This actually reminds me of an old (true) story i heard.
After the falklands war, the RAF were left there (and still are) to, well, just in case. The pilots understandably got a bit bored by doing routine sorties etc., so they tried something.
Out infront of the officers mess was the rocky coast with penguins on it. They started to notice that the penguins did something when a plane went over.
The pilots would fly one way, and the penguins would watch the plane go by. Then they would fly the other, and the penguins did the same. Then the pilots (just to take the piss) would fly into the shore, right over the penguins, who would look up and back so far that they would all fall over.
After a 9 month tour of duty in this sort of place they found a way of entertaining themselves.
uh, no.
a voltage is just a potential difference between two points, this can even be just electrical charge. No flow of current has to be taking place, of course voltage is not just something which flows, it is the means which can cause a current, or transfer of charge.
In short, yes you can have a voltage (potential difference of charge) with no current flowing.
How the fuck do u think lightning works?
Or capacitors for that matter?(especially parallel plate ones)
do E-fields suddenly not exist?
Er, not sure why it's not good for developers (reasons anyone?), but it's VERY good for otehr reasons - more virus and accident proof, plus it boots faster - RISCOS 4 is up and running b4 most x86 boxes are past their BIOS...
ok i must admit there are several times i've completely fucked a riscpc, the been able to just do a ctrl-x-break-del and have it all fine again
yeah i really feel that the thing that let Acorn down was RiscOS. Their architecture was pretty good, but they insisted on keeping the OS in ROM, which i felt was not good for the developer.
Although, they only ever officially pushed the StrongARM to 233MHz, and seemed to stop there for some reason.
I reckon the way Acorn could have saved themselves was by
1.Rewrite RiscOS for multiple processors (use RiscOS for home users and plums only)
2.Update their architecture to support PCI and Multiprocessors (PCI was supported in the Pheobe, but Acorn died before the Pheobe was released)
3.Make their own flavour of UNIX just for these machines (a la IRIX), and target these machines towards the SGI users. (oh, and they would have to put on decent graphics cards for this too.)
I don't think this is very innocent at all. When a company makes the step into complex IC manufacture, that is always a very big jump and large capital investment for them. I think that if M$ have gone this far, they're not really going to stop there.
Also I don't really like the sound of the OS maker manufacturing the processors too: how long will it be until the processors themselves come with a small bit of the windoze/dos code on them in ROM.
"The system has not detected a FAT32 partition on the disk controller. Nice try, sucker. Press any key to retry..."
And we all know how bad M$ is at releasing ANY code to the community. At least with Intel, we get chip specifications for development. I can't see microsoft having those specs in a nice handy.pdf document on their website, do you?
yeah is suppose, but the common user probably won't know about it or care about it if the scanner comes with software which does it all for you without having to go to a URL yourself.
...there's only one problem. That is making your open software the standard.
The standard software is always going to be the software that the sly people selling the barcode reader stick on the CD which ships with it. Those people are going to be the same people who want to do the advertising, and they are always going to try and stick on their own cheesy, smiley software.
Yeah i agree, but I find it with things like DVD's especially. I find that because I know about mpeg'ing and how it works, I can see defective parts of the image. I feel that I have spoilt DVD's for my self because i know so damn much! doh! When i ask other people about it they say the image quality's great and they don't know what im on about.
I think this is one of those few cases where I acually wish I were 'happily dumb'.
There is one main reason why radio networking will not really catch on for big businesses, and that is because of security. With a regular (ethernet for instance) network, there is one fundamental thing a potential 'hacker'(or whatever bad movies are calling them nowadays) needs, which is physical access to the network. Sounds stupid, but its the first obstacle someone has to get past to gain access to the network, which can be quite difficult (believe me:-)). In theory, you could just sit outside the building and cause havoc on the system, and a paranoid clueless sysadmin will probably be shit scared of this.
This is just the second round in the UK cheap internet access wars. The first round was when freeserve came along, offering access with no monthly charge, but access thru an 0845 number. This was how Freeserve got their money, as with 0845, the user's phonebill is charges as local rate, but the company with the phoneline get a percentage of this, in this case Freeserve. So users were paying Freeserve, but indirectly.
Only gullible people really fell for this (including some of my friends:-)), because they fell for all the advertising and the fact that it said 'Free' in the title. Many people ran up HUGE phonebills with this and got very pissed off, at which point i spent much of my time saying 'I told you so...'.
I personally thought that the first completely free service would be backed up by a large company. For instance, I thought that the first to offer this service would be places like banks, who would offer the service if you had an account with them etc., as they are already making money from you out of your business, so their own ISP can afford to make a loss, because they would be backed up by a large company. It turned out this didn't quite happen, instead the phone companies are taking a similar approach.
The third round is going to be with broadband access, and in fact it has already started. This time it's the cable companies (NTL et al with cable modems) vs BT with ADSL. To be honest, BT has already fucked up with the launch of ADSL, but on the other hand, the cable companies have caused problems by banning users from running http and ftp servers on their machines. To some extent that war is still up in the air, but i reckon the cable companies have the edge.
Actually if you have an NTL phoneline like me already (only around £5 a month for a second one), you get completely free access, no matter what your phonebill is.
At the moment I have a BT line, which i use for normal calls, and an NTL line, which is connected 24/7 on an NTL's 0800 dial up line. (for those americans out there, in the UK any 0800 number is free)
lets face it, there are a lot more and cleverer people on our side, than there are on "The Man's" side, so no matter what they and their lawyers try to do, we will always go and set up our own system. "...the geeks will inherit the world..."
Slashdot Mirror
AAARRRGGGHHHH, and just when i'd finished d/ling 7.1!
After the falklands war, the RAF were left there (and still are) to, well, just in case. The pilots understandably got a bit bored by doing routine sorties etc., so they tried something.
Out infront of the officers mess was the rocky coast with penguins on it. They started to notice that the penguins did something when a plane went over.
The pilots would fly one way, and the penguins would watch the plane go by. Then they would fly the other, and the penguins did the same. Then the pilots (just to take the piss) would fly into the shore, right over the penguins, who would look up and back so far that they would all fall over.
After a 9 month tour of duty in this sort of place they found a way of entertaining themselves.
uh, no. a voltage is just a potential difference between two points, this can even be just electrical charge. No flow of current has to be taking place, of course voltage is not just something which flows, it is the means which can cause a current, or transfer of charge. In short, yes you can have a voltage (potential difference of charge) with no current flowing. How the fuck do u think lightning works? Or capacitors for that matter?(especially parallel plate ones) do E-fields suddenly not exist?
ok i must admit there are several times i've completely fucked a riscpc, the been able to just do a ctrl-x-break-del and have it all fine again
Although, they only ever officially pushed the StrongARM to 233MHz, and seemed to stop there for some reason.
I reckon the way Acorn could have saved themselves was by
1.Rewrite RiscOS for multiple processors (use RiscOS for home users and plums only)
2.Update their architecture to support PCI and Multiprocessors (PCI was supported in the Pheobe, but Acorn died before the Pheobe was released)
3.Make their own flavour of UNIX just for these machines (a la IRIX), and target these machines towards the SGI users. (oh, and they would have to put on decent graphics cards for this too.)
Euh, it's already ported, and i run it. It runs on Acorn RiscPC's really well.
yeah i realised i completely missed the point once i hit the submit button, and saw the whole article... d'oh.
There should also be a parallel line with it graphing the amount of sweat on Uncle Bill's forehead.
Also I don't really like the sound of the OS maker manufacturing the processors too: how long will it be until the processors themselves come with a small bit of the windoze/dos code on them in ROM.
"The system has not detected a FAT32 partition on the disk controller. Nice try, sucker. Press any key to retry..."
And we all know how bad M$ is at releasing ANY code to the community. At least with Intel, we get chip specifications for development. I can't see microsoft having those specs in a nice handy .pdf document on their website, do you?
yeah is suppose, but the common user probably won't know about it or care about it if the scanner comes with software which does it all for you without having to go to a URL yourself.
The standard software is always going to be the software that the sly people selling the barcode reader stick on the CD which ships with it. Those people are going to be the same people who want to do the advertising, and they are always going to try and stick on their own cheesy, smiley software.
--- You are a Target Market
great idea: i'm in too. :-)
I think this is one of those few cases where I acually wish I were 'happily dumb'.
I doubt it will take off.
Only gullible people really fell for this (including some of my friends :-)), because they fell for all the advertising and the fact that it said 'Free' in the title. Many people ran up HUGE phonebills with this and got very pissed off, at which point i spent much of my time saying 'I told you so...'.
I personally thought that the first completely free service would be backed up by a large company. For instance, I thought that the first to offer this service would be places like banks, who would offer the service if you had an account with them etc., as they are already making money from you out of your business, so their own ISP can afford to make a loss, because they would be backed up by a large company. It turned out this didn't quite happen, instead the phone companies are taking a similar approach.
The third round is going to be with broadband access, and in fact it has already started. This time it's the cable companies (NTL et al with cable modems) vs BT with ADSL. To be honest, BT has already fucked up with the launch of ADSL, but on the other hand, the cable companies have caused problems by banning users from running http and ftp servers on their machines. To some extent that war is still up in the air, but i reckon the cable companies have the edge.
Great news for all those 56k webserver admins out there!
Actually if you have an NTL phoneline like me already (only around £5 a month for a second one), you get completely free access, no matter what your phonebill is. At the moment I have a BT line, which i use for normal calls, and an NTL line, which is connected 24/7 on an NTL's 0800 dial up line. (for those americans out there, in the UK any 0800 number is free)
lets face it, there are a lot more and cleverer people on our side, than there are on "The Man's" side, so no matter what they and their lawyers try to do, we will always go and set up our own system. "...the geeks will inherit the world..."