that object as often as possible in other projects? Wouldn't you inherit its properties and methods in newer, more complex objects? If the design process works in writing programs, why not in creating life?
I am not a "religious, bible-thumping zealot". I am not close minded. There are people on BOTH sides of the debate to which those words apply, just as there are open-minded, critical thinkers on both sides. I accept scientific FACTS without reservation and make up my OWN mind as to the best THEORY they support. I've always had a hard time swallowing the literal biblical account. In fact, even since childhood I've been fascinated with evolutionary biology. Years of casual observation and life experience (including reading about the latest developments in the Genome Project) has made it equally hard to swallow the pure "random-mutation" evolution theory. There is a definite design process, guided by a higher power, going on in nature--from the molecular level up. It is mind-bogglingly complex, but human beings continue to find order in it. My belief is not adhered to blindly or ignorantly and is not related to fundamentalist beliefs (Christian or otherwise).
Maybe people who share those beliefs should avoid the tainted word "creationism" and use a term like "ordered evolution"... Well, maybe not... that would perpetuate the ongoing process of politically sanitizing our language, and I've had enough of terms like "differently abled", "ethnic cleansing", "chair people"...
A minicomuter is definitely is not, but technically--in a way--it is the baby cousin to the TI990/4 minicomputer. The 16-bit 9900 CPU in the TI99/4 and/4a used a subset of the instruction set in the 99000 CPU of the TI990/4 -- I think the link in the article mentions that connection.
Of course in many ways the little 99/4a was a piece of crap. It had a nice BASIC (and really nice extended BASIC option) and obviously a CPU with potential, but came only with a whopping 256 BYTES of system RAM. The rest of it (16K) wasn't actually system RAM--it had to be accessed through IO calls to the 9918a video chip (very very slow). Also, as full-featured as the BASIC was, I think it was DOUBLE INTERPRETED (BASIC->GPL->binary)! What were those engineers smoking and where do I get some of it?
Of course, I think there were RAM expansion cards that were directly addressable by the CPU, which helped immensely. In any case, there are some old machines (micros, minis and mainframes alike) that should be forgotten, or at leased ony remembered for their mistakes...
Re:What is wrong with US DSL?
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Yup, sounds typical of what I've heard. Shaw@Home in Calgary is the same--some people sometimes get great speed, but service is inconsistent based on where in the city you line and what time you use it and so on.
An interesting point someone made about Bell/Sympatico DSL likely being more reliable than other ISPs offering DSL. In Alberta, I've had personal experience dealing with the cable company, a telco (Telus HSE--which would be like Bell in Ontario) and an ISP (PSInet/CADVision), and although I found little difference in the speed and relibility between the DSL services(Telus was just slightly less than PSI/CADvision), Telus was MUCH WORSE for customer service (both by phone and through their internet pages--long waiting times and less knowledgeable). That was a big factor for me not going with either Shaw OR Telus in the end...
Re:What is wrong with US DSL?
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My argument has NOTHING TO DO with the actual technology. I am fully aware that we share the same phone system and took digital and analogue communications courses in University. I even pointed out that the technology even came into being in the US. The whole problem seems to be with management.
What I am puzzled about is how come American ISP's are defaulting left and right and having their services shut down by suppliers. Why can't these comapnies remember to invoice their customers and pay their bills to their suppliers? Why does DSL cost twice as much and take three times as long to get in the US than it does just north of the border?
This isn't meant as an anti-American statement. I even said that Canada is deploying high-speed internet (and specifically DSL) better than the US despite being higher taxed, over-regulated and less competitive than the US. Generally, Americans don't put up with the same kind of bull from government and corporations that Canadians do, and it's time that Canadians put their feet down (ever try to fly Air Canada (AKA Aeroflot of the West) lately, or deal with the CCRA when your internet purchase gets held up at the border because the customs agent wants to know 50 more pages of stuff about what's inside the box?).
At the risk of offending fellow Canadians, maybe it's time for Americans to stop being so "Canadian" when it comes to high speed internet access (and some other high-tech areas)and take these companies to task. They've been quite successful in the past in other industries (Through a combination of consumers voting with dollars and government persuasion, domestic cars are of much better quality for example)...
DSL isn't dead everywhere
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In the grand scheme of things, DSL technology is FAR from dead. Where I'm at (Calgary, Canada) the situation is opposite. DSL from several providers matches and often exceeds Cable (provided by Shaw@home which has a monopoly on the Calgary cable market). My next door neighbour has Cable internet, I have DSL. I get THREE TIMES the transfer rate and significantly better ping times (Even when we ping other computers on Shaw's network!).
I've also had better uptime than the typical Shaw customer--more than once in the past year, the @home servers crap out or Shaw decides to shut down service to perform some upgrade (usually starting on Friday so as to piss off the enitre neighbourhood for an entire weekend). This is a vicious cycle--Shaw slows down to less than 20 Kbyte/sec, the service goes out for the weekend and comes back at 50-150 Kbyte/sec then degrades slowly to under 20, rinse, repeat... This isn't a problem for "1%" of cable users here--I think it's more like 15% to 50%.
I'm sure that living in the extremely fast growing suburban Calgary is a factor, and that in more established areas the service from Shaw is a bit more consistent. But the fact is, "massive growth in subcriber base" seems to have a HUGE effect on performance, and DSL is consistent, reliable and provides better service than cable(well--except maybe for Telus)--at least where I live. Therefore, I expect Cable and DSL to duke it out for awhile yet (Covad might have financial problems, but @Home and the cable companies also have many problems of their own).
What is wrong with US DSL?
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Why does a country with a leading role in technology and the global economy have such a hard time deploying and marketing the latest innovations? DSL seems to be the latest in a long line of examples.
Think about it. Television, video tape, transistors and microchips all came to being in the US, and non-US companies seem to grab it and run with it. How many TVs, VCRs and video cameras are actually MADE in the US? Next to none (I think there is maybe ONE picture-tube facility in the US--if they haven't already been shut down). A lot of semiconductor manufacturing occurs in the US, but a relatively HUGE amount occurs in Asia (an earthquake in tiny Taiwan didn't cause RAM prices to jump for nothing).
Now we have DSL. The technology leader here is the US, but communications companies can't get their crap together to provide decent service. Even in Canada (which has even bigger problems exploiting home-grown innovation IMHO) we are doing it better. I've had DSL for over a year--I consistently get 1 to 2 Mbps inbound and nearly that outbound and have had less than ONE DAY of outage (in Alberta). In Ontario, some people are even contemplating switching from the horribly inconsistent Rogers@home cable service to DSL because of server outages. Ironically the problems with Cable internet in Canada have a lot to do with screw-ups by the US-based @Home network.
What is Canada doing different than the US for there to be such a difference? I think the US has to be at least as capable (if not more) to provide the best of the best to it's consumers. If private companies can do it with DSL in Canada (despite its higher taxes and over-regulation which gets in the way sometimes), why can't the US? I've always had the impression that the US was much more free enterprise and that US consumers don't put up with the crap Canadians and others would take.
Of course, the telecommnications industry in Canada was privatised and deregulated in a much different manner than in the US. Does anyone have an insight into how come the telephone companies and DSL ISPs are so screwed up in the US?
When you're as big as Microsoft, you don't bother checking if the trademark or domain you want is already taken. You just apply for it, and if there is a conflict with someone else you do one of two things:
1) You dangle the fattest golden carrot in front of the current owner. This works well--especially when the owner of the said domain or trademark is a startup like X-box technologies that basically has no revenue to speak of.
2) If option 1 doesn't work, you instead spend the millions on parasitic lawyers specialising in IP law--I'm sure RIAA has a few to spare. (I hope I didn't offend too may lawyers out there--I'm sure there has to be some non-parasitic lawyers that know something about IP). These lawyers will help you argue that the trademark is invalid because it is a generic word or phrase (like Internet Explorer) or that the current holder has not made sufficient use of the trademark in business (X-box Technologies might fit here). The argument might rely on shaky interpretation of the law, but even if they lose, Microsoft will probably have bled the little pipsqueak troublemakers dry with legal bills.
Actually, I'm quite surprised it took this long for someone to protest about the X-Box name I would have thought someone out there would have made an "X-box" X-windows terminal in the last many years. Anyways, maybe a more appropriate name would simply be "Microsoft Game System". It would fit in very nicely with the boring, tasteless product names they use for their OS and business software (Windows, Office, Word, Access, BOB, Internet Explorer...).
...as long as you aren't looking for top-of-the-line. If you are a hobbyist or student, there are tools for you to use.
You mention Altera. If you are a student you can get the evaluation board (for 5k to 70k gate FPGAs--maybe larger now because the technology is so rapidly advancing) for very cheap--like $200--and it is still a good deal less even if you are not a student.
Furthermore, you can freely download (as in beer, not in speech--the source is closed) the basic MAX+PLUS and Synopsis software for use with the evaluation board. This is perfect for the hobbyist. In fact, these boards are ideal for implementing simple microprocessor cores plus added custom logic, and certainly beats wire-wrapping a bunch of 74hct-series gates and registers and stuff.
The good thing is that FPGA technology is moving so incredibly fast that eventually many more hobbyists could get involved. Plus, VHDL is supposed to be modular, so even if you can't synthesize an Athlon on your FLEX70K you could test and synthesize modules that perform some of its functions at a slower speed. Then if a bunch of hobbyists combined their modules they could come up with one or more open-source VHDL-based microprocessor designs.
If companies with the resources or money to access fabs like the design, with open source they would have ZERO design costs. This isn't so far fetched--I'd say that the Pentium III and PowerPCs could be the Windows 2000 and Mac OS X of the hardware world, and it could be possible to do a Linux or BSD of the hardware world as well. Sure, fab costs are very high, but for a project of that scale, engineering/design costs also play a gigantic factor. I think it could result in lower cost, more interoperable hardware designs. The only resistance is the closed attitude of chip makers (even their support software is closed source despite being downloadable on the net--wouldn't Altera gain a huge amount of support and boost sales of their FPGAs if they allowed the open-source community to develop software tools for their products?)
This Sega/Pace set-top box looks like a pretty hasty shift in marketing direction. I'm surprised Sega and Pace even allowed the press to broadcast pictures of such an obvious example of a preliminary slap-together prototype. It totally reminds me of the Consumer Electronics Shows of the eighties, when they were flooded with home PC companies trying to stake a claim in the emerging market.
Back then, there was no concern for compatibility (or even quality it sometimes seemed). The big players at CES (Commodore, Atari, Tandy, TI--interestingly Apple and IBM often avoided these shows) always had busy booths and the odd new machine, but were notorious for making vapourous product announcements (I think they all said at one point that they would have built-in voice-synthysis and modems in at least one of their models. Of course, none of that ever surfaced). Smaller players (Coleco, Mattel, SpectraVideo, etc) were even worse. They would show non-functioning display prototypes (the first Coleco ADAM display was a hollow plastic case locked behind smoked glass--the working demo was powered by bare boards hidden elseware). Sometimes they would change their product announcements (pricing or specifications) to take the steam out of a competitors product launch (when Atari and Coleco announced the prices and specs of their new products, SpectraVideo actually SOLDERED MORE RAM CHIPS into their prototype machines--right on the trade show floor!).
With such unsophisticated marketing strategies it is no wonder they all bit the dust. Now I see Sega and Pace doing the same thing--besides touting an early prototype, they allowed one of their marketroids to make a "cryptic, possibly un-informed" product announcement. They also left many very important questions unanswered or ambiguous (Who the hell is going to serve up the games? How do I pay for them? Is there a menu system for managing games the hard drive will store or what? Time-limit on storage of games? Use of encryption technology?). Given the current state of tech-stocks and the fact many tech writers remember the roller coaster ride of the 80's home computer industry and the more recent dot-com fiasco, Sega runs the risk of looking desperate and indecisive (are they a hardware or software company or both, and who is going to design and produce their platform in the future?).
I agree with you on one point, but disagree with you on another.
I think it is important that set top boxes made with contemporary off-the-shelf technology become popular. That way, artificially restricted technology will not become the de-facto standard. For example, MP3 has no inherent content-control capability and produces acceptable sound quality. It has become extremely popular and attempts by SDMI to squish it out of existence will be met with consumer resistance. With DATs, mini-discs and DVDs parasitic recording and movie distribution companies got their grubby hands on the technology before "unprotected" formats gained popularity. These technologies are now marginalised or convoluted with content-control schemes like CSS. Content-control is not a feature--it is a pain in the ass and will always be met with resistence if it is introduced into an already large market.
What I take issue with is the fact you tainted your argument for no reason with your personal prejuduces. No all people in the southern states are evangelical bigots who wish to restrict free speech. Nor do all Christians (evangelical or otherwise) harbour intolerant attitudes towards those with differing opinions or even aree with the opinions of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Conservatives and Christians to not have a monopoly on intolerant views and actions, and it is just as bad to supress or denigrate Christans as it is to do the same to Jews, Islamics, feminists or whoever else.
For the record, I live in Canada, not the southern states. I am not an evangelical Christian. I my political views are best described as libertarian--not socailly conservative. Thus, I am not personally offended by your comments. I just hate it when political retoric taints a rational argument. It happens a lot on/. and it leave a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, it is well within your right to write it even if I don't like it. If it gets worse, I'll just stop visiting this web site...
For a set-top sized box, I would use the NLX form factor. This is an industry standard by the same people responsible for ATX, but it's better. All desktops should be NLX because ATX REALLY SUCKS for anything but towers. The only (very unfortunate) drawback is that NLX seems to be harder to find despite being superior to micro/mini ATX for compact systems.
NLS motherboards are about 20 by 25-30 cm (8 by 10 or 11 inches). They have no slots and an edge connector on one side that plugs into the slot of an acocmpanying riser card. PCI cards plug in horizontally--parallel to the motherboard.
Many NLX cases (and industrial racks) allow the motherboard to be removed by loosening 2 thumbscrews. To add DIMMs, you can pull out the motherboard out COMPLETELY without removing ANY cards or cables--sometimes without even opening the case! Yeong-Yang makes a pretty little VCR-sized NLX case. NLX desktop cases are compact, quiet and easy to maintain (No, I don't sell them. I just think they are neat.)
As for the NLX motherboards, they usually come with matching riser cards. Asus, Gigabyte or Intel should have them, although they are not as common as ATX and may cost a bit more. The rest is just normal commodity hardware (TV tuner/capture, DVD player, huge hard drive etc.).
I have been thinking of building such a system for a year or two now. Maybe someone else will try now...
Whoa...Piloting a Jet is less challenging than coding?! Coding x86 assembler maybe. Airline pilots work long hours and if they screw up they can kill hundreds of people along with themselves. Of course they deserve a six figure salary! Joe Blow VB/Java/Perl coder hardly has more responsibility than that, and I'd say $50,000 (especially US$) is fair and generous compensation.
I'm sure there are more senior technical people who work on critical safety systems that warrant a six figure salary, but that's only a fraction of the techies out there.
As for pilots being unionised--their jobs are deemed quite important, so if the nation's economy is disrupted too much they'll just get canned anyways. Think back to the Reagan days...
I believe Unions as they exist today in North America are obsolete. Labour relations should be more co-operative than confrontational, and from my observations "professional" unions (teachers, nurses and so on) have hindered those professions. They are not regarded as professional occupations in the same way managers and engineers are (although they definitely should be), and that has to do with the sometimes unprofessional, teamsters-style strategies employed by sometimes self-interested union leaders.
I boldly predict that nothing significant will change in the next four years from what it has been like in the last eight in the US. The presidential race was basically a tie and the president was untimately picked by judges and lawyers. Congress and the senate are just as divided. No matter who they picked for president, in such a close race there are valid arguments on BOTH sides questioning the validity of the election.
Because of the dead heat in government and questions of the legitimacy of the presidency, if Bush II does anything dramatic either way it will spell crisis. For at least two years he will tread lightly and swing wherever the polls say public opinion is going and hope that in 2002 more Republicans will be voted in. Until then (at the very least), things will idle on in the same directionless manner as they always have. I don't agree with Nader on everything, but he's right that Democrat or Republican, there is absolutely nothing different that matters between the two.
I personally think that such a close government will be good for the US--it will be harder for them to accomplish anything and the less the government does the better. The only thing that will change is the type of corporate whoring that will occur--the Clinton pandered to big recording and motion picture studios with the DMCA and looked the other way with the AOL-Time-Warner deal despite their hard-line stance against Microsoft. Bush is likely to be influenced by oil and heavy industry.
This will continue beyond four years (whether Bush is there or not) if Americans remain apathetic and ignorant of politics. As for Katz's assertion that Bush will bring politics and morality into the scientific realm, that is precisely how his own opinion is formed. Whether or not I share Bush's viewpoint, it is vitally important that science and technology be guided by morality. Unfortunately it has been under political influence for as long as I can remember already.
What I cannot believe is that such an attitude exists in a supposedly forward-thinking internet forum such as Slashdot. But I suppose if the goal is to post troll and flamebait messages it doesn't mean this is the author's actual opinion.
Slashdot is a global forum. The USA is not the world, and not everything interesting or new happens in the USA. For example, wireless technology is big now. Leaders in wireless include famous big companies such as Eriksson, Nokia, Philips, Nortel and newcomers like RIM and WiLAN. NONE of them are based in the USA.
The US is also not the best at everything. DSL in Alberta, Canada is faster, more widely available and more reliable than in California, USA (home of Silicon Valley of all places!). In Calgary, new wired neighbourhoods are being developed. Some of the best in communication technology seems to originate in large, sparsely-populated Canada.
The USA is also NOT the place to be if you want the latest in small, powerful consumer electronics. Not since the days of Atari and Coleco has ANYTHING big in the home videogame industry been available to Americans first. I could go on but I've more than made my point.
As for taking what you like, it was recently reported that the value of acquisitions made by Canadian companies of US ones exceeded that of US companies buying Canadian ones. Also, Canada will stop sending its people to see US doctors as soon as the US stops bussing needy pensioners to Canada to get their prescription drugs.
OK you're right--I'm complaining about both. I think elections Canada messed up the voting system with the permanent list etc, and that Canada needs to re-think it's electoral system (purely first-past-the-post, non-fixed election dates, non-elected senate and so on). I also think the electoral system is more important than mechanics (the voting system--whether we mark an X, punch out chads or press a button on a terminal). Interesting links though. It's discouraging that the Liberals associated direct democracy with Day's social conservatism--I'm not socially conservative at all and the idea really appeals to me...
I wouldn't be so hasty to brag about our superior Canadian electoral procedures. We have nothing to brag about. The government in the US and many European countries are far more democratic and accountable than our system (your comments Sound like typical Liberal arrogance to me;-)
First of all, I agree that nothing beats marking an X on a piece of paper for clarity at this point. If it ain't broke don't fix it. However, we Canadians have this "permanent electors list" we have to register on. Since 1996 electoral officers no longer do full enumerations--they simply scrape the data from income tax, vehicle registration and so on to do yearly updates and the onus is on each person to be sure the info is accurate.
In the last election (a snap election nobody was really prepared for--not even the winning Liberals) the Permanent Electors List proved to be a complete disaster. Working on an election campaign I discovered that OVER 60 PERCENT of eligable voters were NOT registered only days before the election in some polls. I live in a new neighbourhood in the suburbs and NOBODY came around to do a selective enumeration. Elections Canada couldn't even figure out what riding I was in until two weeks into the campaign (eventually they split my neighbourhood in half--arbitrarily--by postal code)! On election day, some polls opened late and there were lineups at others. Post-election analysis revealed that an estimated 1 MILLION people never registered at all (and thus never voted). There were thousands of dead people and non-citizens registered to vote as well!
Furthermore, electoral boundaries are not adjusted often enough and the rules are complicated. As a result, some areas are extremely under-represented due to large population growth since the last census (Metro Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver drastically so). The make-up of parliament is thus not properly rep-by-pop.
Combine this confusion with voter apathy and a vicious and negative campaign and you get the lowest voter turnout in 100 years! By most estimates (accounting for unregistered voters) only 59% to 62% voted--not so long ago (before the permanent List) it was over 70%. Canada also uses the British-style "first past the post" system, where the candidate with the most votes wins even if there are more than two and the winner gets less than 50%--and there are four major parties (each with a differnet regional base as well as different ideology). Therefore the Liberals won a majority government with just over 40% of the vote. With 60% participation that means because 24% to 25%--LESS THAN 1 IN 4 VOTERS--determined which party would govern and who would be PM (and the PM has WAY more power and influence in Canada than the president has in the US). In my opinion it is no exaggeration that Mexico is now more democratic than Canada. It is sad to see such an advanced, peaceful and proud nation slide into a political oligarchy.
I'm not a luddite--I think that when thought through and applied propely that modern technology must be into the electoral process. More important than that however is to introduce reforms to the process to make people's votes count more (preferrential voting or proportional representation perhaps) and to encourage people to get out and vote (both in Canada and the US)--preferrably without resorting to forcing them to by law and harsh penalties.
I'm not sure how deeply you are involved in the technical aspects of your co-generation facility, but I must say that the statement that your entire emissions control runs on NT is probably not completely true. I don't dispute that your operating and engineering control workstations and perhaps other components of your DCS might be NT powered. However, the very important parts at the "front line" of the control system have no Microsoft code at all.
PC-based controllers most often use a customised, hard-real-time replacement NT Kernel. In the case of the controllers used in the Ovation system, architecturally they are pretty much the same as a PC (Probably a Pentium-100 to 133 with 8-32MB RAM. I Thing GE Fanuc or Modicon or someone has something like that too), but they run a custom RTOS, NOT Windows NT and NOT Solaris. Your systems also probably make use of Allen-Bradley PLCs, which while can take instruction from an NT-based control PC, do not depend on a controlling PC to operate.
It's been a few years since I've been in the control room of a generation facility and I'm sure NT has improved to the point that it can play a bigger role, but I bet that even today, the intricacies of start-up and shut-down sequences are NOT handled by NT-based PCs. I am aware that every important system in a generating plant has two or more layers of redundancy. I am unaware, however, of a completely NT/Commodity PC-based control system that offers true "bumpless" failover to a hot-standby. If there is such a beast, I'd be very interested in seeing it.
As to the comment that if your emissions control system goes down the plant goes down. I'm sure it would. But say some catastrophe were to take out all your NT worksatations (that can happen--remote as it might be). Without those important NT machines, how would the plant go about a safe, controlled shutdown? Probably with the assistance of a lot of embedded controllers, PLCs and so on. I'm not saying Windows NT is not to be found in important functions of a power plant. I'm saying that neither it NOR ANY OTHER non-real-time, commodity-PC-based operating system (yes that includes Linux--except perhaps the hard-real-time Linux some day) ever has a direct connection to systems that are "life-or-death" important. You might "run" the plant using NT workstations, but you probably "CONTROL" it with more specialised hardware and software.
The folowing is no exaggeration. There are EXACTLY ZERO power plants--nuclear, or otherwise--in North America that run their critical systems on Microsoft products. This is for several reasons:
1. Microsoft does not make a HARD REAL-TIME OS. For critical systems this is essential, because timing of critical tasks cannot be interrupted by non critical tasks such as switching operator screens or animating cursors and icons. You are more likely to see QNX or something similar in a power plant.
2. Microsoft waives all responsibility for death, injury or serious financial loss due to bugs in their software--REGARDLESS of it's use--in it's standard EULA. "No warranty, expressed or implied" and all that crap. Specifically they state that Windows and it's apps are not suitable for critical medical, aerospace and utility applications. So much for paying for "accountability and liability". If your CANDU goes China Syndrome because of a Microsoft BSOD you can't sue Bill OR his company because they warned you. Similarly if a bank loses your money or the government your tax return they cannot sue Microsoft either. Nobody should depend on Microsoft for accountability--they offer NONE. What they offer is for-a-fee technical support and the fact they are a relatively old, stable company that can offer those services and periodic upgrades for the forseeable future.
3. Microsoft is simply not willing to provide the support that mission critical systems demand. In the typical high-priced, ultra-stable critical systems the source is usually closed, but what you pay for is one-on-one support. If a bug is discovered, the company will send an engineer to look at it and the company will even write a patch to fix your particular problem ASAP. No waiting weeks to months for Service Pack 2 or Hotfix Q286745 or whatever.
4. The most critical of systems don't even rely on PC technology or commodity hardware at all. Even if all the "Critial" PCs crashed, the power plant would not shut down or blow up. It would idle along, all safety systems intact. The operators couldn't adjust any setpoints until the PCs came online, but the current setpoints would be in place. Safety and other ultra-critical systems rely on old but dependable technology used in your typical embedded systems. The continents power systems do not rely on PCs at all. They rely on little $2000 Z80-based PLCs and RTUs, or even electromechanical relays pneumatic or hydraulic systems that have worked well and are subsantially the same as they were in the 1940's and 50's.
Keeping these points in mind, rest assured that planes won't fall out of the sky, there will be no blackouts or hospital patients killed due to a Microsoft Malfunction.
OTOH, you could have your web banking account tapped dry or your Prozac prescription exposed because of un-patched security holes in a Microsoft product (or even poorly secured and administered systems of any sort). THOSE systems rely on closed source, often MS-based commercial software. It's not that closed source is the devils work--it's that Microsoft cannot and will not support their products in a manner REQUIRED for mission critical systems. THAT is what worries me...
Like I said earlier, I did just such a drastic thing with Linux-Mandrake 7.2. It literally went perfectly. I had to reinstall exactly zero components. It runs better than ever now. I guess I was lucky.
At a student job I once had, The IT people had a handful of identical complete Linux installations on bootable JAZ cartridges that they used to set up all the Linux servers. They were all Compaq machines but their motherboards, processors, memory and hard drives varied. Even that worked almost 100% of the time (only two exceptions--occasionally the network driver needed to be changed. Also the odd graphic card wouldn't work with X without changing the X server config/drivers. Neither of these probelms prevented bootup to command-line or even multi-user mode). I guess you can argue changing drivers is partial re-install. I guess we were lucky there too.
Point being, I didn't have to spend time disabling custom hardware, etc. and make sure I got EVERYTHING to avoid BSOD-style mayhem. It's a very pleasant surprise when it goes perfectly but it isn't expecting much for it to not completely crash. Incidentally, Linux does have some parallels to Windows. It is good practice to have an emergency boot disk for both Linux AND Windows--at least to get to a command line to fix config glitches such as your graphic card problem. Another thing I do that probably helped in my situation--if I'm changing the video card I make sure the system is set to boot to runlevel 3. The install image mentioned above was set that way and X only needed to be reconfigured for a few machines. Only once the config for X was proven to work using "startx" would the computer be set to boot to runlevel 5. On my home Mandrake machine I kept the same video card, so runlevel 5 caused no problems at all. Both the TNT and TNT2 cards should be able to handle text the same way. (OTOH, I guess in W2K you don't have much control over runlevels--there's emergency console, command-line and safe mode with and without network etc. But no way to control which services start at which runlevel in what order like in UNIX/Linux, nor is there fine tuned control over drivers--rmmod/insmod/modprobe works great. Kinda sucks if the driver's built into the kernel, but then you can have a "clean/emergency kernal" boot option)
Incidentally, many Linux distros--Mandrake being one of them--allow an upgrade option in the installer that can be used to install over an existing OS. You can also remove, (re)install and upgrade individual packages to a finer degree of control than with Windows.
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Heh..it seems pr0n invades ALL aspects of the Internet -- even the 5K contest.
Check out the Pixxxel Chix. Hilarious! Just think of what "video strip poker" whould look like on the Atari 2600 and you'll get the idea--it's a great spoof of the typical smut site and quite impressive for 5K!
(btw, if it asks for a password type pixel)
So, if someone forgets to lock his car door when he pops into 7-11, his car is "public domain" and it's his loss if a punk "borrows" it for a joyride and smashes it up? According you your logic, since everyone can access the car, everyone can do whatever they want with it. Sure it was stupid to leave the door unlocked, but IT IS STILL ILLEGAL.
Another thought comes to mind. Maybe nobody should list their phone numbers--after all, that DOES make your phone number public domain. I guess that gives everyone the RIGHT to make threatening or lewd phone calls at 3 a.m. to anyone they please--at least by your logic.
This isn't an issue about the content of the site--it could be communistrepublic.org for all I care. Ideally, everyone should be entitled to have their opinion heard, including Aldridge. However, Aldridge went FAR BEYOND free expression and a few troll and flamebait posts. He deliberately and persistently abused his privleges with the intent of hampering someone else's freedom of expression. If he holds strong opinions he could have posted more reasonable counter-arguments within the terms of service. He could have set up an "alternative" site and widely advertised the URL. Whatever his opinion, there are ways of expressing it without harassing others.
This isn't "abstract BS". With rights come responsibility. This is a case of someone acting irresponsibly with the intent of taking away the rights of another.
DSL in Alberta, Canada is typically $35 to $100 per month--and yes, this IS in Canadian dollars (think $22 to $65 per month in US$). If the CO is in your back yard, you can get 4-7 megabits/sec download speed, but more realistically you can expect about 2 Mbps. Upload is about 1 Mbps (and seems to work at that speed as advertised).
My DSL service in Calgary is about $100/month. I subcribe to the "basic business" service, which is maximum 7 Mps/1 Mbps, and includes a fixed 8 IP subnet (one network, one broadcast, one modem/gateway and 5 to use as I please--I only really needed 1 FIXED IP but they didn't give out 1 fixed IP at a time) and no restrictions on running servers (it is specifically advertised as an allowed feature).
I've heard that Alberta is arguably the most advanced juristiction in North America with respect to connectivity (or right up there--it's a very subjective statement). It may be due to the large presence of tech companies like Nortel and soon Motorola. The petroleum industry might also be a big factor in driving the technology (with its SCADA and instrumentation requirements). Other than Alberta, the Ottawa area would probably be comparably connected, as would Vancouver since these areas have a large high-tech economic presence. Anyone from these areas care to comment on the quality and price of their high-bandwidth service?
Well, SOME of the CBC doesn't suck. However, it's news programming has quite an obvious editorial slant (rather socialist and rather easy on the governing federal Liberal party--they don't piss them off lest they lose their funding). And when they are critical of the government, they side with the socialist NDP because they're the only other federal party that supports massive government funding of the CBC--the Alliance, BQ and Conservatives certainly don't have a track record of being CBC sympathisers. In other programming, they tend to be Toronto-centric, since most of management is in that area.
I have some problems with both the CBC AND the implementation of V-chip technology--that problem being that some government-appointed bureaucracy steers both. Ultimately, the government decides what is appropriate content and for whom for both(and don't say the CBC is independent of government influence--the government can manipulate the CBC because it controls its funding).
Society can come to a consensus on what is grossly violent, sexual or profane, but the line gets fuzzy with simple nudity, violence on newscasts or "dialogue" and "situations". A few years ago, the technology was tested in Edmonton. More than a few testers were surprised kids could view violence on the news, but "Mrs. Doubtfire" was deemed to have "adult content--sexual/mature situations" because Robin Williams was cross-dressing. I fear too many parents will rely on V-chip-equipped TVs for parenting, and allow those in government or industry-controlled bodies who make these sort of wacky decisions to to the parenting.
To fix the CBC, it should be modelled after PBS in the US. PBS relies on funding from multiple sources--viewers, corporations, government and so on. It doesn't have to cave to commercial interests, nor is it obligated to represent the government in a less-than-critial light. PBS most definitely DOESN'T suck, and there are a lot of Canadians that donate to northern PBS stations (Boston, Detroit, Seattle, etc). I'm sure they would support a re-invented CBC, as would current CBC viewers. The CBC could then be truly Canadian, not just Liberal-Central-Canadian.
On the problem of kids exposed to TV violence, no technology can do that. The only REAL solution is to acutally start parenting kids again. YOU are the best person to judge what is appropriate for your kids to watch. One thing that stands out for me is that when I watched TV or movies as a young child, one or both of my parents was ALWAYS in the same room--not sometimes--ALWAYS--until I got a bit older. And I wasn't sheltered from much content--if there was violence or a sensitive subject there was discussion about it.
BOTH are examples of something I find distasteful--individuals feeling entitles to have government or some other institution to do everything for them. TV is so commercial, but we don't want to commit our own time or money to change it--lets just let the government use our tax money to "solve" the problem. As a result, we get programming unencumbered by commercial pressures that STILL sucks and is encumbered by governmental pressures. TV violence is corrupting our kids--but supervising EVERYTHING our kids watch? That's so much work--we feel so much more secure with a V-chip to do it for us. The result: kids watch other kids on the TV news shooting up schools and are curious why they can't watch cartoons on Saturday morning, not knowing it was because bugs bunny wore a dress or the coyote mutilated himself again.
Our individual rights and freedoms are not without cost--we pay for them with individual RESPONSIBILITIES. EVERY TIME we let government or anyone else take care of those responsibilities we lose a little freedom. In matters as critical as criminal justice it is worth the loss of a little freedom for basic personal safety--but is "safe" TV programming really worth losing any rights or freedoms over?
Actually, there isn't that much different, because there already ARE "alternatives"--existing PS2 games and games for other platforms which don't rely on on-line validation. Only REALLY GOOD games that were ONLY ON THE PS2 would have a snowball's chance in hell.
Let's outline the facts that make this scheme retarded:
1. You have to be wired to even use the game. What if you are in an RV and went camping, and it started to rain and you wanted to pass the time playing the PS2 you brought along? What if you have a snazzy new PS2-equipped Ford Behemoth Extra-Gigantic edition SUV and you want to keep you kids occupied on a long trip? No can do, without a wireless system with good coverage (non-existant today, at least at reasonable prices). Also, is the connection dial-up? Better supply a toll-free line or validation through a standard internet connection so those in Tumbleweed, Saskatchewan don't have to pay long-distance every time they fire up the ol' PS2...
2. One option allows for the game's ID to be validated against a machine's ID the first time it is used, to restrict the game to one machine. This is SEVERELY retarded, because this disallows legitimate use of the game. What about rentals (a lucrative stream of money)? What happens if you want to lend a game out (NOT so it can be copied), or play it on a friend's PS2 and big TV? You'd have to bring you PS2 with you to play your game! What happens if your PS2 breaks? All your games are useless with a replacement unit, unless you phone or e-mail Sony to re-set your games (I imagine that would have to be annoying and time consuming enough to deter users from abusing the service)
3. How long will Sony support the games? Will Abandonware become useless? Will they assure us that the auth system (and thus the games) will work in 10 to 20 years? (Sound unreasonable? I STILL enjoy playing Ladybug, Venture and so on on my Coleco--19 years after they were made and 10 years after the entire company bit the dust)
4. Privacy. Big Brother Sony can have a list of ALL the PS2's in use in the world and the games that are used on each one, and how often. Enough said.
5. The PS2 works without this cripple-ware scheme with existing games--ie. it is "optional". The only way cripple-ware schemes like this would work would be if the entire industry colluded to make a standard cripple-ware scheme and made it mandatory for ALL NEW SOFTWARE. That would take a long time and could possibly invite trouble from government competition bureaus (aka trust busters). For this idea not to be a complete dud, all software vendors would have to decide it is worth the hassle to accomodate the hassle and lost revenue caused by the issues mentioned above. Otherwise Sony would have to make it a mandatory condition for every PS2 license. Then game makers will say "screw this--we'll stick with the much larger base of PC owners and N64s, and make the snazzy new edition for the X-BOX instead of the PS2"...
This idea definitely has merit to be nominated for the DivX "most retarded corporate idea" award...
A lot of e-commerce solutions work that way--the payment gateway is a CGI interface that requires a dollar amount as one of the parameters, and thus the reason for getting the price from the client. That is why the result page should look calculate the outstanding balance and not complete the purchase unless or until it is zero. FYI there is a solution that doesn't require submitting the price over CGI though...
I worked on an e-commerce site that used a Perl module as the interface to the payment gateway. The customer inputs didn't include price at all. A mod_perl handler (you could use a normal CGI script as well) recovered the price from a database based on SKUs and quantities and submitted it through the transaction object (then sent to the bank encrypted). That way, the payment interface is not directly linked to the customer via CGI. It isn't really much more work.
One thing that wasn't touched on in the feature article was encryption and security. I was a bit dismayed that some "canned" shopping cart solutions advertised that they were "secure" when they were not. The web page and CGI data was of course served up in https, but often credit card data was stored in CLEAR TEXT somewhere on the server, or sent IN THE CLEAR to the payment gateway. One "solution" I saw (geared towards smaller operations) involved collecting credit card info on a secure page, then E-MAILING IT IN THE CLEAR to the merchant to be keyed into their POS terminal manually! WTF is that?
Well, at least I'm comforted in the fact that the tech-stock-tanking will take out some of these losers--the past dot-com-mania fostered a "don't worry, be crappy" attitude. In this climate dot-coms now have to prove their viability and competence.
I'm not a religious person and try my best to have an open mind, and I have to agree. Scientists who use these new facts about our genome to discount scientific creationism are defending their own religion. Evolutionary science is in fact a religious belief of sorts held by athiests (IMHO athieism is a religion--the belief only in one's self--despite the literal definition "without religion"). Just as many devoutly religious people will NEVER believe in evolution, many scientists would never accept creationism as fact, even in the face of convincing evidence. Scientists are human just like everyone else, and as objective as they try to be they are influenced by their personal biases, politics and so on.
Without the ability to travel back in time and witness natural history, BOTH evolution and creationism are theories in the scientific sense. DNA evidence, fossil records and all other scientific evidence has simply made evolution the most credible scientific theory in the opinion of most scientists. "Scientific Creationism" simply uses scientific observations (sometimes the same ones evolutionists use) to advance a different theory.
For example, here is another way of interpreting the FACT that we share most of our DNA with even the lowly bacteria: a supreme being or force would design the universe to be orderly and efficient. DNA molecules--even in bacteria--are miraculously complex and ingeniously designed. If it worked on single-cell life forms, why not build on that for all other life? For the geeks out there think of it like this: what if you were the "supreme coder" and you wrote a killer object with a real cool interface on your first major project? Wouldn't you re-use that object as often as possible in other projects? Wouldn't you inherit its properties and methods in newer, more complex objects? If the design process works in writing programs, why not in creating life?
I am not a "religious, bible-thumping zealot". I am not close minded. There are people on BOTH sides of the debate to which those words apply, just as there are open-minded, critical thinkers on both sides. I accept scientific FACTS without reservation and make up my OWN mind as to the best THEORY they support. I've always had a hard time swallowing the literal biblical account. In fact, even since childhood I've been fascinated with evolutionary biology. Years of casual observation and life experience (including reading about the latest developments in the Genome Project) has made it equally hard to swallow the pure "random-mutation" evolution theory. There is a definite design process, guided by a higher power, going on in nature--from the molecular level up. It is mind-bogglingly complex, but human beings continue to find order in it. My belief is not adhered to blindly or ignorantly and is not related to fundamentalist beliefs (Christian or otherwise).
Maybe people who share those beliefs should avoid the tainted word "creationism" and use a term like "ordered evolution"... Well, maybe not... that would perpetuate the ongoing process of politically sanitizing our language, and I've had enough of terms like "differently abled", "ethnic cleansing", "chair people"...
A minicomuter is definitely is not, but technically--in a way--it is the baby cousin to the TI990/4 minicomputer. The 16-bit 9900 CPU in the TI99/4 and /4a used a subset of the instruction set in the 99000 CPU of the TI990/4 -- I think the link in the article mentions that connection.
Of course in many ways the little 99/4a was a piece of crap. It had a nice BASIC (and really nice extended BASIC option) and obviously a CPU with potential, but came only with a whopping 256 BYTES of system RAM. The rest of it (16K) wasn't actually system RAM--it had to be accessed through IO calls to the 9918a video chip (very very slow). Also, as full-featured as the BASIC was, I think it was DOUBLE INTERPRETED (BASIC->GPL->binary)! What were those engineers smoking and where do I get some of it?
Of course, I think there were RAM expansion cards that were directly addressable by the CPU, which helped immensely. In any case, there are some old machines (micros, minis and mainframes alike) that should be forgotten, or at leased ony remembered for their mistakes...
Yup, sounds typical of what I've heard. Shaw@Home in Calgary is the same--some people sometimes get great speed, but service is inconsistent based on where in the city you line and what time you use it and so on.
An interesting point someone made about Bell/Sympatico DSL likely being more reliable than other ISPs offering DSL. In Alberta, I've had personal experience dealing with the cable company, a telco (Telus HSE--which would be like Bell in Ontario) and an ISP (PSInet/CADVision), and although I found little difference in the speed and relibility between the DSL services(Telus was just slightly less than PSI/CADvision), Telus was MUCH WORSE for customer service (both by phone and through their internet pages--long waiting times and less knowledgeable). That was a big factor for me not going with either Shaw OR Telus in the end...
My argument has NOTHING TO DO with the actual technology. I am fully aware that we share the same phone system and took digital and analogue communications courses in University. I even pointed out that the technology even came into being in the US. The whole problem seems to be with management.
What I am puzzled about is how come American ISP's are defaulting left and right and having their services shut down by suppliers. Why can't these comapnies remember to invoice their customers and pay their bills to their suppliers? Why does DSL cost twice as much and take three times as long to get in the US than it does just north of the border?
This isn't meant as an anti-American statement. I even said that Canada is deploying high-speed internet (and specifically DSL) better than the US despite being higher taxed, over-regulated and less competitive than the US. Generally, Americans don't put up with the same kind of bull from government and corporations that Canadians do, and it's time that Canadians put their feet down (ever try to fly Air Canada (AKA Aeroflot of the West) lately, or deal with the CCRA when your internet purchase gets held up at the border because the customs agent wants to know 50 more pages of stuff about what's inside the box?).
At the risk of offending fellow Canadians, maybe it's time for Americans to stop being so "Canadian" when it comes to high speed internet access (and some other high-tech areas)and take these companies to task. They've been quite successful in the past in other industries (Through a combination of consumers voting with dollars and government persuasion, domestic cars are of much better quality for example)...
In the grand scheme of things, DSL technology is FAR from dead. Where I'm at (Calgary, Canada) the situation is opposite. DSL from several providers matches and often exceeds Cable (provided by Shaw@home which has a monopoly on the Calgary cable market). My next door neighbour has Cable internet, I have DSL. I get THREE TIMES the transfer rate and significantly better ping times (Even when we ping other computers on Shaw's network!).
I've also had better uptime than the typical Shaw customer--more than once in the past year, the @home servers crap out or Shaw decides to shut down service to perform some upgrade (usually starting on Friday so as to piss off the enitre neighbourhood for an entire weekend). This is a vicious cycle--Shaw slows down to less than 20 Kbyte/sec, the service goes out for the weekend and comes back at 50-150 Kbyte/sec then degrades slowly to under 20, rinse, repeat... This isn't a problem for "1%" of cable users here--I think it's more like 15% to 50%.
I'm sure that living in the extremely fast growing suburban Calgary is a factor, and that in more established areas the service from Shaw is a bit more consistent. But the fact is, "massive growth in subcriber base" seems to have a HUGE effect on performance, and DSL is consistent, reliable and provides better service than cable(well--except maybe for Telus)--at least where I live. Therefore, I expect Cable and DSL to duke it out for awhile yet (Covad might have financial problems, but @Home and the cable companies also have many problems of their own).
Why does a country with a leading role in technology and the global economy have such a hard time deploying and marketing the latest innovations? DSL seems to be the latest in a long line of examples.
Think about it. Television, video tape, transistors and microchips all came to being in the US, and non-US companies seem to grab it and run with it. How many TVs, VCRs and video cameras are actually MADE in the US? Next to none (I think there is maybe ONE picture-tube facility in the US--if they haven't already been shut down). A lot of semiconductor manufacturing occurs in the US, but a relatively HUGE amount occurs in Asia (an earthquake in tiny Taiwan didn't cause RAM prices to jump for nothing).
Now we have DSL. The technology leader here is the US, but communications companies can't get their crap together to provide decent service. Even in Canada (which has even bigger problems exploiting home-grown innovation IMHO) we are doing it better. I've had DSL for over a year--I consistently get 1 to 2 Mbps inbound and nearly that outbound and have had less than ONE DAY of outage (in Alberta). In Ontario, some people are even contemplating switching from the horribly inconsistent Rogers@home cable service to DSL because of server outages. Ironically the problems with Cable internet in Canada have a lot to do with screw-ups by the US-based @Home network.
What is Canada doing different than the US for there to be such a difference? I think the US has to be at least as capable (if not more) to provide the best of the best to it's consumers. If private companies can do it with DSL in Canada (despite its higher taxes and over-regulation which gets in the way sometimes), why can't the US? I've always had the impression that the US was much more free enterprise and that US consumers don't put up with the crap Canadians and others would take.
Of course, the telecommnications industry in Canada was privatised and deregulated in a much different manner than in the US. Does anyone have an insight into how come the telephone companies and DSL ISPs are so screwed up in the US?
When you're as big as Microsoft, you don't bother checking if the trademark or domain you want is already taken. You just apply for it, and if there is a conflict with someone else you do one of two things:
1) You dangle the fattest golden carrot in front of the current owner. This works well--especially when the owner of the said domain or trademark is a startup like X-box technologies that basically has no revenue to speak of.
2) If option 1 doesn't work, you instead spend the millions on parasitic lawyers specialising in IP law--I'm sure RIAA has a few to spare. (I hope I didn't offend too may lawyers out there--I'm sure there has to be some non-parasitic lawyers that know something about IP). These lawyers will help you argue that the trademark is invalid because it is a generic word or phrase (like Internet Explorer) or that the current holder has not made sufficient use of the trademark in business (X-box Technologies might fit here). The argument might rely on shaky interpretation of the law, but even if they lose, Microsoft will probably have bled the little pipsqueak troublemakers dry with legal bills.
Actually, I'm quite surprised it took this long for someone to protest about the X-Box name I would have thought someone out there would have made an "X-box" X-windows terminal in the last many years. Anyways, maybe a more appropriate name would simply be "Microsoft Game System". It would fit in very nicely with the boring, tasteless product names they use for their OS and business software (Windows, Office, Word, Access, BOB, Internet Explorer...).
...as long as you aren't looking for top-of-the-line. If you are a hobbyist or student, there are tools for you to use.
You mention Altera. If you are a student you can get the evaluation board (for 5k to 70k gate FPGAs--maybe larger now because the technology is so rapidly advancing) for very cheap--like $200--and it is still a good deal less even if you are not a student.
Furthermore, you can freely download (as in beer, not in speech--the source is closed) the basic MAX+PLUS and Synopsis software for use with the evaluation board. This is perfect for the hobbyist. In fact, these boards are ideal for implementing simple microprocessor cores plus added custom logic, and certainly beats wire-wrapping a bunch of 74hct-series gates and registers and stuff.
The good thing is that FPGA technology is moving so incredibly fast that eventually many more hobbyists could get involved. Plus, VHDL is supposed to be modular, so even if you can't synthesize an Athlon on your FLEX70K you could test and synthesize modules that perform some of its functions at a slower speed. Then if a bunch of hobbyists combined their modules they could come up with one or more open-source VHDL-based microprocessor designs.
If companies with the resources or money to access fabs like the design, with open source they would have ZERO design costs. This isn't so far fetched--I'd say that the Pentium III and PowerPCs could be the Windows 2000 and Mac OS X of the hardware world, and it could be possible to do a Linux or BSD of the hardware world as well. Sure, fab costs are very high, but for a project of that scale, engineering/design costs also play a gigantic factor. I think it could result in lower cost, more interoperable hardware designs. The only resistance is the closed attitude of chip makers (even their support software is closed source despite being downloadable on the net--wouldn't Altera gain a huge amount of support and boost sales of their FPGAs if they allowed the open-source community to develop software tools for their products?)
This Sega/Pace set-top box looks like a pretty hasty shift in marketing direction. I'm surprised Sega and Pace even allowed the press to broadcast pictures of such an obvious example of a preliminary slap-together prototype. It totally reminds me of the Consumer Electronics Shows of the eighties, when they were flooded with home PC companies trying to stake a claim in the emerging market.
Back then, there was no concern for compatibility (or even quality it sometimes seemed). The big players at CES (Commodore, Atari, Tandy, TI--interestingly Apple and IBM often avoided these shows) always had busy booths and the odd new machine, but were notorious for making vapourous product announcements (I think they all said at one point that they would have built-in voice-synthysis and modems in at least one of their models. Of course, none of that ever surfaced). Smaller players (Coleco, Mattel, SpectraVideo, etc) were even worse. They would show non-functioning display prototypes (the first Coleco ADAM display was a hollow plastic case locked behind smoked glass--the working demo was powered by bare boards hidden elseware). Sometimes they would change their product announcements (pricing or specifications) to take the steam out of a competitors product launch (when Atari and Coleco announced the prices and specs of their new products, SpectraVideo actually SOLDERED MORE RAM CHIPS into their prototype machines--right on the trade show floor!).
With such unsophisticated marketing strategies it is no wonder they all bit the dust. Now I see Sega and Pace doing the same thing--besides touting an early prototype, they allowed one of their marketroids to make a "cryptic, possibly un-informed" product announcement. They also left many very important questions unanswered or ambiguous (Who the hell is going to serve up the games? How do I pay for them? Is there a menu system for managing games the hard drive will store or what? Time-limit on storage of games? Use of encryption technology?). Given the current state of tech-stocks and the fact many tech writers remember the roller coaster ride of the 80's home computer industry and the more recent dot-com fiasco, Sega runs the risk of looking desperate and indecisive (are they a hardware or software company or both, and who is going to design and produce their platform in the future?).
Histore really is doomed to repeat itself...
I agree with you on one point, but disagree with you on another.
/. and it leave a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, it is well within your right to write it even if I don't like it. If it gets worse, I'll just stop visiting this web site...
I think it is important that set top boxes made with contemporary off-the-shelf technology become popular. That way, artificially restricted technology will not become the de-facto standard. For example, MP3 has no inherent content-control capability and produces acceptable sound quality. It has become extremely popular and attempts by SDMI to squish it out of existence will be met with consumer resistance. With DATs, mini-discs and DVDs parasitic recording and movie distribution companies got their grubby hands on the technology before "unprotected" formats gained popularity. These technologies are now marginalised or convoluted with content-control schemes like CSS. Content-control is not a feature--it is a pain in the ass and will always be met with resistence if it is introduced into an already large market.
What I take issue with is the fact you tainted your argument for no reason with your personal prejuduces. No all people in the southern states are evangelical bigots who wish to restrict free speech. Nor do all Christians (evangelical or otherwise) harbour intolerant attitudes towards those with differing opinions or even aree with the opinions of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Conservatives and Christians to not have a monopoly on intolerant views and actions, and it is just as bad to supress or denigrate Christans as it is to do the same to Jews, Islamics, feminists or whoever else.
For the record, I live in Canada, not the southern states. I am not an evangelical Christian. I my political views are best described as libertarian--not socailly conservative. Thus, I am not personally offended by your comments. I just hate it when political retoric taints a rational argument. It happens a lot on
For a set-top sized box, I would use the NLX form factor. This is an industry standard by the same people responsible for ATX, but it's better. All desktops should be NLX because ATX REALLY SUCKS for anything but towers. The only (very unfortunate) drawback is that NLX seems to be harder to find despite being superior to micro/mini ATX for compact systems.
NLS motherboards are about 20 by 25-30 cm (8 by 10 or 11 inches). They have no slots and an edge connector on one side that plugs into the slot of an acocmpanying riser card. PCI cards plug in horizontally--parallel to the motherboard.
Many NLX cases (and industrial racks) allow the motherboard to be removed by loosening 2 thumbscrews. To add DIMMs, you can pull out the motherboard out COMPLETELY without removing ANY cards or cables--sometimes without even opening the case! Yeong-Yang makes a pretty little VCR-sized NLX case. NLX desktop cases are compact, quiet and easy to maintain (No, I don't sell them. I just think they are neat.)
As for the NLX motherboards, they usually come with matching riser cards. Asus, Gigabyte or Intel should have them, although they are not as common as ATX and may cost a bit more. The rest is just normal commodity hardware (TV tuner/capture, DVD player, huge hard drive etc.).
I have been thinking of building such a system for a year or two now. Maybe someone else will try now...
Whoa...Piloting a Jet is less challenging than coding?! Coding x86 assembler maybe. Airline pilots work long hours and if they screw up they can kill hundreds of people along with themselves. Of course they deserve a six figure salary! Joe Blow VB/Java/Perl coder hardly has more responsibility than that, and I'd say $50,000 (especially US$) is fair and generous compensation.
I'm sure there are more senior technical people who work on critical safety systems that warrant a six figure salary, but that's only a fraction of the techies out there.
As for pilots being unionised--their jobs are deemed quite important, so if the nation's economy is disrupted too much they'll just get canned anyways. Think back to the Reagan days...
I believe Unions as they exist today in North America are obsolete. Labour relations should be more co-operative than confrontational, and from my observations "professional" unions (teachers, nurses and so on) have hindered those professions. They are not regarded as professional occupations in the same way managers and engineers are (although they definitely should be), and that has to do with the sometimes unprofessional, teamsters-style strategies employed by sometimes self-interested union leaders.
I boldly predict that nothing significant will change in the next four years from what it has been like in the last eight in the US. The presidential race was basically a tie and the president was untimately picked by judges and lawyers. Congress and the senate are just as divided. No matter who they picked for president, in such a close race there are valid arguments on BOTH sides questioning the validity of the election.
Because of the dead heat in government and questions of the legitimacy of the presidency, if Bush II does anything dramatic either way it will spell crisis. For at least two years he will tread lightly and swing wherever the polls say public opinion is going and hope that in 2002 more Republicans will be voted in. Until then (at the very least), things will idle on in the same directionless manner as they always have. I don't agree with Nader on everything, but he's right that Democrat or Republican, there is absolutely nothing different that matters between the two.
I personally think that such a close government will be good for the US--it will be harder for them to accomplish anything and the less the government does the better. The only thing that will change is the type of corporate whoring that will occur--the Clinton pandered to big recording and motion picture studios with the DMCA and looked the other way with the AOL-Time-Warner deal despite their hard-line stance against Microsoft. Bush is likely to be influenced by oil and heavy industry.
This will continue beyond four years (whether Bush is there or not) if Americans remain apathetic and ignorant of politics. As for Katz's assertion that Bush will bring politics and morality into the scientific realm, that is precisely how his own opinion is formed. Whether or not I share Bush's viewpoint, it is vitally important that science and technology be guided by morality. Unfortunately it has been under political influence for as long as I can remember already.
What I cannot believe is that such an attitude exists in a supposedly forward-thinking internet forum such as Slashdot. But I suppose if the goal is to post troll and flamebait messages it doesn't mean this is the author's actual opinion.
Slashdot is a global forum. The USA is not the world, and not everything interesting or new happens in the USA. For example, wireless technology is big now. Leaders in wireless include famous big companies such as Eriksson, Nokia, Philips, Nortel and newcomers like RIM and WiLAN. NONE of them are based in the USA.
The US is also not the best at everything. DSL in Alberta, Canada is faster, more widely available and more reliable than in California, USA (home of Silicon Valley of all places!). In Calgary, new wired neighbourhoods are being developed. Some of the best in communication technology seems to originate in large, sparsely-populated Canada.
The USA is also NOT the place to be if you want the latest in small, powerful consumer electronics. Not since the days of Atari and Coleco has ANYTHING big in the home videogame industry been available to Americans first. I could go on but I've more than made my point.
As for taking what you like, it was recently reported that the value of acquisitions made by Canadian companies of US ones exceeded that of US companies buying Canadian ones. Also, Canada will stop sending its people to see US doctors as soon as the US stops bussing needy pensioners to Canada to get their prescription drugs.
OK you're right--I'm complaining about both. I think elections Canada messed up the voting system with the permanent list etc, and that Canada needs to re-think it's electoral system (purely first-past-the-post, non-fixed election dates, non-elected senate and so on). I also think the electoral system is more important than mechanics (the voting system--whether we mark an X, punch out chads or press a button on a terminal). Interesting links though. It's discouraging that the Liberals associated direct democracy with Day's social conservatism--I'm not socially conservative at all and the idea really appeals to me...
I wouldn't be so hasty to brag about our superior Canadian electoral procedures. We have nothing to brag about. The government in the US and many European countries are far more democratic and accountable than our system (your comments Sound like typical Liberal arrogance to me ;-)
First of all, I agree that nothing beats marking an X on a piece of paper for clarity at this point. If it ain't broke don't fix it. However, we Canadians have this "permanent electors list" we have to register on. Since 1996 electoral officers no longer do full enumerations--they simply scrape the data from income tax, vehicle registration and so on to do yearly updates and the onus is on each person to be sure the info is accurate.
In the last election (a snap election nobody was really prepared for--not even the winning Liberals) the Permanent Electors List proved to be a complete disaster. Working on an election campaign I discovered that OVER 60 PERCENT of eligable voters were NOT registered only days before the election in some polls. I live in a new neighbourhood in the suburbs and NOBODY came around to do a selective enumeration. Elections Canada couldn't even figure out what riding I was in until two weeks into the campaign (eventually they split my neighbourhood in half--arbitrarily--by postal code)! On election day, some polls opened late and there were lineups at others. Post-election analysis revealed that an estimated 1 MILLION people never registered at all (and thus never voted). There were thousands of dead people and non-citizens registered to vote as well!
Furthermore, electoral boundaries are not adjusted often enough and the rules are complicated. As a result, some areas are extremely under-represented due to large population growth since the last census (Metro Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver drastically so). The make-up of parliament is thus not properly rep-by-pop.
Combine this confusion with voter apathy and a vicious and negative campaign and you get the lowest voter turnout in 100 years! By most estimates (accounting for unregistered voters) only 59% to 62% voted--not so long ago (before the permanent List) it was over 70%. Canada also uses the British-style "first past the post" system, where the candidate with the most votes wins even if there are more than two and the winner gets less than 50%--and there are four major parties (each with a differnet regional base as well as different ideology). Therefore the Liberals won a majority government with just over 40% of the vote. With 60% participation that means because 24% to 25%--LESS THAN 1 IN 4 VOTERS--determined which party would govern and who would be PM (and the PM has WAY more power and influence in Canada than the president has in the US). In my opinion it is no exaggeration that Mexico is now more democratic than Canada. It is sad to see such an advanced, peaceful and proud nation slide into a political oligarchy.
I'm not a luddite--I think that when thought through and applied propely that modern technology must be into the electoral process. More important than that however is to introduce reforms to the process to make people's votes count more (preferrential voting or proportional representation perhaps) and to encourage people to get out and vote (both in Canada and the US)--preferrably without resorting to forcing them to by law and harsh penalties.
I'm not sure how deeply you are involved in the technical aspects of your co-generation facility, but I must say that the statement that your entire emissions control runs on NT is probably not completely true. I don't dispute that your operating and engineering control workstations and perhaps other components of your DCS might be NT powered. However, the very important parts at the "front line" of the control system have no Microsoft code at all.
PC-based controllers most often use a customised, hard-real-time replacement NT Kernel. In the case of the controllers used in the Ovation system, architecturally they are pretty much the same as a PC (Probably a Pentium-100 to 133 with 8-32MB RAM. I Thing GE Fanuc or Modicon or someone has something like that too), but they run a custom RTOS, NOT Windows NT and NOT Solaris. Your systems also probably make use of Allen-Bradley PLCs, which while can take instruction from an NT-based control PC, do not depend on a controlling PC to operate.
It's been a few years since I've been in the control room of a generation facility and I'm sure NT has improved to the point that it can play a bigger role, but I bet that even today, the intricacies of start-up and shut-down sequences are NOT handled by NT-based PCs. I am aware that every important system in a generating plant has two or more layers of redundancy. I am unaware, however, of a completely NT/Commodity PC-based control system that offers true "bumpless" failover to a hot-standby. If there is such a beast, I'd be very interested in seeing it.
As to the comment that if your emissions control system goes down the plant goes down. I'm sure it would. But say some catastrophe were to take out all your NT worksatations (that can happen--remote as it might be). Without those important NT machines, how would the plant go about a safe, controlled shutdown? Probably with the assistance of a lot of embedded controllers, PLCs and so on. I'm not saying Windows NT is not to be found in important functions of a power plant. I'm saying that neither it NOR ANY OTHER non-real-time, commodity-PC-based operating system (yes that includes Linux--except perhaps the hard-real-time Linux some day) ever has a direct connection to systems that are "life-or-death" important. You might "run" the plant using NT workstations, but you probably "CONTROL" it with more specialised hardware and software.
The folowing is no exaggeration. There are EXACTLY ZERO power plants--nuclear, or otherwise--in North America that run their critical systems on Microsoft products. This is for several reasons:
1. Microsoft does not make a HARD REAL-TIME OS. For critical systems this is essential, because timing of critical tasks cannot be interrupted by non critical tasks such as switching operator screens or animating cursors and icons. You are more likely to see QNX or something similar in a power plant.
2. Microsoft waives all responsibility for death, injury or serious financial loss due to bugs in their software--REGARDLESS of it's use--in it's standard EULA. "No warranty, expressed or implied" and all that crap. Specifically they state that Windows and it's apps are not suitable for critical medical, aerospace and utility applications. So much for paying for "accountability and liability". If your CANDU goes China Syndrome because of a Microsoft BSOD you can't sue Bill OR his company because they warned you. Similarly if a bank loses your money or the government your tax return they cannot sue Microsoft either. Nobody should depend on Microsoft for accountability--they offer NONE. What they offer is for-a-fee technical support and the fact they are a relatively old, stable company that can offer those services and periodic upgrades for the forseeable future.
3. Microsoft is simply not willing to provide the support that mission critical systems demand. In the typical high-priced, ultra-stable critical systems the source is usually closed, but what you pay for is one-on-one support. If a bug is discovered, the company will send an engineer to look at it and the company will even write a patch to fix your particular problem ASAP. No waiting weeks to months for Service Pack 2 or Hotfix Q286745 or whatever.
4. The most critical of systems don't even rely on PC technology or commodity hardware at all. Even if all the "Critial" PCs crashed, the power plant would not shut down or blow up. It would idle along, all safety systems intact. The operators couldn't adjust any setpoints until the PCs came online, but the current setpoints would be in place. Safety and other ultra-critical systems rely on old but dependable technology used in your typical embedded systems. The continents power systems do not rely on PCs at all. They rely on little $2000 Z80-based PLCs and RTUs, or even electromechanical relays pneumatic or hydraulic systems that have worked well and are subsantially the same as they were in the 1940's and 50's.
Keeping these points in mind, rest assured that planes won't fall out of the sky, there will be no blackouts or hospital patients killed due to a Microsoft Malfunction.
OTOH, you could have your web banking account tapped dry or your Prozac prescription exposed because of un-patched security holes in a Microsoft product (or even poorly secured and administered systems of any sort). THOSE systems rely on closed source, often MS-based commercial software. It's not that closed source is the devils work--it's that Microsoft cannot and will not support their products in a manner REQUIRED for mission critical systems. THAT is what worries me...
Like I said earlier, I did just such a drastic thing with Linux-Mandrake 7.2. It literally went perfectly. I had to reinstall exactly zero components. It runs better than ever now. I guess I was lucky.
At a student job I once had, The IT people had a handful of identical complete Linux installations on bootable JAZ cartridges that they used to set up all the Linux servers. They were all Compaq machines but their motherboards, processors, memory and hard drives varied. Even that worked almost 100% of the time (only two exceptions--occasionally the network driver needed to be changed. Also the odd graphic card wouldn't work with X without changing the X server config/drivers. Neither of these probelms prevented bootup to command-line or even multi-user mode). I guess you can argue changing drivers is partial re-install. I guess we were lucky there too.
Point being, I didn't have to spend time disabling custom hardware, etc. and make sure I got EVERYTHING to avoid BSOD-style mayhem. It's a very pleasant surprise when it goes perfectly but it isn't expecting much for it to not completely crash. Incidentally, Linux does have some parallels to Windows. It is good practice to have an emergency boot disk for both Linux AND Windows--at least to get to a command line to fix config glitches such as your graphic card problem. Another thing I do that probably helped in my situation--if I'm changing the video card I make sure the system is set to boot to runlevel 3. The install image mentioned above was set that way and X only needed to be reconfigured for a few machines. Only once the config for X was proven to work using "startx" would the computer be set to boot to runlevel 5. On my home Mandrake machine I kept the same video card, so runlevel 5 caused no problems at all. Both the TNT and TNT2 cards should be able to handle text the same way. (OTOH, I guess in W2K you don't have much control over runlevels--there's emergency console, command-line and safe mode with and without network etc. But no way to control which services start at which runlevel in what order like in UNIX/Linux, nor is there fine tuned control over drivers--rmmod/insmod/modprobe works great. Kinda sucks if the driver's built into the kernel, but then you can have a "clean/emergency kernal" boot option)
Incidentally, many Linux distros--Mandrake being one of them--allow an upgrade option in the installer that can be used to install over an existing OS. You can also remove, (re)install and upgrade individual packages to a finer degree of control than with Windows.