As others have mentioned, the x86 platform is all but end-of-life. Intel is pushing ia64, well as much as they can when they have to fight their own megahertz matters campaign. If Apple where to jump ship from the AIM PPC alliance they would almost certainly not use x86 class chips.
Some options for Apple if they need to leave Motorola in the dust: 1. The ever popular IBM option. Either continue the PPC roadmap, or start using the POWER series. 2. Start their own fab and take over development themselves, licensing AltiVec from MOT. 3. License AltiVec (or clone it) and farm out fab to a third party like they do most other components. 4. Purchase the now very dead Alpha technology from HP. The Alpha EV8 chip design was almost completed before canning, and would scream past probably all other microporocessors currently in production or design. Of course Alphas are known for their heat output as much as their processing power.
Of all the things Apple could do as far as microprocessor choice, switching to x86 seems to make the lest amount of sense both technologically, and from a marketing perspective. After all, how will Steve do those glorious "shootouts" on stage if both platforms are running the same speed and type of chip? Apple: Our 3GHz P4 runs Photoshop 20% faster than Dell's 3GHz P4. It just doesn't work does it? Will Apple somehow cut a deal with Intel or AMD to get the newest high-speed chips 6 months before everyone else? Doubtful.
Apple keeps it's marketing edge by focusing on performance of end-user tasks, not joining the MHz train.
Is Apple maintaining an x86 port of OS X? Very likely. Does Ford keep a fleet of GM, Toyota and other vehicles around? Very likely. Apple isn't planning on making x86 based Macs any more than Ford is going to start building and selling vevicles with GM frames or parts.
You're missing the point. Apple would not release OSX for Wintel systems, they would put the AMD or Intel chips in Apple designed systems. Without the Apple proprietary ROM code, Mac OS would not boot on another vendor's system.
OCing the beige G3 is a simple matter of setting jumpers on the motherboard. Specifically the jumpers under the red "do not remove, you'll void your warranty" sticker near the front left of the mobo. I got most of my info from the site : www.xlr8yourmac.com. I found the information disjointed and a bit confusing so I created my own chart to overclcok with. You can get my document as an excel worksheet by connecting to the idisk server (cmd-k in OS X 10.1+) http://idisk.mac.com/gerardrj/Public the 'p' in public must be upper case.
You used the term 700Kbaud when I think you ment 700Kbit or 700Kbyte. A buad is a discreet signal on the wire. That signal may represent anywhere from one to 64 bits of information depending on the type of encoding on the wire (voltage, phase, frequency, etc). Hence 700Kbaud may be from 700Kbit to several megabits. Just a minor technical point.
You need to first figure out if you are buying a T1 link with Internet access, or are purchasing Internet access as T1 speeds. It may seem subtle, but there is a big difference. In the first you have a 1.544 Mb/s link (either a true T1, FrameRelay or rate limited connection of some type) to the ISP. They in turn allow you access to their backbone connection. Here your ISP guarantees 1.5MB/s to their POP, but not necessarily to the Internet. In the second you purchase a link (perhaps a T1) and Internet access at a set minimum bitrate. Your ISP guarantees that you get from your site to the Internet at 1.5MB/s. Once past their backbone router though, they aren't responsible for performance.
Also realise that you will never achieve that throughput for payload data. Each 1500 byte packet has a significant amount of wrapper data for all the lower protocols (IP,TCP,Link).
As far as your ISP's claim that they aren't overselling their T3, I don't believe them. I've never encountered a provider that didn't oversell their backbone. I'm not saying it isn't possible.
For testing: All you can really test is your link speed from you to your ISP. If they have an FTP server, transfer a large file and time the throughput. Once you get to the Internet all bets are off for throughput testing. A comprehensive program of throughput testing and ping times from servers across the net at many different times of the day would reveal your maximum Internet throughput, but you never can tell exactly what could be causing any slowdown.
If you suspect your link is slower than it should be, ask whoever owns the local loop to run a circuit test, this will usually be the local telco. Tell them you need a local data loop tested for noise compliance because you are getting low throughput. They should do this for free as basic troubleshooting.
Running on a Beige G3/333 that I've overclocked to: 375Mhz cpu, 75Mhz system bus, 30Mhz PCI. I'm using an ATI 7000 PCI, along with an OrangeLink USB/FW and Apple SCSI card(that drives the boot disk) on PCI. The ATI PCI is driving two displays, so each only has 16MB of video RAM availalbe and I drive them at 1600x1200 each.
The system runs at, but is slightly unstable at the 385/70/35 jumper settings so I'll have to try that to see if the extra 5Mhz of bandwidth on the PCI bus helps at all.
As for performance with the hack: windows sometimes scroll and relocate faster, but I also get random hesitations while dragging windows that I didn't get with QE off. The windows look better when dragged, there's no "tearing" and they seem to float obove the desktop better than with QE off. The genie effect is smoother. The OpenGL screensavers are no faster or smoother than before, not that this should affect them as I understand.
While I'll be the first to say I'd prefer a new G4, I'll also say that this old system is stil quite viable for running OS X on a daily basis. Not for heavy lifting (video clip renderind, 3D modeling/rendering, audio creation, etc). But for surfing, email, coding web apps and the like this is still a nice little box. Beige though it is.
If you start mail forwarding with one of those "Movers Guide" pamphlets, you pay for the service in the junk mail that gets sent to you. Read the back, that book is provided by the Direct Marketer's Association or some such thing. The info you supply is given directly to them as an "opt-in" for junk mail.
This centralized server idea mentioned in the patent will cause spam in one of two ways: The owners will sell spammers access to the list, or perform mailings for them Someone will hack the sytem and download all the addresses Of course by the simple nature of the thing, a simple bot that generates random queries would eventually get you a lot of addresses across many domains. Imagine just sending it millions of queries for random screen names on AOL. MSN and the other major ISPs.
You can not be charged to recieve broadcasts that use the publicly owned airwaves. Broadcasters that use over-the-air transmission must prove (laughably) that they perfom a public good or they can loose the use of the channel. Remember... these broadcasters don't pay any significant fee to use these frequencies. Certainly they don't pay even 1% of the revenue they generate using them.
That said, I recall a company called "Whimetco" or something like that. They used a descrambler to recieve pay content transmitted over a UHF channel. Don't know how that ended, but I suspect it was due to the "free public airwaves" issue.
There will always be some contigent of viewers that don't or can't skip commercials. Some with the ability will watch some of the ads at least some of the time. Those without PVRs or VCRs will simply watch the ads or change the channel as they do now.
I don't see a technology that will universally eliminate the commercials, simply lower their value to the advertisers purchasing that commercial time.
With lower revenues, stations do not need to change their business model, they simply need to adjust their compensation to employees like executves and the actors. There is no reason that the cast of Friends gets like $2M per year except that the statation/network has the cash to pay it. If the stations have less income they will simply lower the exorbatant saleries of the actors to be more in-line with what is available.
Lower outlay for advertisements on television will also mean lower product prices, as we the consumers will no longer have to pay a premium for having products pitched at us in commercials that cost $100,000 per half minute.
But really that's not the case. In most all video applications green is overscanned such that is comprises as much as 2/3 of the incoming data. The remaining pixels are then spread across red and blue in decreasing proportion. Granted for scientific purposes they may use equally balanced color input, ie 1:1:1
I would also argue that this isn't a statistical issue. If you can detect a 1 photon difference across CCD collection wells, then you might only need 255 photons for white (assuming 24 bit color). Again, whether you could split the one photon to three CCDs, or need three incoming photons I don't know. I'd feel asamed, but given the ongoing debate over wave/particle/etc theories I think my ignorance is tolerable. Anyway, that seems to mean that we only need either 255 or 765 photons per image pixel in such a case.
The limitations are all in the quality of the read-out logic of the CCD and the amplifier and A/D once the information is off-chip.
Our government breaks laws every day. YOU (whoever is reading this) broke dozens of laws today. Yet we (the collective population) trust the government, and I'm sure many people trust you, despite your tendency to violate laws.
Law abiding and trustworthy are not a cause/effect or any other sort of mutual relationship. It would be very convienient to label them as such, but it just isn't the case.
I must admit I'm somewhat lost in your assumptions, but aren't you discounting the possibility of amplification of the signal after capture and the standard practice of super-cooling CCDs for better performance? How did you arrive at needing 4096 photons/color/frame, I don't see the support in your message and it doesn't seem to be common sense.
With a high efficiency CCD cooled to around -300F (liquid nitrogen) you can reliably distinguish a single photon hitting a collection well from a cell from those with no photon strikes. So if you where going to do 3CCD imagery with prism splitting, you would need what? Three photons per pixel? Or do photons split in a prism to 1/3 their initial energy so you'd only need one?
I can't recall the exact show now, but I think on TechTV not too long ago they did a segment on a very high speed digital camera that did something like 300,000 frames per second. The think was pretty small, about the size of two towerstyle computer cases.
And it seems the fastest way to get ALL the information in a reliable and accurate way is to set up a meeting and ASK those involved to disclose what went on and to turn over any material.
This is the United States, not the Soviet Union. Bashing in doors should be the last resort.
"I am the great wizard, do not look behind the curtain! There is nothing behind the curtain, keep watching what I show you!"
If you're developing a larger program 5 can be really useful. Especially if you have shelves that you can "stack" montors over each other, three on bottom, two on top. You get one screen dedicated to Finder and system stuff like Email. One screen for the compiler/debugger. These two go on top. The three bottom monitors all display various source code windows. You can have up to 6 full pages of text open across that kind of space.
The BEST flight sim I ever played was on my Q900 with 3 displays and flying F/A18 Hornet from GraphSim. Sadly they've removed multi monitor support last I checked. Flying with REAL side views was just awsome.
MacOS has been Multi-tasking since Apple came out with Multi-Finder in the 80s. More recent versions of the OS 7, 8 and 9 where better multi-taskers, but still used cooperative multi-tasking. Cooperative multitasking IS true multitasking, it just requires programmers to do certain things to cooperate, and is more "chunky" than the current preemptive multitasking that is used in OS X.
Apple's OS X is compliant (mostly) with the new HIG document. Yes, Apple has tossed out most of the old stuff, but reading through the new "Jaguar Human Interface Guidelines" (available on Apple Developer Connection) it makes sense. Times changed and the guidelines evolved. Change hurts, but for the most part it is better I think.
OS X does indeed have multiple monitor support or "monitor spanning". I am in fact running three displays from my OS X machine at this moment. Two displays are connected to my ATI 7000 via PCI, and one display to the built-in video of the machine (this is a Beige G3). The card is driving at 1600x1200, and the built-in at 1280x1024, all in millions of colors. My desktop is roughly 4480x1200! If it wheren't for my use of FW/USB and SCSI disks, I'd have another two displays connected up.
To clarify a point. It's not speed of the memory bus in MHz that's important, it's throughput that counts. Rambus bet the farm that a high clock speed narrow bus would be able to beat the market for some time to come. What has happened is that the wider and slower clocked SDRAM systems have caught up and n some cases surpassed the rambus throughput speeds, and at a lower price than the proprietary RBUS stuff.
All cargo holds on commercial aircraft are pressurized. IF they weren't anything that was sealed would explode at altitude: shampoo bottles, shaving cream, perfume, etc.
Why not just do what the CIA does? Send in a few operatives and abdict the target. Drop him in some third country where the FSB can then "rightfully" arrest him. You could of course skip the third country and just create a good cover story, AKA a bunch of lies the media will gobble up in a heartbeat. That's something else the US Governement is good at.:(
What's more troubling to me is that the selectively apply The Consitution to these people.
All U.S. laws stem from The Constitution, hence charging someone under U.S. law means they are charged under that document. To then turn around and state that those people can't use the same body of laws they are charged under to defend themselves is utterly and completely rediculous.
Lots of talk in here so far about this is good/bad for Education so I'd like to make another point.
I looked at the numbers in the MS press release and thought: $10 spread over 5 years and across all the universities in the country? How lame? $2.3M for this deal ($7.7M left for the remaining 4 years).
Ten million dollars is equivilant to what, perhaps 4 seconds worth of profit from Microsoft? Consider that Microsoft proper currently sits on $40 billion in cash. If they where taxes 30% on that money. $2.3 million would be due in about 2 hours. This doesn't even get in to their temendous cash flow.
Waterloo isn't just a Microsoft whore, it's a damed cheap one at that. I can understand selling out for the money, but they should have at least demanded $50M per year.
Not very long. The current crew has a docked return vehicle at all times. IF they need to they could abandon the station and return to Earth in a matter of about 20 minutes.
The Russians don't have these problems and could lauch a resupply vehicle quickly. Probably in a day or two if necessary. NASA took the expensive, high-tech, complex everything in one basket approach that America loves so much. The Russians continue to produce low cost, simple equipment in large volumes. The Russians also don't get caught up in all the beurocracy that we do.
Leaving the water running slowly is not more wasteful than emptying/refilling the bowls several times.
If it takes 5 gallons of warm tap-water to thaw something. it's no more or less wasteful to use that 5 gallons in "chunks' or at a slow continuous drizzle.
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As others have mentioned, the x86 platform is all but end-of-life. Intel is pushing ia64, well as much as they can when they have to fight their own megahertz matters campaign.
If Apple where to jump ship from the AIM PPC alliance they would almost certainly not use x86 class chips.
Some options for Apple if they need to leave Motorola in the dust:
1. The ever popular IBM option. Either continue the PPC roadmap, or start using the POWER series.
2. Start their own fab and take over development themselves, licensing AltiVec from MOT.
3. License AltiVec (or clone it) and farm out fab to a third party like they do most other components.
4. Purchase the now very dead Alpha technology from HP. The Alpha EV8 chip design was almost completed before canning, and would scream past probably all other microporocessors currently in production or design. Of course Alphas are known for their heat output as much as their processing power.
Of all the things Apple could do as far as microprocessor choice, switching to x86 seems to make the lest amount of sense both technologically, and from a marketing perspective. After all, how will Steve do those glorious "shootouts" on stage if both platforms are running the same speed and type of chip?
Apple: Our 3GHz P4 runs Photoshop 20% faster than Dell's 3GHz P4.
It just doesn't work does it? Will Apple somehow cut a deal with Intel or AMD to get the newest high-speed chips 6 months before everyone else? Doubtful.
Apple keeps it's marketing edge by focusing on performance of end-user tasks, not joining the MHz train.
Is Apple maintaining an x86 port of OS X? Very likely. Does Ford keep a fleet of GM, Toyota and other vehicles around? Very likely. Apple isn't planning on making x86 based Macs any more than Ford is going to start building and selling vevicles with GM frames or parts.
You're missing the point. Apple would not release OSX for Wintel systems, they would put the AMD or Intel chips in Apple designed systems. Without the Apple proprietary ROM code, Mac OS would not boot on another vendor's system.
OCing the beige G3 is a simple matter of setting jumpers on the motherboard. Specifically the jumpers under the red "do not remove, you'll void your warranty" sticker near the front left of the mobo.
I got most of my info from the site : www.xlr8yourmac.com. I found the information disjointed and a bit confusing so I created my own chart to overclcok with.
You can get my document as an excel worksheet by connecting to the idisk server (cmd-k in OS X 10.1+) http://idisk.mac.com/gerardrj/Public
the 'p' in public must be upper case.
You used the term 700Kbaud when I think you ment 700Kbit or 700Kbyte.
A buad is a discreet signal on the wire. That signal may represent anywhere from one to 64 bits of information depending on the type of encoding on the wire (voltage, phase, frequency, etc). Hence 700Kbaud may be from 700Kbit to several megabits.
Just a minor technical point.
You need to first figure out if you are buying a T1 link with Internet access, or are purchasing Internet access as T1 speeds.
It may seem subtle, but there is a big difference. In the first you have a 1.544 Mb/s link (either a true T1, FrameRelay or rate limited connection of some type) to the ISP. They in turn allow you access to their backbone connection. Here your ISP guarantees 1.5MB/s to their POP, but not necessarily to the Internet.
In the second you purchase a link (perhaps a T1) and Internet access at a set minimum bitrate. Your ISP guarantees that you get from your site to the Internet at 1.5MB/s. Once past their backbone router though, they aren't responsible for performance.
Also realise that you will never achieve that throughput for payload data. Each 1500 byte packet has a significant amount of wrapper data for all the lower protocols (IP,TCP,Link).
As far as your ISP's claim that they aren't overselling their T3, I don't believe them. I've never encountered a provider that didn't oversell their backbone. I'm not saying it isn't possible.
For testing: All you can really test is your link speed from you to your ISP. If they have an FTP server, transfer a large file and time the throughput. Once you get to the Internet all bets are off for throughput testing.
A comprehensive program of throughput testing and ping times from servers across the net at many different times of the day would reveal your maximum Internet throughput, but you never can tell exactly what could be causing any slowdown.
If you suspect your link is slower than it should be, ask whoever owns the local loop to run a circuit test, this will usually be the local telco. Tell them you need a local data loop tested for noise compliance because you are getting low throughput. They should do this for free as basic troubleshooting.
Running on a Beige G3/333 that I've overclocked to:
375Mhz cpu, 75Mhz system bus, 30Mhz PCI. I'm using an ATI 7000 PCI, along with an OrangeLink USB/FW and Apple SCSI card(that drives the boot disk) on PCI. The ATI PCI is driving two displays, so each only has 16MB of video RAM availalbe and I drive them at 1600x1200 each.
The system runs at, but is slightly unstable at the 385/70/35 jumper settings so I'll have to try that to see if the extra 5Mhz of bandwidth on the PCI bus helps at all.
As for performance with the hack: windows sometimes scroll and relocate faster, but I also get random hesitations while dragging windows that I didn't get with QE off. The windows look better when dragged, there's no "tearing" and they seem to float obove the desktop better than with QE off. The genie effect is smoother. The OpenGL screensavers are no faster or smoother than before, not that this should affect them as I understand.
While I'll be the first to say I'd prefer a new G4, I'll also say that this old system is stil quite viable for running OS X on a daily basis. Not for heavy lifting (video clip renderind, 3D modeling/rendering, audio creation, etc). But for surfing, email, coding web apps and the like this is still a nice little box. Beige though it is.
It's sort of free in the U.S.
If you start mail forwarding with one of those "Movers Guide" pamphlets, you pay for the service in the junk mail that gets sent to you. Read the back, that book is provided by the Direct Marketer's Association or some such thing. The info you supply is given directly to them as an "opt-in" for junk mail.
This centralized server idea mentioned in the patent will cause spam in one of two ways:
The owners will sell spammers access to the list, or perform mailings for them
Someone will hack the sytem and download all the addresses
Of course by the simple nature of the thing, a simple bot that generates random queries would eventually get you a lot of addresses across many domains. Imagine just sending it millions of queries for random screen names on AOL. MSN and the other major ISPs.
You can not be charged to recieve broadcasts that use the publicly owned airwaves. Broadcasters that use over-the-air transmission must prove (laughably) that they perfom a public good or they can loose the use of the channel. Remember... these broadcasters don't pay any significant fee to use these frequencies. Certainly they don't pay even 1% of the revenue they generate using them.
That said, I recall a company called "Whimetco" or something like that. They used a descrambler to recieve pay content transmitted over a UHF channel. Don't know how that ended, but I suspect it was due to the "free public airwaves" issue.
There will always be some contigent of viewers that don't or can't skip commercials. Some with the ability will watch some of the ads at least some of the time.
Those without PVRs or VCRs will simply watch the ads or change the channel as they do now.
I don't see a technology that will universally eliminate the commercials, simply lower their value to the advertisers purchasing that commercial time.
With lower revenues, stations do not need to change their business model, they simply need to adjust their compensation to employees like executves and the actors. There is no reason that the cast of Friends gets like $2M per year except that the statation/network has the cash to pay it. If the stations have less income they will simply lower the exorbatant saleries of the actors to be more in-line with what is available.
Lower outlay for advertisements on television will also mean lower product prices, as we the consumers will no longer have to pay a premium for having products pitched at us in commercials that cost $100,000 per half minute.
But really that's not the case. In most all video applications green is overscanned such that is comprises as much as 2/3 of the incoming data. The remaining pixels are then spread across red and blue in decreasing proportion.
Granted for scientific purposes they may use equally balanced color input, ie 1:1:1
I would also argue that this isn't a statistical issue. If you can detect a 1 photon difference across CCD collection wells, then you might only need 255 photons for white (assuming 24 bit color). Again, whether you could split the one photon to three CCDs, or need three incoming photons I don't know. I'd feel asamed, but given the ongoing debate over wave/particle/etc theories I think my ignorance is tolerable.
Anyway, that seems to mean that we only need either 255 or 765 photons per image pixel in such a case.
The limitations are all in the quality of the read-out logic of the CCD and the amplifier and A/D once the information is off-chip.
Our government breaks laws every day. YOU (whoever is reading this) broke dozens of laws today. Yet we (the collective population) trust the government, and I'm sure many people trust you, despite your tendency to violate laws.
Law abiding and trustworthy are not a cause/effect or any other sort of mutual relationship. It would be very convienient to label them as such, but it just isn't the case.
I must admit I'm somewhat lost in your assumptions, but aren't you discounting the possibility of amplification of the signal after capture and the standard practice of super-cooling CCDs for better performance? How did you arrive at needing 4096 photons/color/frame, I don't see the support in your message and it doesn't seem to be common sense.
With a high efficiency CCD cooled to around -300F (liquid nitrogen) you can reliably distinguish a single photon hitting a collection well from a cell from those with no photon strikes. So if you where going to do 3CCD imagery with prism splitting, you would need what? Three photons per pixel? Or do photons split in a prism to 1/3 their initial energy so you'd only need one?
I can't recall the exact show now, but I think on TechTV not too long ago they did a segment on a very high speed digital camera that did something like 300,000 frames per second. The think was pretty small, about the size of two towerstyle computer cases.
And it seems the fastest way to get ALL the information in a reliable and accurate way is to set up a meeting and ASK those involved to disclose what went on and to turn over any material.
This is the United States, not the Soviet Union. Bashing in doors should be the last resort.
"I am the great wizard, do not look behind the curtain! There is nothing behind the curtain, keep watching what I show you!"
If you're developing a larger program 5 can be really useful. Especially if you have shelves that you can "stack" montors over each other, three on bottom, two on top.
You get one screen dedicated to Finder and system stuff like Email. One screen for the compiler/debugger. These two go on top.
The three bottom monitors all display various source code windows. You can have up to 6 full pages of text open across that kind of space.
The BEST flight sim I ever played was on my Q900 with 3 displays and flying F/A18 Hornet from GraphSim. Sadly they've removed multi monitor support last I checked. Flying with REAL side views was just awsome.
To correct a few of your statements:
MacOS has been Multi-tasking since Apple came out with Multi-Finder in the 80s.
More recent versions of the OS 7, 8 and 9 where better multi-taskers, but still used cooperative multi-tasking. Cooperative multitasking IS true multitasking, it just requires programmers to do certain things to cooperate, and is more "chunky" than the current preemptive multitasking that is used in OS X.
Apple's OS X is compliant (mostly) with the new HIG document. Yes, Apple has tossed out most of the old stuff, but reading through the new "Jaguar Human Interface Guidelines" (available on Apple Developer Connection) it makes sense. Times changed and the guidelines evolved. Change hurts, but for the most part it is better I think.
OS X does indeed have multiple monitor support or "monitor spanning". I am in fact running three displays from my OS X machine at this moment. Two displays are connected to my ATI 7000 via PCI, and one display to the built-in video of the machine (this is a Beige G3).
The card is driving at 1600x1200, and the built-in at 1280x1024, all in millions of colors. My desktop is roughly 4480x1200! If it wheren't for my use of FW/USB and SCSI disks, I'd have another two displays connected up.
To clarify a point. It's not speed of the memory bus in MHz that's important, it's throughput that counts.
Rambus bet the farm that a high clock speed narrow bus would be able to beat the market for some time to come.
What has happened is that the wider and slower clocked SDRAM systems have caught up and n some cases surpassed the rambus throughput speeds, and at a lower price than the proprietary RBUS stuff.
All cargo holds on commercial aircraft are pressurized. IF they weren't anything that was sealed would explode at altitude: shampoo bottles, shaving cream, perfume, etc.
Why not just do what the CIA does? Send in a few operatives and abdict the target. Drop him in some third country where the FSB can then "rightfully" arrest him. :(
You could of course skip the third country and just create a good cover story, AKA a bunch of lies the media will gobble up in a heartbeat. That's something else the US Governement is good at.
What's more troubling to me is that the selectively apply The Consitution to these people.
All U.S. laws stem from The Constitution, hence charging someone under U.S. law means they are charged under that document. To then turn around and state that those people can't use the same body of laws they are charged under to defend themselves is utterly and completely rediculous.
Just want to correct your .sig:
The Write brothers where not the first to fly a heavier than air machine.
Their claim to fame is: First controlled flight by a human in a powered, heavier than air craft.
Many had "flown" but uncontrolled, many had put up heavier than air gliders, etc...
Lots of talk in here so far about this is good/bad for Education so I'd like to make another point.
I looked at the numbers in the MS press release and thought: $10 spread over 5 years and across all the universities in the country? How lame? $2.3M for this deal ($7.7M left for the remaining 4 years).
Ten million dollars is equivilant to what, perhaps 4 seconds worth of profit from Microsoft? Consider that Microsoft proper currently sits on $40 billion in cash. If they where taxes 30% on that money. $2.3 million would be due in about 2 hours. This doesn't even get in to their temendous cash flow.
Waterloo isn't just a Microsoft whore, it's a damed cheap one at that. I can understand selling out for the money, but they should have at least demanded $50M per year.
Not very long. The current crew has a docked return vehicle at all times. IF they need to they could abandon the station and return to Earth in a matter of about 20 minutes.
The Russians don't have these problems and could lauch a resupply vehicle quickly. Probably in a day or two if necessary.
NASA took the expensive, high-tech, complex everything in one basket approach that America loves so much. The Russians continue to produce low cost, simple equipment in large volumes. The Russians also don't get caught up in all the beurocracy that we do.
I used them about 5 years ago. I think they'd been out for a few years before that.
Slashdot is really behind the times on occasion.
Leaving the water running slowly is not more wasteful than emptying/refilling the bowls several times.
If it takes 5 gallons of warm tap-water to thaw something. it's no more or less wasteful to use that 5 gallons in "chunks' or at a slow continuous drizzle.
Perhaps you should search the re-runs pages at Food-TV. He did an episode for squid entirly "on location" at a beach tailgate party.