Lets see... what was the last major governemnt that:
Tracked information about all its citizens Required you to carry federal identifiation whenever you left the house Required "papers" for any sort of travel outside of your home town
And yet here in 2002, we as a nation seem to be jumping for joy that all these things are being talked about and implimented in our country. Yea, it's all supposedly for national defense, but Hitler started his reign by imposing all those rules and ideas for the good of the country. How far will we take it this time?
Why can't the Fed just look at the easy way out: stop imposing our will on other countries by military force. Just get out of the Middle East and let them fight it out amongst themselves. Problem solved.
I don't much like the "send your application we'll tell you if you can compete" idea. They should judge all entries that show up for competition. I have a strange feeling this isn't so much about competing to see who can build the best human power flying craft, but mora thinly veiled marketing event that they hope to control as much as possible.
I'll bet that the design contraints are there so they can more easily fit the vehicle on a tow-trailer and take it around the country with just a few people as crew. I'll bet the designs are being avaulated for advertising space and visual impact on a crowd rather than functional design.
Then again maybe I've just spend too much time in the presence of marketing companies.
Where is this mythical $600 wintel machine that matches a $1500 (There actually isn't a $1500 model iMac or Power Mac, but a $1399 and $1599 pricepoints respectively) I don't just want the cheapo clone to match memory and HD, but FireWire, video, CDR, case design, included software, etc.
Because Apple charges a premium for larger HDs and RAM. If I purchased a new PowerMac G4 base system, and added my own RAM and drive from a third party, then re-sold if for what Apple would charge for that system with the now upgraded RAM/HD, I would make a tidy profit.
Take the current base system (G4/800 256MB, 40G ATA) priced at $1,600. Apple wants $150 to make that 512MB and $100 to make that 80G On the open market, PC133 RAM goes for $27 for 256MB, an 80G drive $80
Apple wants $1850 for that system (upgraded to 512MB/80G). I could purchase the base system from Apple at full retail, upgrade it and sell it for $1850 and make $143 profit (Plus have a 40G drive left over to sell bare or create a RAID in another system that I sell).
Now throw in a 5% VAR discount and that profit becomes $223 (or about 14.5%).
There would be little to no installation time for the YDL, as they probably use a disk duplicator and the process probably takes about 15 minutes.
No, it's the OmniMax I recall that uses the Imax film format on the domed projection screen. All the standard Imax theaters are just jumbo flat screens. They seem to have found that a large flat screen that covers most of the human perfipheral vision is just as effective as the round screen, but a lot cheaper and simpler to build and to project on to.
No.. the larger size isn't what would be cool. What would be cool is to re-render the Pixar films to be shown in Imax 3D!
I don't think the Imax film reels are large enough to a feature-length film, but I'd certainly pay $20 to go see Toy Story (2), Monsters, Bugs Life, etc.
Any bets as to how long it will be before some lab announces they use atoms to store entire bytes? Their announcement will tell us that instead of that "old-fasioned moving of atoms" to represent 1s and 0s, the new technique changes the electron (or proton) count of an atom to represent up to one full byte of information in the same space. Hmm.... what elements are stable enough at that many charge levels to do such a thing?
I do find it interesting that the access speeds and density of new memory technologies seem to be inversly proportional (and then some). We could probably write to a whole room full of conventional memory in the time it would take to full up a few bytes of this room-sized new memory.
But isn't that 4.7G they quote as capacity the space allowed by the encoding? IE: there's 4.7 of payload available from RSPC payload blocks. I don't think they quote the 4.7G as the RAW capacity of the disks, but the formatted capacity.
All digital music is compressed. The simple act of sampling and digitizing at some arbitrary frequency and bit depth is a form of compression. It's compression by omission. Any TRUE audiophile would not be listening to digital audio, but instead would use high quality analog sources.
Wireless connections are almost always directional at the endpoint, usually using microwave type frequencies. The "wasted" range is something more like 15-30 degrees, not the 359 you stated. It's also possible for the transmitters to be intelligent, such that on clear days they transmit at lower power. They increase power as necessary to cope with atmospheric conditions like snow, rain and dust. In fact, when you order wireless Internet or telephone access you will almost always have a sire survey completed before they let you sign a contract. The survey looks for a spot on your building/property where they have line-of-sight to the
Apple's never had to rely on third party software as part of the operating system core functions before. They'd always been able to test in-house. BTW: there is no god. Commanding your god to bless somtheing seems to mean that you think you know better than it, and means then that you don't actually believe in it anyway. Hyporit religous morons. Keep your beliefs in your pocket, not in the public posting areas.
In fact, having the USPS run Email and have it subjected to the same laws and regulations as standard mail would almost certainly provide you with MORE spam and more headaches.
While you paid 1 penny to send an email, mass mailers would get massive discounts, like 1/10 of a penny. The USPS would be required by law to deliver any mail addressed to you, or any mail vaugly resembling your address. account_owner@domain.com would by law HAVE to be delivered to every email account in the "domain.com" domain. The USPS would sell your email address to mass marketers, and be required to publish your address in a master list that is available to almost anyone who asks for it. Further, the USPS would actively encourage mass mailers to send you bulk advertzing to increase their revenue stream. Email messages would have no ability to be tracked. They would dissapear in to the system, and would usually show up at the proper destination. The contents of your message may have been damaged in transit, or the message unexpectedly delayed for days or weeks. The 1 penny rate would only apply to messages of 1KB in size. Larger messages would be charged extra. Discounts would apply for "media" email that contained images, book transcripts, video, or sound files. The machines that recieve the email would have to be certified by the USPS. If any system failed to meet the approval of the USPS they could confiscate it, or refuse to deliver mail to it.
And the Tandy Color Computer threw in multi-user on a 2Mhz processor and 128K of RAM.
The only reason this article is considered newsworthy today is that programmers have gotten to where they don't care about performance or resource requirements. Programmers today don't consider what library call will be fastest, never mind trying to store toggle flags in a bit instead of and INT. If you want good programs to run at decent speeds and look good on a PDA, then go and hire the people that where writing all those games on the CoCo, Commodore 64, TI -99/4a, Amiga and all those other mid 80s systems. These people made magic with almost nothing for resources. Let them work their assembly language magic for a few months. Then watch jaws drop and listen to people ask "How did you get a 16Mhz CPU to do THAT?!?!"
Yes, I do it all the time on my Nextel i1000+. I regularly type out full english words, sentences and paragraphs without any frustration. Nextel includes T9 text auto-complete with a dictonary of something like 15,000 words. For example:43556 is hello. If there are more words that match, pressing the zero key scrolls through all current possibilities for the word. There is also the option of entering text the old 'multi-tap' way, where hello would be: 4433555555666. You can teach the T9 software words that it doesn't know. I don't know what the limit on learned words is though.
Yes it would be more convienient to have a full keyboard that plugs in to the expansion port, but That would be something else I'd have to take with me.
Re:btw, there is not "dark" side of the moon
on
Back to the Moon?
·
· Score: 2
Wrong on two counts.
As already mentioned by the others, the same hemisphere of The Moon is seen by all of the Earth observers. The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, just as the Earth is slowly becoming tidally locked to The Moon and Sun.
Also there is no "dark side" of The Moon. The entire surface of The Moon all gets Sun light, we Earthlings just never see it so we stupidly call it the dark side. Because of course, the Universe revolves around humanity. It is more appropriately called the far or distant side"
No they are not two different formats. The content is in the same format. The only difference is a few bytes in the disk identifier that mark the region. Saying Region 1 and Region two are different formats is about as effective as saying two idetical doors are of different styles because one as an "enter" sign and the other has an "exit" sign. Both (regions and signs) are artificially imposed limitations on the use of the device.
Well, if you set up the mirror the backup time is essentially 0 since the backup copy is made at the same time the write it done. It would only take 2.66 hrs if you didn't run a RAID and instead did a manual copy to the spare drive on a periodic basis.
But a 20 pack of flopies weigh 13oz without packaging and will not make the $.37 rate class. Sending 20 loose floppies in a large envelope by 1st class US mail: $3.13. Using the "Media Mail" rate you acn get down to $1.45 each pack. I'm too lazy to calculate what it would cost to bulk-ship that many floppies on several pallets via a ground shipping line.
That makes your shipping costs more like $21,737 and $10,070 respectively. I'd imaging you could send the 2.8 tons of floppies via bulk carrier for somewhat less than that.
Others have mentioned backup problems with these large drives and joked about the number of floppies the drive equates to. Assuming my math went okay, here's a list of popular backup media and their estimated time to backup such a beast. What these large drives mean to users is that you can't just buy one drive, as there is no feasable way to back up the entire drive. You'll need to purchase two identical drives and mirror them for backup purposes. While 200BG seems like a lot, you'll need at least 400GB in reality. You can't let all that good prOn get lost in a head crash.
Drive type (Native capacity) (native xfer rate) (time to fill one media) Time to complete a full 200GB backup* (approx media cost)**
DVD-R 4.7G 2.6MB/s (2x write speed) 30 mins per disk 43 disks 21 hrs $43
CD-R 700MB 3.5MB/s (~20x write speed) 20mins per disk 286 disks 4 days $45
Floppy 1.44MB 25K/s 1.5Mins per disk 138889 disks 20 weeks $13,888
*These times assume 100% efficiency. IE: That the next media will be available immediately after the preceeding one is full. I did not allow any time for insert/eject, preperation/formatting or phyisical movement of the media. You would never be able to achieve these times. Perhaps * 1.5 would be more realistic. *For media cost, I used pricewatch and took the lowest price I could find for bulk media. In the case of floppies that was 10/$1. These costs do not reflect the price of the device to write to the media.
PLEASE people... before you say/type "RAID array", please stop to consider what that "A" in RAID stands for. ARRAY. It makes about as much sense as "ATM machine" or "PIN number/code"
So why doesn't Intel just adopt FireWire and make it the standard. Then all MBs will have FW and USB1.1 on board. Then economies of scale can start to take hold and chip prices will drop. I've read that Intel was basically coersced in to supporting USB2 on their chipsets. It seems the only reason it will survive is politics, not superiority in any way.
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Lets see... what was the last major governemnt that:
Tracked information about all its citizens
Required you to carry federal identifiation whenever you left the house
Required "papers" for any sort of travel outside of your home town
And yet here in 2002, we as a nation seem to be jumping for joy that all these things are being talked about and implimented in our country. Yea, it's all supposedly for national defense, but Hitler started his reign by imposing all those rules and ideas for the good of the country. How far will we take it this time?
Why can't the Fed just look at the easy way out: stop imposing our will on other countries by military force. Just get out of the Middle East and let them fight it out amongst themselves. Problem solved.
I don't much like the "send your application we'll tell you if you can compete" idea. They should judge all entries that show up for competition.
I have a strange feeling this isn't so much about competing to see who can build the best human power flying craft, but mora thinly veiled marketing event that they hope to control as much as possible.
I'll bet that the design contraints are there so they can more easily fit the vehicle on a tow-trailer and take it around the country with just a few people as crew. I'll bet the designs are being avaulated for advertising space and visual impact on a crowd rather than functional design.
Then again maybe I've just spend too much time in the presence of marketing companies.
Where is this mythical $600 wintel machine that matches a $1500 (There actually isn't a $1500 model iMac or Power Mac, but a $1399 and $1599 pricepoints respectively)
I don't just want the cheapo clone to match memory and HD, but FireWire, video, CDR, case design, included software, etc.
Because Apple charges a premium for larger HDs and RAM.
If I purchased a new PowerMac G4 base system, and added my own RAM and drive from a third party, then re-sold if for what Apple would charge for that system with the now upgraded RAM/HD, I would make a tidy profit.
Take the current base system (G4/800 256MB, 40G ATA) priced at $1,600.
Apple wants $150 to make that 512MB and $100 to make that 80G
On the open market, PC133 RAM goes for $27 for 256MB, an 80G drive $80
Apple wants $1850 for that system (upgraded to 512MB/80G).
I could purchase the base system from Apple at full retail, upgrade it and sell it for $1850 and make $143 profit (Plus have a 40G drive left over to sell bare or create a RAID in another system that I sell).
Now throw in a 5% VAR discount and that profit becomes $223 (or about 14.5%).
There would be little to no installation time for the YDL, as they probably use a disk duplicator and the process probably takes about 15 minutes.
So the theater can loose another $100M on the iMax version?
No, it's the OmniMax I recall that uses the Imax film format on the domed projection screen.
All the standard Imax theaters are just jumbo flat screens. They seem to have found that a large flat screen that covers most of the human perfipheral vision is just as effective as the round screen, but a lot cheaper and simpler to build and to project on to.
No.. the larger size isn't what would be cool. What would be cool is to re-render the Pixar films to be shown in Imax 3D!
I don't think the Imax film reels are large enough to a feature-length film, but I'd certainly pay $20 to go see Toy Story (2), Monsters, Bugs Life, etc.
Any bets as to how long it will be before some lab announces they use atoms to store entire bytes?
Their announcement will tell us that instead of that "old-fasioned moving of atoms" to represent 1s and 0s, the new technique changes the electron (or proton) count of an atom to represent up to one full byte of information in the same space.
Hmm.... what elements are stable enough at that many charge levels to do such a thing?
I do find it interesting that the access speeds and density of new memory technologies seem to be inversly proportional (and then some). We could probably write to a whole room full of conventional memory in the time it would take to full up a few bytes of this room-sized new memory.
But isn't that 4.7G they quote as capacity the space allowed by the encoding? IE: there's 4.7 of payload available from RSPC payload blocks.
I don't think they quote the 4.7G as the RAW capacity of the disks, but the formatted capacity.
All digital music is compressed. The simple act of sampling and digitizing at some arbitrary frequency and bit depth is a form of compression. It's compression by omission.
Any TRUE audiophile would not be listening to digital audio, but instead would use high quality analog sources.
Wireless connections are almost always directional at the endpoint, usually using microwave type frequencies. The "wasted" range is something more like 15-30 degrees, not the 359 you stated.
It's also possible for the transmitters to be intelligent, such that on clear days they transmit at lower power. They increase power as necessary to cope with atmospheric conditions like snow, rain and dust.
In fact, when you order wireless Internet or telephone access you will almost always have a sire survey completed before they let you sign a contract. The survey looks for a spot on your building/property where they have line-of-sight to the
Apple's never had to rely on third party software as part of the operating system core functions before. They'd always been able to test in-house.
BTW: there is no god. Commanding your god to bless somtheing seems to mean that you think you know better than it, and means then that you don't actually believe in it anyway.
Hyporit religous morons.
Keep your beliefs in your pocket, not in the public posting areas.
In fact, having the USPS run Email and have it subjected to the same laws and regulations as standard mail would almost certainly provide you with MORE spam and more headaches.
While you paid 1 penny to send an email, mass mailers would get massive discounts, like 1/10 of a penny.
The USPS would be required by law to deliver any mail addressed to you, or any mail vaugly resembling your address. account_owner@domain.com would by law HAVE to be delivered to every email account in the "domain.com" domain.
The USPS would sell your email address to mass marketers, and be required to publish your address in a master list that is available to almost anyone who asks for it.
Further, the USPS would actively encourage mass mailers to send you bulk advertzing to increase their revenue stream.
Email messages would have no ability to be tracked. They would dissapear in to the system, and would usually show up at the proper destination. The contents of your message may have been damaged in transit, or the message unexpectedly delayed for days or weeks.
The 1 penny rate would only apply to messages of 1KB in size. Larger messages would be charged extra. Discounts would apply for "media" email that contained images, book transcripts, video, or sound files.
The machines that recieve the email would have to be certified by the USPS. If any system failed to meet the approval of the USPS they could confiscate it, or refuse to deliver mail to it.
And the Tandy Color Computer threw in multi-user on a 2Mhz processor and 128K of RAM.
The only reason this article is considered newsworthy today is that programmers have gotten to where they don't care about performance or resource requirements. Programmers today don't consider what library call will be fastest, never mind trying to store toggle flags in a bit instead of and INT.
If you want good programs to run at decent speeds and look good on a PDA, then go and hire the people that where writing all those games on the CoCo, Commodore 64, TI -99/4a, Amiga and all those other mid 80s systems. These people made magic with almost nothing for resources. Let them work their assembly language magic for a few months. Then watch jaws drop and listen to people ask "How did you get a 16Mhz CPU to do THAT?!?!"
Yes, I do it all the time on my Nextel i1000+. I regularly type out full english words, sentences and paragraphs without any frustration.
Nextel includes T9 text auto-complete with a dictonary of something like 15,000 words. For example:43556 is hello. If there are more words that match, pressing the zero key scrolls through all current possibilities for the word. There is also the option of entering text the old 'multi-tap' way, where hello would be: 4433555555666. You can teach the T9 software words that it doesn't know. I don't know what the limit on learned words is though.
Yes it would be more convienient to have a full keyboard that plugs in to the expansion port, but That would be something else I'd have to take with me.
Wrong on two counts.
As already mentioned by the others, the same hemisphere of The Moon is seen by all of the Earth observers. The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, just as the Earth is slowly becoming tidally locked to The Moon and Sun.
Also there is no "dark side" of The Moon. The entire surface of The Moon all gets Sun light, we Earthlings just never see it so we stupidly call it the dark side. Because of course, the Universe revolves around humanity. It is more appropriately called the far or distant side"
No they are not two different formats. The content is in the same format. The only difference is a few bytes in the disk identifier that mark the region.
Saying Region 1 and Region two are different formats is about as effective as saying two idetical doors are of different styles because one as an "enter" sign and the other has an "exit" sign.
Both (regions and signs) are artificially imposed limitations on the use of the device.
I think you forgot a 5. It's 555,556 (200,000,000KB / 360KB)
That comes out to 206 weeks(48 months or 2 years) ( 555,556 disks / 16 disks/hr)
Well, if you set up the mirror the backup time is essentially 0 since the backup copy is made at the same time the write it done.
It would only take 2.66 hrs if you didn't run a RAID and instead did a manual copy to the spare drive on a periodic basis.
But a 20 pack of flopies weigh 13oz without packaging and will not make the $.37 rate class.
Sending 20 loose floppies in a large envelope by 1st class US mail: $3.13.
Using the "Media Mail" rate you acn get down to $1.45 each pack.
I'm too lazy to calculate what it would cost to bulk-ship that many floppies on several pallets via a ground shipping line.
That makes your shipping costs more like $21,737 and $10,070 respectively. I'd imaging you could send the 2.8 tons of floppies via bulk carrier for somewhat less than that.
Erg. CR-R was off.
time is 3.3 mins per disk, 15 hours total time
Others have mentioned backup problems with these large drives and joked about the number of floppies the drive equates to. Assuming my math went okay, here's a list of popular backup media and their estimated time to backup such a beast.
What these large drives mean to users is that you can't just buy one drive, as there is no feasable way to back up the entire drive. You'll need to purchase two identical drives and mirror them for backup purposes. While 200BG seems like a lot, you'll need at least 400GB in reality. You can't let all that good prOn get lost in a head crash.
Drive type
(Native capacity) (native xfer rate)
(time to fill one media)
Time to complete a full 200GB backup* (approx media cost)**
DLT-8000
40GB 6MB/s
2hrs per tape
5 tapes 10 hrs $200
DVD-R
4.7G 2.6MB/s (2x write speed)
30 mins per disk
43 disks 21 hrs $43
CD-R
700MB 3.5MB/s (~20x write speed)
20mins per disk
286 disks 4 days $45
Floppy
1.44MB 25K/s
1.5Mins per disk
138889 disks 20 weeks $13,888
*These times assume 100% efficiency. IE: That the next media will be available immediately after the preceeding one is full. I did not allow any time for insert/eject, preperation/formatting or phyisical movement of the media. You would never be able to achieve these times. Perhaps * 1.5 would be more realistic.
*For media cost, I used pricewatch and took the lowest price I could find for bulk media. In the case of floppies that was 10/$1. These costs do not reflect the price of the device to write to the media.
PLEASE people... before you say/type "RAID array", please stop to consider what that "A" in RAID stands for. ARRAY.
It makes about as much sense as "ATM machine" or "PIN number/code"
No, most routers don't compress the traffic that traverses them.
So why doesn't Intel just adopt FireWire and make it the standard. Then all MBs will have FW and USB1.1 on board. Then economies of scale can start to take hold and chip prices will drop.
I've read that Intel was basically coersced in to supporting USB2 on their chipsets. It seems the only reason it will survive is politics, not superiority in any way.