Studies (and intuition) show that it is more fuel efficient to fly short trip and refuel, than it is to pack a plane full of fuel for a long trip.
While moving lots of people in a single trip is more efficient, moving lots of fuel is not. It makes me wonder if they'll be able to afford to fly this pig on anything but an ocean route.
I emailed eBay and Yahoo about these guys last week after receiving the scam the first time. It is very convincing - a very nice mockup of the real eBay site.
It's a shame that both eBay and Yahoo make it so hard to find a contact address, and that even after I made the efforts they didn't make an effort in return.
I really hate it when people hack up perfectly good old computers and think it's cool. This guy trashed a pretty rare piece of equipment that can't be replaced. Ugh. But this observation is redundant, and not going to earn me karma. That's ok..
It's just like seeing your favorite vintage machine being parted out on eBay. To me, the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts. Somebody who hacks apart a machine for fun (this article) or profit (eBay) just doesn't understand.
I take my sadistic pleasure in trying to do things on older machines that the Bit Gods just did not intend. Like, try to run DOS 6.2 on a PCjr. (No DOS after 3.3 supported the PCjr.) Or try to run a modern SCSI drive and SCSI CD-ROM on the poor beast. Now, that's retro computing...
Or the guys who build their Apple ][s into monster machines - that's classy.
Or just simply enjoy the machines, as they were originally designed. My Timex Sinclair 1000 was one step above garbage in 1983, but today it's a hoot. Same with C64s, Vics, the dreaded PCjr, etc. Even an old IBM PC 5150 with the 64KB motherboard and the 5 ISA slots can be a hoot. (Yes Virginia, people did use monochrome monitors without graphics, and they like it!)
These RIAA guys are much smarter than I give them credit for. They can't sue the source, so they're going after the corporations that provide the medium. They are effectively trying to make the backbone providers part of their enforcement department.
Couple this with some ISPs blocking well-known file sharing ports, presumably because of bandwidth concerns.
The Feds are doing this kind of thing too... with their packet snatchers.
Very tricky...
We'll see if the backbone providers roll over, or try to argue common carrier status.
was dominated by giant, dehumanizing machines. Machines driven by steam, gears, pistons, etc.
The thing that fascinates me about the film is not that he tried to protray a future dominated by machines, but that the machines that came to pass are so vastly different. We don't labor in front of huge steam engines; our machines are based on information.
And hence the danger of predicting the future based on past history.:-)
The lowest (and supporting) levels of anything should be simple and robust. This gives the higher levels something to build on. This principle applies to computers as well as buildings,
To me, the function of a BIOS is to hide the gory details of the hardware from the OS, and to help the OS bootstrap. Above all else, BIOS must function. Performance and complex functions are secondary. The BIOS needs to live long enough to check for hardware, and tell the OS what's available.
These guys aren't building BIOS anymore. They are building an embedded OS. I'm not sure if we want an embedded OS just for starting the real OS. What ever happened to "Keep It Simple S-tpid!"
If my machine needs an update that badly, let me do it with a floppy (another simple device) and a standard (not USB!) keyboard. This is more secure, more robust, and performs the function needed.
This concept sucks. I want firmware for my hardware, not an embedded OS as well.
That brought back many familiar memories. I lived in Queens NY, which used to have the 212 area code. This was before the great split to 718. Of course back then, we didn't have flat rate billing either - it was something obscene like 10 cents a minute.
My machine was a PCjr with 128KB, single floppy drive, and a Hayes 1200. It's amazing how nice the carrier signal sounded. The Hayes 1200 was a beautiful piece of machinery - brushed aluminum, with the black bezel and red lights. Solidly built, to have the old Western Electric desk telephone sitting on top of it. Once you were connected to a BBS, what machine you had didn't matter - C64s, Apples, Commodores, etc - they all joined the party.
Remember PC Board? FidoNet? Doors? File download areas that were meticulously organized? Downloading ratios? Sysops with "god" power? Sysops that you could actually talk to using a "Page Sysop" function of the software? ANSI graphics?
In 1984 a friend and I (John N.) decided to write our own BBS software. The first verion was horrible, but then again so was the language. (Interpreted BASIC.) The second and third versions were so much better - compiled ZBASIC with embedded assembly code. The software ran for two years on another friends computer. (Nick S.) The phone number was 997-1189. I'll never get that out of my head.
Using BBSs and trying to write one taught me a lot, not just about computers either. It was a great experience - much more personal that the Internet is today.
Up to 31 Linux partitions using the 32 or 64 bit PowerPC kernel, concurrently. Run it on anything from a $20000 model 270 up to the biggest 24 processor machine IBM sells. Available from SuSE, TurboLinux, and RedHat.
It's called a diskless workstation. And for the most part, it has been discredited.
Disks used to be expensive. Not any more.
Disk management used to be a chore. For those of us who are conscientious about it, it still is. For must users, a disk is just something to fill up, and with 40GB drives being common this is hard to do.
Remember quotas on disk systems? Ha.. only my ISP imposes a quota now, because they are cheap. (Well, my employer is trying with my email system, but that's a different issue.)
Remember network computers? More than an X Station, but slightly less than a PC? Ha.. also discredited. A network computer was a glorified diskless workstation. You don't see too many of those being deployed, except in tightly controller environments.
Remember folks, this just isn't for Macs - it runs on big iron too!
For those of you who are utterly confused - this Suse distribution also runs on IBM's AS/400 (new name is iSeries). Yes, you too can have good old RPG (not "role playing game"!) and COBOL apps running side by side with Linux.
When people find out I have a cable modem (relatively high speed too - 1.5Mbps at peak), they say "Wow, you must spend a lot of time online."
And I tell them, no, that's why I have a cable modem. To reduce that time even more.
Life it too short to be surfing, or waiting while surfing. The cable modem actually cut the amount of time I spend online checking stocks, mail, looking for information, etc.
I'm sorry, what following does this guy have? He looks like a crackpot to me.
Right up there with magnetic water softeners.
How long should a patent last?
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 1
It looks like Mundie backed up a bit, and decided to focus on the GPL instead of open source in general. I summarized the article as "Do you want to make money or not?" I also think that I see a legal challenge to the GPL in the not-so-distant future.
But let's talk IP rights for a minute. My employer certainly likes them. People should be able to get monopoly protection for innovation. The bigger question is, for how long?
Patent protection for 15 to 20 years on anything seems really long. When put in the context of software, it is rediculously long. Is it still fashionable to talk in terms of web years? If so, a reasonable software patent length should be three to five years. (Give or take a few years.)
Anything less doesn't give an entity time to profit from the idea. Anything more stifles innovation.
And as always, if people want to give stuff away for free, then more power to them. Their work may need to be registered for the purpose of prior art searches though.
My first introduction to OS/2 was in 1994 when I bought a used 486/66 system with 16MB of RAM, a VL Bus SCSI card, 420MB SCSI hard drive, an ATI Graphics Ultra Pro (VLB), and a brand new IBM 17P monitor to go with it. This was a pretty bitchin setup in June of 1994, and of course, it came with a real operating system on it - OS/2 2.11.
I would blow people's minds with the machine. My father, a computer person with 20 years of experience at the time was in awe. The machine could compile C++ code, telnet (in and out), ftp (in and out), run WordPerfect 6.0 under DOS, and do all sorts of neat tricks - ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It did not thrash it's brain out - it had a real OS paging algorithm, not the nasty hack task switching that Windows 3.1 used. Oh yeah, I forgot that it also had an X-server and it was live on the internet through a SLIP connection.
I did a lot of great work on the machine while working towards my masters degree. OS/2 wasn't without faults, but it was damned good compared to Windows 3.1 Windows 95 was still way off in the future. I saw OS/2 as a personal version of unix; it had all of the libraries and tools that I needed. The compiler (C Set) was world class, and the graphical debugger & performance analysis tools were decent too.
In Dec 1995 I upgraded to Warp 3.0. That partition is still on my machine, one motherboard later, one video card later, two hard drives later, etc. The only thing that hasn't changed on the machine since I installed Warp 3.0 is the sheet metal on the case and the floppy drive. Every other component (including the power supply) has changed at least once. Show me a Windows partition that could survive all of that.
And of course I supported what I used. I worked for IBM which helped a lot, but I still bought the printer drivers for my Epson printer (from Germany), ImpOS/2 for graphics (also from Germany), BackAgain/2 for backup, and other goodies. I had to buy more expensive hardware to ensure that it was supported under OS/2, and I could never use the bundled software that came with my hardware. (SCSI HP 4C scanner, SCSI Zip, SCSI Tape, Matrox Video, etc.) That was a harsh tax to pay, but I believed in the product.
Buying the software that I should be getting for free was an uphill battle though. Eventually I had to install Windows 95 to use some Windows only software. For a long time I dual-booted between the two, usually preferring OS/2. On the same hardware it just seemed to respond much faster than Windows 95. Eventually I acquired more Windows software, and now I use OS/2 when I need to fall back to something old, like it's DOS support or those specific programs that I purchased.
I'm almost entirely on Win 98SE now. OS/2 is still on the machine, and it's up to Warp 3.0, Fixpack 40. I never bothered with 4.0 - IBM was very good about allowing Warp 3.0 users to patch their way into new functions, so I haven't needed to. It's in maintenance mode now - I'd never install something new there.
I can't complain about Win 98SE too much. It's what Windows 95 should have been. It doesn't crash often, and I can do almost anything I need to. But for code development, I avoid it like the plague and I go to Linux.
BTW, that 486/66 was re-incarnated as my Linux firewall box! Good hardware never dies. And thank goodness for Linux, which gave it a use again. It's not a barn burner, but with a 4GB hard drive and 32MB of RAM it's actually a pretty usable little box. I would never attempt that with Windows of any flavor. (I really love that little box.)
I've used every version of DOS from 2.1 up, OS/2, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98 SE, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2K Pro, AIX 3.x and 4.x, OS/400, and Linux in varying amounts over the last 15 years. (I'm not counting the stuff I've only just touched, like Solaris/SunOS, VMS, Ultrix, etc.) My favorite OSes are OS/2, Windows 98, and Linux. Linux has the lead at the moment.
Back to OS/2.. it should be dead. It's on life support because some fairly large customers still have it and need support. It is great at what it does, but it really has been eclipsed by Linux - Linux can provide all of the function of OS/2 (most of it at least), and IBM doesn't control Linux so IBM can't kill Linux by rolling over on it and playing dead. It's a shame that IBM rolled over and played dead a few years ago... I'm still embarassed about IBM's unwillingness to show any backbone against Microsoft.
Unless you've got a real use for that 2GHz processor, anything else is just wasted electricity/heat.
Lets look at my house for a minute - a fairly modest setup. The old 486 running Linux to protect my Windows machines from the 3l33t h4x0rz is idle most of the time. Like as in less than 2% load. I probably should replace it with a little LinkSys box, but I need Linux access every once in a while at home. That would be a great use for a processor whose rate could be increased/decreased dynamically.
Look at my Pentium 233. It's idle most of the time I spend composing email, browsing, and programming. It's only when I want to do a brain sucking compile or image manipulation that I need more juice.
Here at work it's even more wasteful. We've got tons of machines that idle all night, spinning hard drives and running stupid screen savers. Power management is often set incorrectly, and the screen savers can burn quite a bit of needless CPU. Wouldn't it be great if they could slow down and save some juice?
Energy is too cheap.. I wish things were built more like my PalmPilot - the damn thing is so stingy, it's wonderful!
I have an early SCSI Zip 100. It's been flawless. Then again, I don't pound the crap out of it either.
I received the class action lawsuit notification, and read through it carefully. The attorneys in the case are getting 4.7 million in fees. People who may have been affected by real problems are getting the chance to get a rebate on their next Zip drive. Whoop-tee-dooo!
CD-RW has made Zip obsolete. Iomega got off easy on this one.
Note this is the second class action lawsuit against Iomega in regards to Zip drives. The first one was for not deliving promised rebate checks & freebies on time back on the first batches of Zip drives in 1996 and 1997.
I'm running into these problems now. My ancient software collection from the mid 1980's is sitting on 5.25" floppy disks. The low density ones at that.
Modern machines don't have the drives. Older drives are worn and potentially flakey. And the media is aging and suffering from bit rot. (I've had four read errors in about 120 diskettes.) And the media hasn't been made in almost 10 years.
I'm using 'dd' to make images of the diskettes and I'm going to burn the images to CD. The copy-protected diskettes are a real problem though; my old copy program (COPYIIPC) doesn't work on newer hardware, and even if it did, it will make another floppy, not an image I can burn to diskette. Teledisk might work...
I can't even imagine trying to do this with 8" floppies or older tape formats. Most of this data is of little worth now.. it might be interesting in a few years.
Plane was in international airspace. Which do you believe - the lumbering prop plane attacked the fighter, which was supposed to be 60 - 100 kilometers away, or that the fighter buzzed the prop plane and lost?
An apology is an admission of guilt. Without knowing exactly what happened (other than the aftermath), how can one accept blame for what might have happened? Especially when circumstantial evididence points the the much more nimble fighter being at fault?
Enough of this crap already. Why is Katz allowed to post this drivel?
Slashdot Mirror
Studies (and intuition) show that it is more fuel efficient to fly short trip and refuel, than it is to pack a plane full of fuel for a long trip.
While moving lots of people in a single trip is more efficient, moving lots of fuel is not. It makes me wonder if they'll be able to afford to fly this pig on anything but an ocean route.
I emailed eBay and Yahoo about these guys last week after receiving the scam the first time. It is very convincing - a very nice mockup of the real eBay site.
It's a shame that both eBay and Yahoo make it so hard to find a contact address, and that even after I made the efforts they didn't make an effort in return.
PCjr
I really hate it when people hack up perfectly good old computers and think it's cool. This guy trashed a pretty rare piece of equipment that can't be replaced. Ugh. But this observation is redundant, and not going to earn me karma. That's ok ..
...
It's just like seeing your favorite vintage machine being parted out on eBay. To me, the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts. Somebody who hacks apart a machine for fun (this article) or profit (eBay) just doesn't understand.
I take my sadistic pleasure in trying to do things on older machines that the Bit Gods just did not intend. Like, try to run DOS 6.2 on a PCjr. (No DOS after 3.3 supported the PCjr.) Or try to run a modern SCSI drive and SCSI CD-ROM on the poor beast. Now, that's retro computing
Or the guys who build their Apple ][s into monster machines - that's classy.
Or just simply enjoy the machines, as they were originally designed. My Timex Sinclair 1000 was one step above garbage in 1983, but today it's a hoot. Same with C64s, Vics, the dreaded PCjr, etc. Even an old IBM PC 5150 with the 64KB motherboard and the 5 ISA slots can be a hoot. (Yes Virginia, people did use monochrome monitors without graphics, and they like it!)
That IBM gave the world SGML and XML by derivative ....
....
...
...
...
That a lot of useful data exists on IBM mainframes
That EBCDIC doesn't "cleanly" map into Unicode by design like ASCII/UTF-8 does
That this benefits IBM users and customers, not IBM because there is no strategic market position related to new-line characters
That this was a recommendation reached by a group
Let it live and get a life.
Use tiny advertisements in newspapers!
These RIAA guys are much smarter than I give them credit for. They can't sue the source, so they're going after the corporations that provide the medium. They are effectively trying to make the backbone providers part of their enforcement department.
... with their packet snatchers.
...
Couple this with some ISPs blocking well-known file sharing ports, presumably because of bandwidth concerns.
The Feds are doing this kind of thing too
Very tricky
We'll see if the backbone providers roll over, or try to argue common carrier status.
was dominated by giant, dehumanizing machines. Machines driven by steam, gears, pistons, etc.
:-)
The thing that fascinates me about the film is not that he tried to protray a future dominated by machines, but that the machines that came to pass are so vastly different. We don't labor in front of huge steam engines; our machines are based on information.
And hence the danger of predicting the future based on past history.
The lowest (and supporting) levels of anything should be simple and robust. This gives the higher levels something to build on. This principle applies to computers as well as buildings,
To me, the function of a BIOS is to hide the gory details of the hardware from the OS, and to help the OS bootstrap. Above all else, BIOS must function. Performance and complex functions are secondary. The BIOS needs to live long enough to check for hardware, and tell the OS what's available.
These guys aren't building BIOS anymore. They are building an embedded OS. I'm not sure if we want an embedded OS just for starting the real OS. What ever happened to "Keep It Simple S-tpid!"
If my machine needs an update that badly, let me do it with a floppy (another simple device) and a standard (not USB!) keyboard. This is more secure, more robust, and performs the function needed.
This concept sucks. I want firmware for my hardware, not an embedded OS as well.
That brought back many familiar memories. I lived in Queens NY, which used to have the 212 area code. This was before the great split to 718. Of course back then, we didn't have flat rate billing either - it was something obscene like 10 cents a minute.
My machine was a PCjr with 128KB, single floppy drive, and a Hayes 1200. It's amazing how nice the carrier signal sounded. The Hayes 1200 was a beautiful piece of machinery - brushed aluminum, with the black bezel and red lights. Solidly built, to have the old Western Electric desk telephone sitting on top of it. Once you were connected to a BBS, what machine you had didn't matter - C64s, Apples, Commodores, etc - they all joined the party.
Remember PC Board? FidoNet? Doors? File download areas that were meticulously organized? Downloading ratios? Sysops with "god" power? Sysops that you could actually talk to using a "Page Sysop" function of the software? ANSI graphics?
In 1984 a friend and I (John N.) decided to write our own BBS software. The first verion was horrible, but then again so was the language. (Interpreted BASIC.) The second and third versions were so much better - compiled ZBASIC with embedded assembly code. The software ran for two years on another friends computer. (Nick S.) The phone number was 997-1189. I'll never get that out of my head.
Using BBSs and trying to write one taught me a lot, not just about computers either. It was a great experience - much more personal that the Internet is today.
This comment is not lame, despite what the nice web page tells me.
iSeries. (Formerly known as the AS/400).
Up to 31 Linux partitions using the 32 or 64 bit PowerPC kernel, concurrently. Run it on anything from a $20000 model 270 up to the biggest 24 processor machine IBM sells. Available from SuSE, TurboLinux, and RedHat.
"Until there is either an extremely fierce law or just one vender who makes hardware X ..."
Replace hardware with software. Now substitute your favorite big OS vendor. The danger is here already.
Excellent insight on your part. We don't need laws to push silliness on us. We need just one dominant vendor.
It's called a diskless workstation. And for the most part, it has been discredited.
.. only my ISP imposes a quota now, because they are cheap. (Well, my employer is trying with my email system, but that's a different issue.)
.. also discredited. A network computer was a glorified diskless workstation. You don't see too many of those being deployed, except in tightly controller environments.
Disks used to be expensive. Not any more.
Disk management used to be a chore. For those of us who are conscientious about it, it still is. For must users, a disk is just something to fill up, and with 40GB drives being common this is hard to do.
Remember quotas on disk systems? Ha
Remember network computers? More than an X Station, but slightly less than a PC? Ha
Remember folks, this just isn't for Macs - it runs on big iron too!
For those of you who are utterly confused - this Suse distribution also runs on IBM's AS/400 (new name is iSeries). Yes, you too can have good old RPG (not "role playing game"!) and COBOL apps running side by side with Linux.
I doubt it ...
When people find out I have a cable modem (relatively high speed too - 1.5Mbps at peak), they say "Wow, you must spend a lot of time online."
And I tell them, no, that's why I have a cable modem. To reduce that time even more.
Life it too short to be surfing, or waiting while surfing. The cable modem actually cut the amount of time I spend online checking stocks, mail, looking for information, etc.
I'm sorry, what following does this guy have? He looks like a crackpot to me.
Right up there with magnetic water softeners.
It looks like Mundie backed up a bit, and decided to focus on the GPL instead of open source in general. I summarized the article as "Do you want to make money or not?" I also think that I see a legal challenge to the GPL in the not-so-distant future.
But let's talk IP rights for a minute. My employer certainly likes them. People should be able to get monopoly protection for innovation. The bigger question is, for how long?
Patent protection for 15 to 20 years on anything seems really long. When put in the context of software, it is rediculously long. Is it still fashionable to talk in terms of web years? If so, a reasonable software patent length should be three to five years. (Give or take a few years.)
Anything less doesn't give an entity time to profit from the idea. Anything more stifles innovation.
And as always, if people want to give stuff away for free, then more power to them. Their work may need to be registered for the purpose of prior art searches though.
#include "rambling"
.. it should be dead. It's on life support because some fairly large customers still have it and need support. It is great at what it does, but it really has been eclipsed by Linux - Linux can provide all of the function of OS/2 (most of it at least), and IBM doesn't control Linux so IBM can't kill Linux by rolling over on it and playing dead. It's a shame that IBM rolled over and played dead a few years ago ... I'm still embarassed about IBM's unwillingness to show any backbone against Microsoft.
My first introduction to OS/2 was in 1994 when I bought a used 486/66 system with 16MB of RAM, a VL Bus SCSI card, 420MB SCSI hard drive, an ATI Graphics Ultra Pro (VLB), and a brand new IBM 17P monitor to go with it. This was a pretty bitchin setup in June of 1994, and of course, it came with a real operating system on it - OS/2 2.11.
I would blow people's minds with the machine. My father, a computer person with 20 years of experience at the time was in awe. The machine could compile C++ code, telnet (in and out), ftp (in and out), run WordPerfect 6.0 under DOS, and do all sorts of neat tricks - ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It did not thrash it's brain out - it had a real OS paging algorithm, not the nasty hack task switching that Windows 3.1 used. Oh yeah, I forgot that it also had an X-server and it was live on the internet through a SLIP connection.
I did a lot of great work on the machine while working towards my masters degree. OS/2 wasn't without faults, but it was damned good compared to Windows 3.1 Windows 95 was still way off in the future. I saw OS/2 as a personal version of unix; it had all of the libraries and tools that I needed. The compiler (C Set) was world class, and the graphical debugger & performance analysis tools were decent too.
In Dec 1995 I upgraded to Warp 3.0. That partition is still on my machine, one motherboard later, one video card later, two hard drives later, etc. The only thing that hasn't changed on the machine since I installed Warp 3.0 is the sheet metal on the case and the floppy drive. Every other component (including the power supply) has changed at least once. Show me a Windows partition that could survive all of that.
And of course I supported what I used. I worked for IBM which helped a lot, but I still bought the printer drivers for my Epson printer (from Germany), ImpOS/2 for graphics (also from Germany), BackAgain/2 for backup, and other goodies. I had to buy more expensive hardware to ensure that it was supported under OS/2, and I could never use the bundled software that came with my hardware. (SCSI HP 4C scanner, SCSI Zip, SCSI Tape, Matrox Video, etc.) That was a harsh tax to pay, but I believed in the product.
Buying the software that I should be getting for free was an uphill battle though. Eventually I had to install Windows 95 to use some Windows only software. For a long time I dual-booted between the two, usually preferring OS/2. On the same hardware it just seemed to respond much faster than Windows 95. Eventually I acquired more Windows software, and now I use OS/2 when I need to fall back to something old, like it's DOS support or those specific programs that I purchased.
I'm almost entirely on Win 98SE now. OS/2 is still on the machine, and it's up to Warp 3.0, Fixpack 40. I never bothered with 4.0 - IBM was very good about allowing Warp 3.0 users to patch their way into new functions, so I haven't needed to. It's in maintenance mode now - I'd never install something new there.
I can't complain about Win 98SE too much. It's what Windows 95 should have been. It doesn't crash often, and I can do almost anything I need to. But for code development, I avoid it like the plague and I go to Linux.
BTW, that 486/66 was re-incarnated as my Linux firewall box! Good hardware never dies. And thank goodness for Linux, which gave it a use again. It's not a barn burner, but with a 4GB hard drive and 32MB of RAM it's actually a pretty usable little box. I would never attempt that with Windows of any flavor. (I really love that little box.)
I've used every version of DOS from 2.1 up, OS/2, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98 SE, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2K Pro, AIX 3.x and 4.x, OS/400, and Linux in varying amounts over the last 15 years. (I'm not counting the stuff I've only just touched, like Solaris/SunOS, VMS, Ultrix, etc.) My favorite OSes are OS/2, Windows 98, and Linux. Linux has the lead at the moment.
Back to OS/2
You know, I disagree.
.. I wish things were built more like my PalmPilot - the damn thing is so stingy, it's wonderful!
Unless you've got a real use for that 2GHz processor, anything else is just wasted electricity/heat.
Lets look at my house for a minute - a fairly modest setup. The old 486 running Linux to protect my Windows machines from the 3l33t h4x0rz is idle most of the time. Like as in less than 2% load. I probably should replace it with a little LinkSys box, but I need Linux access every once in a while at home. That would be a great use for a processor whose rate could be increased/decreased dynamically.
Look at my Pentium 233. It's idle most of the time I spend composing email, browsing, and programming. It's only when I want to do a brain sucking compile or image manipulation that I need more juice.
Here at work it's even more wasteful. We've got tons of machines that idle all night, spinning hard drives and running stupid screen savers. Power management is often set incorrectly, and the screen savers can burn quite a bit of needless CPU. Wouldn't it be great if they could slow down and save some juice?
Energy is too cheap
I have an early SCSI Zip 100. It's been flawless. Then again, I don't pound the crap out of it either.
I received the class action lawsuit notification, and read through it carefully. The attorneys in the case are getting 4.7 million in fees. People who may have been affected by real problems are getting the chance to get a rebate on their next Zip drive. Whoop-tee-dooo!
CD-RW has made Zip obsolete. Iomega got off easy on this one.
Note this is the second class action lawsuit against Iomega in regards to Zip drives. The first one was for not deliving promised rebate checks & freebies on time back on the first batches of Zip drives in 1996 and 1997.
I'm running into these problems now. My ancient software collection from the mid 1980's is sitting on 5.25" floppy disks. The low density ones at that.
...
.. it might be interesting in a few years.
Modern machines don't have the drives. Older drives are worn and potentially flakey. And the media is aging and suffering from bit rot. (I've had four read errors in about 120 diskettes.) And the media hasn't been made in almost 10 years.
I'm using 'dd' to make images of the diskettes and I'm going to burn the images to CD. The copy-protected diskettes are a real problem though; my old copy program (COPYIIPC) doesn't work on newer hardware, and even if it did, it will make another floppy, not an image I can burn to diskette. Teledisk might work
I can't even imagine trying to do this with 8" floppies or older tape formats. Most of this data is of little worth now
Often repeated, and repeated once again:
Plane was in international airspace. Which do you believe - the lumbering prop plane attacked the fighter, which was supposed to be 60 - 100 kilometers away, or that the fighter buzzed the prop plane and lost?
An apology is an admission of guilt. Without knowing exactly what happened (other than the aftermath), how can one accept blame for what might have happened? Especially when circumstantial evididence points the the much more nimble fighter being at fault?
Enough of this crap already. Why is Katz allowed to post this drivel?
Ok, so this 20 million might be pure bonus money to the Russions.
As a policy issue, is it a good thing to encourage space tourism? That is the broader question that I am trying to ask. If so, at what cost?