Thanks for your reply. I think you've missed a few things over the past couple of decades:
PCs, going back to the first IBM PC, have always been able to run different operating systems, and different operating systems have always been available for them.
MS-DOS "won" on the PC back then because it was cheaper, not because it was better or because it was well-established in the market (it was neither).
Android cannot be the PC of smartphones, because Android is an operating system -- not a hardware platform. Android itself runs on a wide array of stuff, but the stuff it runs on generally can only run Android.
Your analogy is backward -- you've reversed the roles of hardware and software.
What else is in there? What has the corn been treated with? Is it genetically-modified? Is it property of Monsanto? What about that weird white lining on the inside of the steal can? What's in that? Has any of it leeched into my food? What about groundwater contamination from it when it goes to the landfill, or atmospheric contamination if it gets recycled? OMG!
This really blows my mind! (Except it doesn't. I accept it and move on.)
I got my wife the HD2 and she had all sorts of problems with Windows Mobile 6.5, but as soon as I loaded Android on it, she loved the phone.
That, to me, is the most interesting part about what you said: You switched a phone to a completely different operating system. AFAICT, there aren't many devices that make it easy.
But there should be: If a given phone's hardware were no longer tied, hard, to a specific OS, that would enable more consumer choice than anything...and should help keep both hardware and OS vendors on their toes trying to produce the best products they can, respectively.
For instance, I'm reasonably happy with Android. And while I have no idea if Windows Mobile or whatever would suit me better (I try to keep an open mind), I'll never find out, since giving it a fair chance would require different hardware, which means messing with contracts and other bullshit.
I can dual-boot my PC. Why can't I dual-boot my phone?
Have you seen how heavily shielded the cables and connections for PDAs and other PEDs are in US military aircraft?
No, I haven't. And your photo doesn't show me how well-shielded they are, either. For all I know, that cable has no shielding at all.
The size of the connector or cable has nothing to do with shielding. Mil-spec connectors like that are big so that they are durable (and often waterproof), and rated for huge numbers of insertions, and supply proper strain relief for the cable, and...
Your photographic anecdote makes as much sense me saying this:
"Have you seen how heavily shielded the cables and connections for microphones and other small widgets are in stage performance?
That's what you need to keep voice audio from being disrupted according to accepted practice, they've done a lot of testing on that stuff over the last century or so. (Plus, everyone knows that pictures of folks in uniform always helps emphasize a point.)"
Which, of course, is wrong. The wire doesn't need to be anywhere near that big, and the XLR connector is complete overkill, electrically speaking, for a microphone: It's just two wires and a shield, with very low current and voltage. (A trio of Fahnestock clips would work very nearly as well, electrically speaking, and consume little space -- but it's impractical because it wouldn't be durable.)
We use XLR connectors for microphones, because they represent a good balance between durability and size. Likewise, we tend to use big, heavily-insulated wire for stage microphones not because it is electrically necessary or because it is particularly well-shielded (it's generally not), but because it's durable and reliable.
Military connectors are subject to the same reliability/size tradeoff, with generally greater emphasis on reliability (including harsh environments). It's no surprise that the connector/wire coming from that PDA-like device is huge, if it's got more than a handful of conductors: It is, simply, not meant to fail easily.
But again, that doesn't mean that it's particularly well-shielded. It also doesn't mean that it's not particularly well-shielded. The picture doesn't say.
Verizon is not prohibiting tethering. They just don't allow it on their unlimited data phone plan. I hate Verizon as much as the next guy, but how can anybody expect an unlimited unrestricted wireless connection for cheap?
My unlimited "PDA" contract with Verizon does not specify that I cannot use that unlimited transfer for other things. I am not contractually obligated to avoid tethering my phone using third-party applications.
Meanwhile, Verizon's license for 700MHz spectrum does stipulate a number of things, including that they cannot limit the applications that people use.
Is it practical and possible for every single person to use Verizon for all of their Internet needs? No, not right now: There's not enough spectrum available, given their network's layout and abilities. But the issue isn't about physical practicality, but rather about contractual requirements.
Same with these people complaining about cable modem caps. Residential cable service is for residential usage, which follows typical usage patterns. Anybody who wants to feed torrents all day long needs to find out what a full T1 costs.
Anyone saying this needs to remember that, historically, the problem with residential service was the last mile, which is (currently and commonly) a solved problem.
Now that ISPs have plenty of bandwidth available on the last mile, they're being stingy about the infrastructure, even though (with the modern advent of good CDNs and ISP-owned backhauls) that isn't exactly dear these days either.
Meanwhile, I don't need to compare my residential circuit to a T1, because it's an invalid comparison. I'm not buying a lossless, highly-reliable pipe from A to B all for myself -- I'm buying a consumer-grade residential pipe from A to n, which later gets multiplexed (hello! packet switching !=new) with other people exchanging data with n.
And n is, on average, very reachable. But it's non-specific. If I can't get to n=b today, but I can get to n=c, my ISP doesn't care -- their circuit works fine.
With a T1 and its point-to-point nature, it's a contractually-guaranteed certainty that all of the data I send from A will arrive intact, in order, and with consistent latency, at B -- exactly as it was sent.
However, my ability to get data from A to B is a crapshoot with residential service.
You're comparing apples (T1) to road apples (residential broadband).
Why the fuck do people keep bringing up the Power Glove as a Nintendo accessory when it was made by Mattel?
The Power Glove may have been made by Mattel, but it was a device which was only used on the Nintendo. And it was optional, which allows it admission into GP's list of optional gear that failed to gain traction, no matter who made the silly thing.
It was also promoted by Nintendo, perhaps most prominently in the film "The Wizard," which was (in part) a Nintendo product. (Not that this matters to counter the point that you're attempting to raise.)
I think of it like a propane tank for a gas-fired barbeque grill:
It's (usually) cheaper to refill the same tank over and over, but that takes more time, and can only be done at a limited selection of locations. Plus you've got to keep the thing free of rust, have it inspected periodically, and sometimes apply a new coat of paint. Eventually, the tank will fail inspection anyway, and needs replaced.
And while some folks do all that, others just toss their empty tank into the car, and exchange it for a full tank when they do their shopping. It's easy, it's fast, it (usually) costs more, and it's done.
The propane distributor handles details like inspection and painting. They are paid for this with the premium that they charge for the service. I'm sure they make more money on some exchanges than on others, but on average they must do reasonably well or there wouldn't be a propane exchange at every single corner gas station, convenience store, grocery store, and home center in my town. (Of course, large batteries are too costly to handle to make things up in a game of averages, but I'll get to that.)
Back to the topic: It's also easy to analyze batteries The battery in my Dell laptop currently 7 years old, and it has a pretty good idea of the actual power availability that it has (which is not very much). At work, we use dedicated a battery analyzer to rate used battery packs for customers.
It's also possible to design a battery so that it can be repaired. I once saw a gentleman replacing a single failed lead-acid cell in a Pandur. Each cell was containerized, and they were connected together in series with short jumper straps. (I forget it it had 6 or 12 individual 2.1V lead acid cells, but it doesn't matter...)
Combine these three concepts, and you wind up with a battery exchange program which works as follows:
1. The customer pulls in, and wants to exchange the battery in his electric MoonGoblin.
2. The service attendant looks (visually, and electronically) at the condition of the battery and its current state of charge.
3. While this is happening, the driver can select from a range of different batteries, priced differently (and predictably) based on their condition -- which should include new, or nearly new batteries as well as anything else.
4. The battery gets swapped. Money changes hands (more money changes hands when getting a better battery than you came in with). Driver leaves in his MoonGoblin with his new (or at least newly-charged) battery.
5. If warranted, the exchange station will repair a battery that is in poor condition, or send it out to be fixed (depending on their skill and the extent of the repair), but if it is a reasonably good battery it will just be placed back onto the charging rack, re-rated, and exchanged with the next guy.
Here are the problems with my plan that I anticipate folks will be willing to point and laugh at:
First, changing batteries. How the hell is this supposed to be done, exactly? A forklift? A gantry crane? Magic robots? I don't know either, sorry. Argue about something else please.:)
Second, lies and deceit. There is a financial incentive, on all sides, to make batteries appear to be in better condition than they actually are. But the market will sort that out quite well enough, I think: The stations can keep track of individual cars and their exchange habits, so if the ol' MoonGoblin gets hacked by its owner to lie about the condition of the battery, stations will stop doing business with him (databases are cool). This provides a disincentive to counter the incentive for the costumer to lie.
On the other hand, if a station has a tendency to be misrepresenting the batteries they offer, their reputation will keep people away. (On the other hand, the local Department of Weights and Measures will audit them periodically anyway, just like they do with gas pumps and deli scales
It's not so abnormal: Witness modern video cards, with their sometimes-multiple jet-engine fans that are anything but balanced, yet are held in place with a single screw and a card-edge connector.
The vibrations from a hard drive, while having more rotational mass but at least intended to be balanced, seem miniscule to me.
Eggdrop seemed to be unofficially frowned-upon at io.com, but they never really seemed to do much about it (or anything else) unless it was abusive or generated complaints: I know a guy who had set up a crontab to keep eggdrop reasonably awake, and as far as I recall he kept that bot alive for years at $10/month. But that was one bot, on a rather non-contested channel, with a rather cool ISP.
Myself, I used to keep screen sessions active for days, weeks, or months, running ircii, pine, tin, and a bash shell or six at io.com. Later on, especially after they started offering Linux servers, I would spread this across multiple hosts. It didn't seem to impact the system in any way, so nobody ever told me to stop. (Nor should they have.)
It was nice, in dialup days, logging into io.com, issuing a screen -x, and getting back to exactly where I was before. (Their boxen were only rebooted if there was a good reason to do so.)
I used to run a few multi-user boxes, mostly based around 486-ish CPUs with 24-or so megs of RAM. All were tied to T1s. They worked fine, and were very responsive....even with multiple remote X11 sessions running Netscape as a test.
But things were different then: Spam wasn't yet a problem, port 25 was de-facto open for relaying to anything that bothered to try, and Usenet was more about discussion than binaries. Portscans and attack attempts were an occasional curiosity instead of something that happened several times per minute no-matter-what. The net, as a whole, was a friendlier place back then...and it has henceforth grown relatively hostile.
That said, I think you're talking about marketability. I'm not on dialup anymore: I've got a 12/1.5 Mbps pipe into my house with absurdly-good reliability. I've still got my own local *nix hosts, and with my modern multi-core CPUs and the free virtualization tech from numerous sources, multiple concurrent varieties of other *nix are just a few clicks away...and I've got a good UPS to keep things ticking predictably if the power dips for some reason.
So, I don't really care much about having an always-on shell account anymore. And I don't know that anyone with much clue would be interested, either...unless they wanted an Eggdrop bot from a fixed IP, or a massive warez server, or whatever other scary (from a liability standpoint) thing.
And I don't think I'm unique.
There's plenty of market for low-cost shared Web hosting, but other good and relatively giant companies like Dreamhost are fighting hard to keep that as cheap as possible as well, which limits profits.
But if you want to go ahead with it, it does sound fun. Nobody (in well over a decade of being here) has ever emailed me from Slashdot, but if you want to proceed and/or need a hand, give me a shout.
I remember in my BBS days reading about the SJ Games raid by the Secret Service.
And as soon as I discovered local internet access (mostly through a borrowed account on a VAX at a local school), I started giving SJG's io.com $10/month for a shell account.
But it wasn't just a shell: It was a FreeBSD shell, back when Linux was still a toy, and it had an infallible NetApps backend with snapshots for ~ (which is still rare, even in this day of positively cheap disk storage). It was access to a good news spool, when Usenet was still Usenet. It was a short email address, when such things weren't so special. It was an Apache web server, with a few megabytes of disk quota and plenty of slack if you needed more from time to time. AAnd a personalized anonymous FTP server. And a proper dev environment for building your own software from source.
All on a fast T1. (Remember when a T1 was fast, and a Pentium-based FreeBSD box with 32 or 64MB of RAM could host more than 100 concurrent interactive users? You yungin's will say it's impossible, but it worked well.)
And the operators and managers seemed to actually give a shit about their users' needs. There was a sense of community between the users and the folks running the show that I've never seen elsewhere.
Things were different back then. The web was mostly text, Gopher still was useful, I never minded using Lynx as a browser, and the world's former-best music/discography site (cdnow.com) had an extremely functional and fast interface using...telnet.
Back them, if you wanted new dirt on the latest Linux happenings, you'd look at Matt Welsh's page, as there just weren't any others that were worth keeping up with.
I remember Steve Jackson himself writing on io.com's news (which was more of a.plan than a modern blog) about how he'd given every single desktop in his company proper Internet access, and how he (rightly!) suspected that his was one of the first companies to do so.
Eventually, my io.com account was banished due to a copyright complaint from an outside party. But by then I'd already built my own *nix boxen, and a more proper local ISP than the 9600bps VAX/VMS beast had cropped up that was both worthwhile and was feeding me dual-channel ISDN as a favor, so I never bothered to fight the copyright complaint.
But I still remember the IP address for pentagon.io.com (their first, and primary shell server) from way back when: 199.170.88.5. And I still ping "io.com" when troubleshooting network connectivity: It's a fast and easy way to see that DNS works and that packets are making their way to Texas and back.
Interesting, indeed. I can't disagree with anything you said.
But back in context: Does this OCZ device do this sort of selective caching? It seems to me that, in order for it to do so, it'd have to be aware of (at least) the filesystem. That's not so far-fetched, given today's low-cost CPUs and FPGAs (we've had various NICs running Linux available for years now, for instance, to wring out the nth degree of latency), but again: Does it do any of this?
Or is it just a somewhat-larger SSD-based multi-gigabyte caching system of the same sort that common and modern operating systems already supply with RAM caching?
Or is it worse? (I suspect this, but without a product, I can't say...)
You're not using all ten gigabytes of Portal 2 every time you play the game. An intelligent caching scheme would see that you're reading a lot of data from a contiguous section of disk, and copy more stuff from the area into your SSD cache than you actually ask for.
No, I'm not using all ten gigabytes of Portal 2 every time I play the game.
But an intelligent caching system won't see that I'm reading a lot of data from a contiguous section of disk, because the installation is likely not contiguous on disk in the first place. Without knowledge of the filesystem AND the application, "intelligent" sector-level caching is a waste for such applications.
Meanwhile the OS will likely, while I'm running through the single-player mode of that particular game, only request new data once per session: Even if I play a level over and over again, it's still going to be in the OS's RAM-based cache on any respectable machine that isn't otherwise burdened. The extraneous "intelligent" SSD caching system won't help a bit.
And even if I'm particularly good at Portal 2, and never replay a level, the data for the next level will still need loaded from a spinning disk...because until I do play them, unplayed levels will appear to an "intelligent" caching scheme as data that has no business being pre-cached because nothing has ever used it before (aside from the first time it was written out to disk at installation).
All it will help out with, consistently, with common use of Portal 2 is initial load time of the game itself...and only then if the game is used often enough that its data isn't flushed from the SSD cache in favor of more recently-used data.
Just to be clear: I'm not sure what point you're trying to argue, exactly, when talking about games and this particular sort of technology (which is not, by any means, a new concept). I can, however, see that you are wrong.
Yes. They were made by Quantum, and later by some other manufacturers.
It kind of made sense at the time, since hard drives were non-trivial to install back then. I still remember performing a series of dark incantations in MS-DOS debug to initialize an MFM hard drive on an XT.
At the time, I thought it was pretty cool, getting my fingers dirty like that. But I think most folks would have preferred to die in a fire than get involved in their hardware to that extent.
And at the same time, I felt it was a lousy idea to integrate everything since it also increased the number of single points of failure in the storage system. (This so-far vapor offering from OCZ suffers the same problem.)
Another issue with the OCZ product: What problem does it actually solve which cannot also be solved by a good OS, a competent admin, an SSD, and a spinning disk?
I feel spoiled, these days, when I pull the side off of my desktop, plug in a new SATA drive, and it just works -- immediately, without even turning the box off first.
(I also remember 8-bit memory expansion cards populated with six dozen individual DIP RAM chips. I remember soldering pins onto SIMM memory to make them fit into my SIPP motherboard. And I remember caching hard drive controllers, stuffed with as much RAM as you could afford. And I remember hardware data compression cards of at least two general variations. I remember the And I remember when sound cards actually did something, and themselves had SIMM sockets. And I remember squeezing sixteen 30-pin SIMMs into four 72-pin sockets on a Socket 5 board.
I even remember an 8-bit ISA card, called the Copy II PC Option Board, which existed only to facilitate copying software on floppy. I even found a Gopher source for the reference just to show how full my beard is, and how long I've been in Mom's basement.
Now, get off of my lawn before I start lamenting about how under-appreciated a common 8-bit parallel port is.)
(Warning: The aforelinked page is allegedly actually hosted on a ZX81, which allegedly can grok HTTP all by itself. It will probably halt and catch fire soon.)
There's only so many hours in a day. Even if you spend 14 hours a day -only- being social (=100% of your waking time minus the time you eat and visit the bathroom etc), then 150 friends would still only get 10 minutes a day each.
So many hours in the day, but I don't need to talk to each of my friends every day, so my time spent with friends doesn't need to fit into 10-minute increments.
I can spend a couple of hours with each of 150 friends every couple of weeks, on average, and still fit into your 14-hour social day.
But I don't average my social time across my "friends." Some friends might only consume a few minutes per month of conversational maintenance; better friends will use more time.
There's no good reason why I can't spend 5 or 10 minutes, per month, talking to my not-so-close friends, and a few hours a week with each of my good friends, and still have time for eating, showering, and work in a day. Even if I've got 150 "friends," and neglect none of them absolutely.
(On another note, I'm personally nowhere near as social as that and don't have any desire to be, but let's not let that get in the way of hypothetical conjecture...)
I have a friend who works at a large bakery. They use big microwave ovens to make cookies. One of his favorite tricks, before all glass was banned from the floor, was carry a fluorescent tube around near the ovens to scare the new guy. I guess they light up pretty brilliantly.:)
What is the actual use of Analog Video Senders anyway?
They're used a lot for half-assed CCTV systems, with applications ranging from video baby monitors, to security video, to hidden pedobear spy cams. The cheap ones are generally pretty ugly unless the planets align just-so, and tend to shit all over whatever band they're using.
There are a few companies that produce more professional versions of such devices, which include very directional, polarized antennas. These play a little nicer with the RF spectrum, but are still bandwidth hogs. They only reason they play nice at all is to avoid interference with other devices of the same type -- not to be nice to Wi-Fi signals. (I've got a few such devices in a parking lot affixed to light poles in a light industrial area, and in this fixed installation they work great. But if that customer wanted WiFi and analog security cameras, there'd be some potential issues...)
Is this what is being advertised for start watching in one room and finish in another from various cable providers?
No. Such installations as that use either Ethernet (802.3 or 802.11), or HPNA (over existing coax or telephone wires), or something proprietary (DirecTV's SWIM system). They're not analog at all (in any conventional sense), and are almost always wired. Installers tend to avoid using wireless for these applications whenever possible (it's expensive, and it's error-prone, resulting in service calls, which make it more expensive yet...).
I think their best best is to throw it away and launch a giant rebranding and "we used to suck and we're honest about that but we're better now" blitz.
Hopefully it works better than Pizza Hut's attempt at marketing "all natural" pizza instead of the presumably unnatural pizza they were serving previously.
As I look, right now, resistors at Radio Shack are selling for $1.19 in packs of 5.
Myself, I bought a giant bag of 1/8 Watt resistors (500 or so of them) from Radio Shack a few years ago, of widely mixed values (and with larger quantities of more common ones, and fewer quantities of less common ones).
IIRC, it wasn't all that expensive. I haven't bought any resistors since -- whatever I need, within reason, I can build out of that stock.
My biggest complaint, these days, is not that they don't have what I want. It's that they do have it, but they've only got one or two of them...and I'll need, say, six.
That's great if you're doing B/W text printing 99% of the time. Still if you're doing something where you need to produce a greater color gamut, it's hard to beat the ink. Pricier, yes. But even color toner can't match the color gamut CMYK ink produces because it doesn't have the same translucent qualities. It lacks depth. Of course in order for the ink to come out ahead in this, you still need a decent quality paper.
Indeed. I use a cheap (free!) black-and-white Laserjet 5 for my printing needs. It's perfectly adequate for running off the occasional widget, or the occasional short hundred-or-so-page manual. I added an Ethernet card and some RAM, and the only thing it's missing is Postscript (and if anyone has a Postscript SIMM for it, let me know).
I've had it for about 7 years. It's been maintenance-free during that time, aside from one replacement toner cart (Ebay, sealed genuine HP, $20 shipped).
I've also got a respectably good inkjet, but it's been packed away in the closet for a few years and I haven't bothered with it. I used to use it a lot to print Google maps; but these days when I travel very far, I'm accompanied by both Droid (which can access the same Google maps wherever there is bandwidth) and Garmin (for when there is no bandwidth) and the old fashioned way (asking for directions/buying a map).
So, since I don't print maps much, I don't bother much with worrying about that inkjet. It'd revive easily enough with a new set of ink cartridges, but I find that I just don't care anymore.
If I want to print snapshots, I just send them over to Wal-Mart online and pick them up with my shopping. The results of their Fuji photographic/chemical printer are better than I can do myself, anyway, and the prices are awesome. Hell, they've even got a large-format HP inkjet there if I want to do an enlargement, which I've found is also rather economical to use.
If I want to print something more than a couple of hundred pages long, I send it over to a locally-owned print shop. They don't bat an eye at printing huge jobs, they're good people, they work fast, and it's both cheaper and better to just have them do it than mess with it myself.
Color laser printers have a place in the world with medium-volume business graphics and sales brochures, but for small volumes even this sort of work often looks better when printed on a good inkjet with high-quality paper.
There's at least one or two big, not-so-old, HP Color Laserjets at work which aren't being used, and which I could probably legitimately grab one of for myself. I just don't have a need for one, and don't want the pain of buying the initial set of toners for it, just to print color at home when I simply don't care anymore.
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Neat. I guess that makes you older than me.
Do Boy Scouts line up to carry your groceries to your car?
Can you explain to me what the difference between "Multicore" and "Multi-core" is?
Cheers.
Thanks for your reply. I think you've missed a few things over the past couple of decades:
PCs, going back to the first IBM PC, have always been able to run different operating systems, and different operating systems have always been available for them.
MS-DOS "won" on the PC back then because it was cheaper, not because it was better or because it was well-established in the market (it was neither).
Android cannot be the PC of smartphones, because Android is an operating system -- not a hardware platform. Android itself runs on a wide array of stuff, but the stuff it runs on generally can only run Android.
Your analogy is backward -- you've reversed the roles of hardware and software.
Not really.
How much money would Verizon be unable to gouge from me if I switched operating systems on my phone?
In my pantry is a can of sweet corn.
It says it contains corn, water, and salt.
What else is in there? What has the corn been treated with? Is it genetically-modified? Is it property of Monsanto? What about that weird white lining on the inside of the steal can? What's in that? Has any of it leeched into my food? What about groundwater contamination from it when it goes to the landfill, or atmospheric contamination if it gets recycled? OMG!
This really blows my mind! (Except it doesn't. I accept it and move on.)
That, to me, is the most interesting part about what you said: You switched a phone to a completely different operating system. AFAICT, there aren't many devices that make it easy.
But there should be: If a given phone's hardware were no longer tied, hard, to a specific OS, that would enable more consumer choice than anything...and should help keep both hardware and OS vendors on their toes trying to produce the best products they can, respectively.
For instance, I'm reasonably happy with Android. And while I have no idea if Windows Mobile or whatever would suit me better (I try to keep an open mind), I'll never find out, since giving it a fair chance would require different hardware, which means messing with contracts and other bullshit.
I can dual-boot my PC. Why can't I dual-boot my phone?
Meh.
No, I haven't. And your photo doesn't show me how well-shielded they are, either. For all I know, that cable has no shielding at all.
The size of the connector or cable has nothing to do with shielding. Mil-spec connectors like that are big so that they are durable (and often waterproof), and rated for huge numbers of insertions, and supply proper strain relief for the cable, and...
Your photographic anecdote makes as much sense me saying this:
"Have you seen how heavily shielded the cables and connections for microphones and other small widgets are in stage performance?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phil_Stacey_%28cropped,_full_shot%29_%C2%B7_071118-N-1644C-007.jpg
That's what you need to keep voice audio from being disrupted according to accepted practice, they've done a lot of testing on that stuff over the last century or so. (Plus, everyone knows that pictures of folks in uniform always helps emphasize a point.)"
Which, of course, is wrong. The wire doesn't need to be anywhere near that big, and the XLR connector is complete overkill, electrically speaking, for a microphone: It's just two wires and a shield, with very low current and voltage. (A trio of Fahnestock clips would work very nearly as well, electrically speaking, and consume little space -- but it's impractical because it wouldn't be durable.)
We use XLR connectors for microphones, because they represent a good balance between durability and size. Likewise, we tend to use big, heavily-insulated wire for stage microphones not because it is electrically necessary or because it is particularly well-shielded (it's generally not), but because it's durable and reliable.
Military connectors are subject to the same reliability/size tradeoff, with generally greater emphasis on reliability (including harsh environments). It's no surprise that the connector/wire coming from that PDA-like device is huge, if it's got more than a handful of conductors: It is, simply, not meant to fail easily.
But again, that doesn't mean that it's particularly well-shielded. It also doesn't mean that it's not particularly well-shielded. The picture doesn't say.
My unlimited "PDA" contract with Verizon does not specify that I cannot use that unlimited transfer for other things. I am not contractually obligated to avoid tethering my phone using third-party applications.
Meanwhile, Verizon's license for 700MHz spectrum does stipulate a number of things, including that they cannot limit the applications that people use.
Is it practical and possible for every single person to use Verizon for all of their Internet needs? No, not right now: There's not enough spectrum available, given their network's layout and abilities. But the issue isn't about physical practicality, but rather about contractual requirements.
Anyone saying this needs to remember that, historically, the problem with residential service was the last mile, which is (currently and commonly) a solved problem.
Now that ISPs have plenty of bandwidth available on the last mile, they're being stingy about the infrastructure, even though (with the modern advent of good CDNs and ISP-owned backhauls) that isn't exactly dear these days either.
Meanwhile, I don't need to compare my residential circuit to a T1, because it's an invalid comparison. I'm not buying a lossless, highly-reliable pipe from A to B all for myself -- I'm buying a consumer-grade residential pipe from A to n, which later gets multiplexed (hello! packet switching !=new) with other people exchanging data with n.
And n is, on average, very reachable. But it's non-specific. If I can't get to n=b today, but I can get to n=c, my ISP doesn't care -- their circuit works fine.
With a T1 and its point-to-point nature, it's a contractually-guaranteed certainty that all of the data I send from A will arrive intact, in order, and with consistent latency, at B -- exactly as it was sent.
However, my ability to get data from A to B is a crapshoot with residential service.
You're comparing apples (T1) to road apples (residential broadband).
The Power Glove may have been made by Mattel, but it was a device which was only used on the Nintendo. And it was optional, which allows it admission into GP's list of optional gear that failed to gain traction, no matter who made the silly thing.
It was also promoted by Nintendo, perhaps most prominently in the film "The Wizard," which was (in part) a Nintendo product. (Not that this matters to counter the point that you're attempting to raise.)
I think of it like a propane tank for a gas-fired barbeque grill:
It's (usually) cheaper to refill the same tank over and over, but that takes more time, and can only be done at a limited selection of locations. Plus you've got to keep the thing free of rust, have it inspected periodically, and sometimes apply a new coat of paint. Eventually, the tank will fail inspection anyway, and needs replaced.
And while some folks do all that, others just toss their empty tank into the car, and exchange it for a full tank when they do their shopping. It's easy, it's fast, it (usually) costs more, and it's done.
The propane distributor handles details like inspection and painting. They are paid for this with the premium that they charge for the service. I'm sure they make more money on some exchanges than on others, but on average they must do reasonably well or there wouldn't be a propane exchange at every single corner gas station, convenience store, grocery store, and home center in my town. (Of course, large batteries are too costly to handle to make things up in a game of averages, but I'll get to that.)
Back to the topic: It's also easy to analyze batteries The battery in my Dell laptop currently 7 years old, and it has a pretty good idea of the actual power availability that it has (which is not very much). At work, we use dedicated a battery analyzer to rate used battery packs for customers.
It's also possible to design a battery so that it can be repaired. I once saw a gentleman replacing a single failed lead-acid cell in a Pandur. Each cell was containerized, and they were connected together in series with short jumper straps. (I forget it it had 6 or 12 individual 2.1V lead acid cells, but it doesn't matter...)
Combine these three concepts, and you wind up with a battery exchange program which works as follows:
1. The customer pulls in, and wants to exchange the battery in his electric MoonGoblin.
2. The service attendant looks (visually, and electronically) at the condition of the battery and its current state of charge.
3. While this is happening, the driver can select from a range of different batteries, priced differently (and predictably) based on their condition -- which should include new, or nearly new batteries as well as anything else.
4. The battery gets swapped. Money changes hands (more money changes hands when getting a better battery than you came in with). Driver leaves in his MoonGoblin with his new (or at least newly-charged) battery.
5. If warranted, the exchange station will repair a battery that is in poor condition, or send it out to be fixed (depending on their skill and the extent of the repair), but if it is a reasonably good battery it will just be placed back onto the charging rack, re-rated, and exchanged with the next guy.
Here are the problems with my plan that I anticipate folks will be willing to point and laugh at:
First, changing batteries. How the hell is this supposed to be done, exactly? A forklift? A gantry crane? Magic robots? I don't know either, sorry. Argue about something else please. :)
Second, lies and deceit. There is a financial incentive, on all sides, to make batteries appear to be in better condition than they actually are. But the market will sort that out quite well enough, I think: The stations can keep track of individual cars and their exchange habits, so if the ol' MoonGoblin gets hacked by its owner to lie about the condition of the battery, stations will stop doing business with him (databases are cool). This provides a disincentive to counter the incentive for the costumer to lie.
On the other hand, if a station has a tendency to be misrepresenting the batteries they offer, their reputation will keep people away. (On the other hand, the local Department of Weights and Measures will audit them periodically anyway, just like they do with gas pumps and deli scales
It's not so abnormal: Witness modern video cards, with their sometimes-multiple jet-engine fans that are anything but balanced, yet are held in place with a single screw and a card-edge connector.
The vibrations from a hard drive, while having more rotational mass but at least intended to be balanced, seem miniscule to me.
Eggdrop seemed to be unofficially frowned-upon at io.com, but they never really seemed to do much about it (or anything else) unless it was abusive or generated complaints: I know a guy who had set up a crontab to keep eggdrop reasonably awake, and as far as I recall he kept that bot alive for years at $10/month. But that was one bot, on a rather non-contested channel, with a rather cool ISP.
Myself, I used to keep screen sessions active for days, weeks, or months, running ircii, pine, tin, and a bash shell or six at io.com. Later on, especially after they started offering Linux servers, I would spread this across multiple hosts. It didn't seem to impact the system in any way, so nobody ever told me to stop. (Nor should they have.)
It was nice, in dialup days, logging into io.com, issuing a screen -x, and getting back to exactly where I was before. (Their boxen were only rebooted if there was a good reason to do so.)
I used to run a few multi-user boxes, mostly based around 486-ish CPUs with 24-or so megs of RAM. All were tied to T1s. They worked fine, and were very responsive....even with multiple remote X11 sessions running Netscape as a test.
But things were different then: Spam wasn't yet a problem, port 25 was de-facto open for relaying to anything that bothered to try, and Usenet was more about discussion than binaries. Portscans and attack attempts were an occasional curiosity instead of something that happened several times per minute no-matter-what. The net, as a whole, was a friendlier place back then...and it has henceforth grown relatively hostile.
That said, I think you're talking about marketability. I'm not on dialup anymore: I've got a 12/1.5 Mbps pipe into my house with absurdly-good reliability. I've still got my own local *nix hosts, and with my modern multi-core CPUs and the free virtualization tech from numerous sources, multiple concurrent varieties of other *nix are just a few clicks away...and I've got a good UPS to keep things ticking predictably if the power dips for some reason.
So, I don't really care much about having an always-on shell account anymore. And I don't know that anyone with much clue would be interested, either...unless they wanted an Eggdrop bot from a fixed IP, or a massive warez server, or whatever other scary (from a liability standpoint) thing.
And I don't think I'm unique.
There's plenty of market for low-cost shared Web hosting, but other good and relatively giant companies like Dreamhost are fighting hard to keep that as cheap as possible as well, which limits profits.
But if you want to go ahead with it, it does sound fun. Nobody (in well over a decade of being here) has ever emailed me from Slashdot, but if you want to proceed and/or need a hand, give me a shout.
I remember in my BBS days reading about the SJ Games raid by the Secret Service.
And as soon as I discovered local internet access (mostly through a borrowed account on a VAX at a local school), I started giving SJG's io.com $10/month for a shell account.
But it wasn't just a shell: It was a FreeBSD shell, back when Linux was still a toy, and it had an infallible NetApps backend with snapshots for ~ (which is still rare, even in this day of positively cheap disk storage). It was access to a good news spool, when Usenet was still Usenet. It was a short email address, when such things weren't so special. It was an Apache web server, with a few megabytes of disk quota and plenty of slack if you needed more from time to time. AAnd a personalized anonymous FTP server. And a proper dev environment for building your own software from source.
All on a fast T1. (Remember when a T1 was fast, and a Pentium-based FreeBSD box with 32 or 64MB of RAM could host more than 100 concurrent interactive users? You yungin's will say it's impossible, but it worked well.)
And the operators and managers seemed to actually give a shit about their users' needs. There was a sense of community between the users and the folks running the show that I've never seen elsewhere.
Things were different back then. The web was mostly text, Gopher still was useful, I never minded using Lynx as a browser, and the world's former-best music/discography site (cdnow.com) had an extremely functional and fast interface using...telnet.
Back them, if you wanted new dirt on the latest Linux happenings, you'd look at Matt Welsh's page, as there just weren't any others that were worth keeping up with.
I remember Steve Jackson himself writing on io.com's news (which was more of a .plan than a modern blog) about how he'd given every single desktop in his company proper Internet access, and how he (rightly!) suspected that his was one of the first companies to do so.
Eventually, my io.com account was banished due to a copyright complaint from an outside party. But by then I'd already built my own *nix boxen, and a more proper local ISP than the 9600bps VAX/VMS beast had cropped up that was both worthwhile and was feeding me dual-channel ISDN as a favor, so I never bothered to fight the copyright complaint.
But I still remember the IP address for pentagon.io.com (their first, and primary shell server) from way back when: 199.170.88.5. And I still ping "io.com" when troubleshooting network connectivity: It's a fast and easy way to see that DNS works and that packets are making their way to Texas and back.
But I guess that's gone now, too.
Goodbye, io.com.
Interesting, indeed. I can't disagree with anything you said.
But back in context: Does this OCZ device do this sort of selective caching? It seems to me that, in order for it to do so, it'd have to be aware of (at least) the filesystem. That's not so far-fetched, given today's low-cost CPUs and FPGAs (we've had various NICs running Linux available for years now, for instance, to wring out the nth degree of latency), but again: Does it do any of this?
Or is it just a somewhat-larger SSD-based multi-gigabyte caching system of the same sort that common and modern operating systems already supply with RAM caching?
Or is it worse? (I suspect this, but without a product, I can't say...)
Since when is running a game a "high demand" for a storage system?
*facepalm*
No, I'm not using all ten gigabytes of Portal 2 every time I play the game.
But an intelligent caching system won't see that I'm reading a lot of data from a contiguous section of disk, because the installation is likely not contiguous on disk in the first place. Without knowledge of the filesystem AND the application, "intelligent" sector-level caching is a waste for such applications.
Meanwhile the OS will likely, while I'm running through the single-player mode of that particular game, only request new data once per session: Even if I play a level over and over again, it's still going to be in the OS's RAM-based cache on any respectable machine that isn't otherwise burdened. The extraneous "intelligent" SSD caching system won't help a bit.
And even if I'm particularly good at Portal 2, and never replay a level, the data for the next level will still need loaded from a spinning disk...because until I do play them, unplayed levels will appear to an "intelligent" caching scheme as data that has no business being pre-cached because nothing has ever used it before (aside from the first time it was written out to disk at installation).
All it will help out with, consistently, with common use of Portal 2 is initial load time of the game itself...and only then if the game is used often enough that its data isn't flushed from the SSD cache in favor of more recently-used data.
Just to be clear: I'm not sure what point you're trying to argue, exactly, when talking about games and this particular sort of technology (which is not, by any means, a new concept). I can, however, see that you are wrong.
Yes. They were made by Quantum, and later by some other manufacturers.
It kind of made sense at the time, since hard drives were non-trivial to install back then. I still remember performing a series of dark incantations in MS-DOS debug to initialize an MFM hard drive on an XT.
At the time, I thought it was pretty cool, getting my fingers dirty like that. But I think most folks would have preferred to die in a fire than get involved in their hardware to that extent.
And at the same time, I felt it was a lousy idea to integrate everything since it also increased the number of single points of failure in the storage system. (This so-far vapor offering from OCZ suffers the same problem.)
Another issue with the OCZ product: What problem does it actually solve which cannot also be solved by a good OS, a competent admin, an SSD, and a spinning disk?
I feel spoiled, these days, when I pull the side off of my desktop, plug in a new SATA drive, and it just works -- immediately, without even turning the box off first.
(I also remember 8-bit memory expansion cards populated with six dozen individual DIP RAM chips. I remember soldering pins onto SIMM memory to make them fit into my SIPP motherboard. And I remember caching hard drive controllers, stuffed with as much RAM as you could afford. And I remember hardware data compression cards of at least two general variations. I remember the And I remember when sound cards actually did something, and themselves had SIMM sockets. And I remember squeezing sixteen 30-pin SIMMs into four 72-pin sockets on a Socket 5 board.
I even remember an 8-bit ISA card, called the Copy II PC Option Board, which existed only to facilitate copying software on floppy. I even found a Gopher source for the reference just to show how full my beard is, and how long I've been in Mom's basement.
Now, get off of my lawn before I start lamenting about how under-appreciated a common 8-bit parallel port is.)
You mean like a ZX81 webserver, perhaps?
Oh, look. There's one!
(Warning: The aforelinked page is allegedly actually hosted on a ZX81, which allegedly can grok HTTP all by itself. It will probably halt and catch fire soon.)
So many hours in the day, but I don't need to talk to each of my friends every day, so my time spent with friends doesn't need to fit into 10-minute increments.
I can spend a couple of hours with each of 150 friends every couple of weeks, on average, and still fit into your 14-hour social day.
But I don't average my social time across my "friends." Some friends might only consume a few minutes per month of conversational maintenance; better friends will use more time.
There's no good reason why I can't spend 5 or 10 minutes, per month, talking to my not-so-close friends, and a few hours a week with each of my good friends, and still have time for eating, showering, and work in a day. Even if I've got 150 "friends," and neglect none of them absolutely.
(On another note, I'm personally nowhere near as social as that and don't have any desire to be, but let's not let that get in the way of hypothetical conjecture...)
You mean something like this?
I have a friend who works at a large bakery. They use big microwave ovens to make cookies. One of his favorite tricks, before all glass was banned from the floor, was carry a fluorescent tube around near the ovens to scare the new guy. I guess they light up pretty brilliantly. :)
They're used a lot for half-assed CCTV systems, with applications ranging from video baby monitors, to security video, to hidden pedobear spy cams. The cheap ones are generally pretty ugly unless the planets align just-so, and tend to shit all over whatever band they're using.
There are a few companies that produce more professional versions of such devices, which include very directional, polarized antennas. These play a little nicer with the RF spectrum, but are still bandwidth hogs. They only reason they play nice at all is to avoid interference with other devices of the same type -- not to be nice to Wi-Fi signals. (I've got a few such devices in a parking lot affixed to light poles in a light industrial area, and in this fixed installation they work great. But if that customer wanted WiFi and analog security cameras, there'd be some potential issues...)
No. Such installations as that use either Ethernet (802.3 or 802.11), or HPNA (over existing coax or telephone wires), or something proprietary (DirecTV's SWIM system). They're not analog at all (in any conventional sense), and are almost always wired. Installers tend to avoid using wireless for these applications whenever possible (it's expensive, and it's error-prone, resulting in service calls, which make it more expensive yet...).
I'm confused.
How do I pronounce the words "f*ck" and "sh*t"?
Hopefully it works better than Pizza Hut's attempt at marketing "all natural" pizza instead of the presumably unnatural pizza they were serving previously.
As I look, right now, resistors at Radio Shack are selling for $1.19 in packs of 5.
Myself, I bought a giant bag of 1/8 Watt resistors (500 or so of them) from Radio Shack a few years ago, of widely mixed values (and with larger quantities of more common ones, and fewer quantities of less common ones).
IIRC, it wasn't all that expensive. I haven't bought any resistors since -- whatever I need, within reason, I can build out of that stock.
My biggest complaint, these days, is not that they don't have what I want. It's that they do have it, but they've only got one or two of them...and I'll need, say, six.
Indeed. I use a cheap (free!) black-and-white Laserjet 5 for my printing needs. It's perfectly adequate for running off the occasional widget, or the occasional short hundred-or-so-page manual. I added an Ethernet card and some RAM, and the only thing it's missing is Postscript (and if anyone has a Postscript SIMM for it, let me know).
I've had it for about 7 years. It's been maintenance-free during that time, aside from one replacement toner cart (Ebay, sealed genuine HP, $20 shipped).
I've also got a respectably good inkjet, but it's been packed away in the closet for a few years and I haven't bothered with it. I used to use it a lot to print Google maps; but these days when I travel very far, I'm accompanied by both Droid (which can access the same Google maps wherever there is bandwidth) and Garmin (for when there is no bandwidth) and the old fashioned way (asking for directions/buying a map).
So, since I don't print maps much, I don't bother much with worrying about that inkjet. It'd revive easily enough with a new set of ink cartridges, but I find that I just don't care anymore.
If I want to print snapshots, I just send them over to Wal-Mart online and pick them up with my shopping. The results of their Fuji photographic/chemical printer are better than I can do myself, anyway, and the prices are awesome. Hell, they've even got a large-format HP inkjet there if I want to do an enlargement, which I've found is also rather economical to use.
If I want to print something more than a couple of hundred pages long, I send it over to a locally-owned print shop. They don't bat an eye at printing huge jobs, they're good people, they work fast, and it's both cheaper and better to just have them do it than mess with it myself.
Color laser printers have a place in the world with medium-volume business graphics and sales brochures, but for small volumes even this sort of work often looks better when printed on a good inkjet with high-quality paper.
There's at least one or two big, not-so-old, HP Color Laserjets at work which aren't being used, and which I could probably legitimately grab one of for myself. I just don't have a need for one, and don't want the pain of buying the initial set of toners for it, just to print color at home when I simply don't care anymore.
Perhaps, in Skype's opinion, cleaning out the Asterisk side of things is more like pressure-washing the siding than ripping out the in-ground pool.