The chip is slated to be the first 1 teraflop consumer device."
It would greatly benefit the Open Source developer to have such a chip with such a vast potential.
Care to bet Microsoft is involved somewhere in the scheme of things?
"Our suggestion, which you should heed because we know what's best*, is that you design this to work only with WinCE and zealously prevent any unwashed heathens from reverse engineering and attempt to run other alleged operating systems on it."
* As evidenced by the huge successes of WebTV, XBox and Ultimate TV.
Any mention in the press, on-line web-mags, blogs, uttered in a dark corner of a restaurant, scrawled on a bathroom wall, by chance letters M-A-T-R-I-X in a bowl of Alphabits or alphabet soup, uttered as first words of an infant, imagined while under the influence of drugs and/or lack of sleep, or previously posted have a 94.7214% chance of being posted.
Yeah, and us poor schmucks who can't afford several grand in expences have to get a corporation to help and
hope they don't screw us. Too bad I can't make any money off of these ideas I have. Innovation my ass.
Become a Patent Attorney. With this kind of glut there's going to be a strong demand for those who can wade through it.
Excuse me while I get back to filling out my patent application for 'carrot and stick'
Duluth-Mesabi Iron Range? Um, that's western UP, eh? I was referring to northeastern LP, like West Branch, Rogers City, Alpena, Harrison, Gaylord, etc. Some was for timber, but there were also considerable passenger services pretty much everywhere. In the early boom of the rail era, speculators laid rail everywhere, including Pettycoat Junction type places. Eventually most went broke, but there's a lot of old railbed out there.
I thought it a good analogie as laying copper, and even glass, may become the old way, beaten by nimble little Wi-Fi startups. The only real problem is connecting those dots, and though getting a satellite up to do it isn't cheap, that cost has come down, lowering the bar for a VC or such to enter the market.
Oh, and DM&IR had some really cool engines in their day, like the Yellowstone.
Free Pilot rolling ball gel pen to the first person who gives me their Slashdot password!
It's Frodo.
Don't worry about sending the pen, I called up your ISP and said I was Bob the field service tech and you were having trouble logging in, would they mind verifying that your password was 'patthebunny', they indicated it must have been changed, I indicated you had tried to change it to 'patthebunny', which hadn't apparently gone through, "maybe the password change object garbled it, what does it show?" With that tidbit I looked into your account and found a cookie with your Visa card number and some email with your home address. I called up Visa and changed the billing address (tip o' the hat to your mom wishing you a happy birthday) A carton should be arriving at the neighbor's (who happens to be away on business, but I have a fake DL with his name on it, thanks to the DMV who never check anything.)
Whoops! Look at the time. Better get my duds on and stroll into the governors mansion like I belong there. (I need to complete 6 place settings and only have 4 so far.)
Just a quick ?, for US readers (but non-US readers, please consider and comment within your own context), is there any law you can think of which states the CSP you interface with must be a domestic company? Suppose a japanese or french company (come to think of it T (as in T Mobile) is Deutsche Telecom) sets up relays or satellites, what's to say I can't bypass SBC, et al, completely? If so then the answer may be foreign competition to keep domestic providers honest.:-)
"Yeah, that'd be one hell of an Achilles Heel, there's probably something on the books about it -- for our protection."
all technology that is not
expressly permitted by a communications providerM will be prohibited.
Oh, let me think.. put this dangerous little mind to work for a moment.
If this is what a large provider like
SBC wants, perhaps it's not so bad on the surface. (You already know these laws don't get started without their helpful assistance in Lansing, Sacramento, and so on, without their helpful assistance)
Much is made about Wi-Fi. What's to stop grass-roots cooperatives forming wi-fi networks?
Seems like I've been reading quite a bit about these on Slashdot lately, including communities, even cities, considering this. Great for a few reasons, not
the least of which is less dependency on capital-heavy infrastructure. Don't like SBC? Encourage or participate in creating not competition, but alternatives. As always,
watch your back for legislation to prevent or hinder such enterprises, along the lines of "It shall be immensely illegal for people to cast of the chains of
bondage to BigBabyBell in favor of a free and unrestricted system."
Remember, countries used to be criss-crossed with a hojillion miles of rail. Once the Interstate highways were built in the USA that all changed. (I saw a rail map once of northeastern LP of Michigan, it staggered the mind how much rail used to be up in that sparsely populated area.) Like rail, BigBabyBell doesn't move without expending a lot of capital. Seems to me Wi-Fi is a capital-light.
So a 1-in-50 catastrophic failure rate is not considered a show stopper? At this rate, we'll be out of shuttles in
another 150 flights. Would you use software that crashed 1-in-50 times? The shuttle is the "Internet Explorer" of space vehicles...
Ooooo. You don't like shuttles, do you? I'd say, if NASA were run by Microsoft they'd recommend setting the clock back and trying again...
"Well, there goes the shuttle Explorer 2003 SP1, up in flames. Condolences will be sent to loved ones, and flights will continue while they work on SP2. Meanwhile, in other news, Microsoft lobbyists have renewed pressure on Congress to black out any public notification of these shuttle disasters."
I remember carting around 20MB RL02 disk packs for a PDP 11/34.
Yeah? Well, I had to care for 7.5MB packs from
IBM 360/40 drives (there were 5 of them, mfd by Fujitsu in the late 60's!)
I should have kept at least one old Byte magazine from ~1981. There were ads for 5MB HDD for a PC, ~$5,000 5.25" full height.
The thing that was so amazing, was running an entire student admissions/registration system, plus student accounts for Fortran IV, (UCSD) Pascal, RSTS Basic and various DP (remember that term, Data Processing, before it was universally replaced by Information Services?) on a PDP 11/50 with 128KWords (256KB) memory, a 4MB Megastore (Core) swapping drive and 2 RP04 drives. Ah, but it sure beat punch cards;-)
Why it seems only 3 years ago I saw them 300MB IBM
Microdrives at a CES and marvelled at its compactness and
possibilies. I already feel like a geezer when I describe (with misty eyes)
my days changing RP04 packs (DEC 80 MB removable, that is, you took the pack of platters and spindle out
and put a different one in.) It done be amazin. How long before a Video Ipod? (Or did I already miss it?)
Fast forward to April 15, 2023
"Whatchu got there, boy? Looks like a wristwatch stuck in each of your eyes."
"Aw, gramps, it's a 3D-VR Relay, I'm in a meeting at work, talking to my girlfriend and watching
The Matrix Gets Old, can I get back with you?"
"Shee-yoot, I might be daid by then!"
"That's ok, Gramps, I have your soul digitized and can carry on any conversation with you in Virtual Space, now."
"You can fit my very essence into those things?"
"Yeah, you only take up 3 terabytes."
Well, let's put a slightly diffrent spin on this and see how sentiments go...
"Among other things,
residents of the Great Lakes State can no longer knowingly "assemble,
develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise"
any device or software that conceals "the existence or place of origin or
destination of any telecommunications service."
Suppose Ralan Alsky (just to pick a name at random) sends.. uh.. email, routed in such a way that you can't tell he was the originator. He connects with an open relay, possibly the Total Home Network, Coordination and Entertainment device in, say Gill Bates' (just to pull another name at random) house, normally used for counting the wilted stalks of celery in his refridgerator crisper drawer and monitoring dog poop rings in his front lawn (much less mysterious than crop circles, but there they are), the email is sent to thousands of worthy individuals (worth of being on some CD he loaded up with publicly posted email addresses from alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus) Ralan has devised a way to avoid indicating the origin of a missive, a Dell Optiplex GX150 in his garage, which promotes a certain salve, which when applied to a certain private part make a certain HOT penny stock worth 24% more in the morning and consolidates debt to a 2nd mortgage on an old pair of Nikes at 3.85% APR. Further, the affiliate who has paid Ralan for this service accepts calls at a certain payphone booth outside a Southfield, MI, 7-11 for the first 4 hours the missive has been present on the internet.
Now, I ask you in all objectivity, "should that be illegal?"
"Frankly I'm suprised a CPU made of wood would work at all."
Hey man, don't knock wood.
That's not just wood, it's Carbon Fibre, the latest thing!
Seriously. This the month that the first Hammers are supposed to emerge and this happens. Do you recall the disaster for Intel when, a couple years ago, they attempted to roll out a PIII 1GHz and it was flawd, then AMD jumped them by getting the Athlon 1GHz to market first. Quite the coupe that was. Looks like Intel's flubbing it again.
Man, how things have changed. I can still remember when Cadillacs had a 500 cu. in. (over 8L) displacement engine with enough weight and torque to affect the earths spin if you stomped on the gas. Then again, recalling the old ways of the Detroit assemply lines which built these things, Rube Goldberg would have been proud.
Not me at all, I'm ganking asshole terrorists left and right in Raven Shield every night
Well, if you put it like that... I could probably get into a game where I get to slaughter, dismember, torture, eviscerate, perforate, electrocute, vaporize, annihilate, massacre, butcher and really badly hurt spammers... know of such a game?
During times of war I tend away from video games which involve killing people. Images in the news, particularly if you've gone to the Al-Jezeera site and looked at their un-censored images (yes, this is what war is really like, unlike what you see on US news broadcasts), disturb me and I tend to shift of to strategy games and D&D (where I'm hacking monsters to bits, rather than humans.)
Get off your Cellphone rage and think of the lives they save when they are used to call 911 or to report an accident.
I refuse. I'd like to point out, particularly where I do my ~38 mile, each way, trek each day the traffic is such that a 911 call is usually from a stationary vehicle, as accidents tend to stop traffic. There's actually three components to my daily drive:
Fairly predictable Highway 17/880 from Los Gatos to near Highway 101, cell phoners tend to congregate in the left lane, to avoid worrying about merging traffic. Usually identifiable by slow reaction to changing traffic and/or driving slower than surrounding traffic.
Highway 17 winding through the Santa Cruz mountains, from ~sea level to 1,800 feet, back to ~sea level. Slow reactions, distractions, failure to compensate for variability of grade, turn, camber, as well as the occasional scumbucket speed-racer/lane-changer cause no shortage of accidents. Both hands on the wheel and eyes forward are highly recommended. Every trip is an adventure.
City driving. I honestly don't know how people do it. Driving city streets at rush hour requires absolute undivided attention. I've seen more than a few drivers drop their phone to avoid an accident. I've also seen a few who incorrectly decided their precious phone and/or call were more important than avoiding said accident.
It's like smoking. There are those who smoke a 3 packs a day and live to be 100. There's also those who smoke less than a pack a day and develop lung cancer in their 30's. Some get away with the roll of the dice and others don't. Best not to claim mastery of the situation and jinx yourself.
I've had 3 cell phones (first was a bag-phone, yeah, early adopter) and learned early on that you can't drive a stick and use a cell phone. Tricky enough with an automatic. I leave calls to when I'm stationary. I've had various cars in the body shop over the years and, though there's a hit-and-run ding on the front right of the current set of wheels, the inconvenience of doing without while it's in the shop is enough to encourage caution, if not just to keep insurance low.
The technology for videophones has been around since the 40ies. Try and search the web if you don't believe it.
The point is, users don't want it. No matter how many times a year a technology start-up pops up and tells us that
yes, they can do it, users don't want it. Shouldn't be that hard to understand.
Which means:
They are probably already using it in Japan.
If they aren't they soon will be.
Several articles about it will appear on slashdot, over which dozens of readers will drool over it and lament why the US is so backward that it doesn't have it yet.
Whoops, left this little caveat out. I still expect 5-6 replies telling me I'm daft and it's not illegal where they are. Well, I'm probably daft anyway. Unfortunately it takes 2 minutes to post a follow-up, so they'll have that much time to jump all over my case.
Trivia: Popeye's first words were, "Ya think I am a cowboy?"
It's bad enough having idiots on the road not listening to what's going on.
"Hey, Bill, will you hold the wheel? I need to take this call..."
No kidding. I laughed at this, not so much because it's funny, but because I know exactly what you mean.
Here's the rub. As of January 1st, 2003 it became illegal to drive while talking on a cell phone. Think it's had any impact? None that I can see, every other car that goes by someone is on the phone and virtually every one that cuts me or someone else off, appears to drive with disregard, or erratically, is the same (except for that one car where it looked like G. Bush Sr. having a debate with the passenger, waving hands all over the place except in the vicinity of the steering wheel.)
Slashdot Mirror
It would greatly benefit the Open Source developer to have such a chip with such a vast potential.
Care to bet Microsoft is involved somewhere in the scheme of things?
"Our suggestion, which you should heed because we know what's best*, is that you design this to work only with WinCE and zealously prevent any unwashed heathens from reverse engineering and attempt to run other alleged operating systems on it."
* As evidenced by the huge successes of WebTV, XBox and Ultimate TV.
Any mention in the press, on-line web-mags, blogs, uttered in a dark corner of a restaurant, scrawled on a bathroom wall, by chance letters M-A-T-R-I-X in a bowl of Alphabits or alphabet soup, uttered as first words of an infant, imagined while under the influence of drugs and/or lack of sleep, or previously posted have a 94.7214% chance of being posted.
Become a Patent Attorney. With this kind of glut there's going to be a strong demand for those who can wade through it.
Excuse me while I get back to filling out my patent application for 'carrot and stick'
Duluth-Mesabi Iron Range? Um, that's western UP, eh? I was referring to northeastern LP, like West Branch, Rogers City, Alpena, Harrison, Gaylord, etc. Some was for timber, but there were also considerable passenger services pretty much everywhere. In the early boom of the rail era, speculators laid rail everywhere, including Pettycoat Junction type places. Eventually most went broke, but there's a lot of old railbed out there.
I thought it a good analogie as laying copper, and even glass, may become the old way, beaten by nimble little Wi-Fi startups. The only real problem is connecting those dots, and though getting a satellite up to do it isn't cheap, that cost has come down, lowering the bar for a VC or such to enter the market.
Oh, and DM&IR had some really cool engines in their day, like the Yellowstone.
It's Frodo.
Don't worry about sending the pen, I called up your ISP and said I was Bob the field service tech and you were having trouble logging in, would they mind verifying that your password was 'patthebunny', they indicated it must have been changed, I indicated you had tried to change it to 'patthebunny', which hadn't apparently gone through, "maybe the password change object garbled it, what does it show?" With that tidbit I looked into your account and found a cookie with your Visa card number and some email with your home address. I called up Visa and changed the billing address (tip o' the hat to your mom wishing you a happy birthday) A carton should be arriving at the neighbor's (who happens to be away on business, but I have a fake DL with his name on it, thanks to the DMV who never check anything.)
Whoops! Look at the time. Better get my duds on and stroll into the governors mansion like I belong there. (I need to complete 6 place settings and only have 4 so far.)
Ta!
Yet, as the article suggests, domestic control can also be bad.
"Yeah, that'd be one hell of an Achilles Heel, there's probably something on the books about it -- for our protection."
Oh, let me think.. put this dangerous little mind to work for a moment.
If this is what a large provider like SBC wants, perhaps it's not so bad on the surface. (You already know these laws don't get started without their helpful assistance in Lansing, Sacramento, and so on, without their helpful assistance)
Much is made about Wi-Fi. What's to stop grass-roots cooperatives forming wi-fi networks? Seems like I've been reading quite a bit about these on Slashdot lately, including communities, even cities, considering this. Great for a few reasons, not the least of which is less dependency on capital-heavy infrastructure. Don't like SBC? Encourage or participate in creating not competition, but alternatives. As always, watch your back for legislation to prevent or hinder such enterprises, along the lines of "It shall be immensely illegal for people to cast of the chains of bondage to BigBabyBell in favor of a free and unrestricted system."
Remember, countries used to be criss-crossed with a hojillion miles of rail. Once the Interstate highways were built in the USA that all changed. (I saw a rail map once of northeastern LP of Michigan, it staggered the mind how much rail used to be up in that sparsely populated area.) Like rail, BigBabyBell doesn't move without expending a lot of capital. Seems to me Wi-Fi is a capital-light.
Well no, other than the strong suspicion that a chunk of the craft can fall off during lift-off and fatally damage the vehicle...
That and the rather conspicuous lack of (1) shuttle. Are they planning to build another, or just spread out launches for the reduced rotation?
Maybe Richard Branson can dig one up...
Ooooo. You don't like shuttles, do you? I'd say, if NASA were run by Microsoft they'd recommend setting the clock back and trying again...
"Well, there goes the shuttle Explorer 2003 SP1, up in flames. Condolences will be sent to loved ones, and flights will continue while they work on SP2. Meanwhile, in other news, Microsoft lobbyists have renewed pressure on Congress to black out any public notification of these shuttle disasters."
Reminds me of something I saw here..
The president, when presented with the findings, gave it much serious thought and consideration then recommended drilling for oil in Alaska.
Anyone else notice another attempt to sneak that through in the last few weeks.
Maybe there's a future for Nanoscale Particles in home gardening and pest control, too? ;-)
Yeah? Well, I had to care for 7.5MB packs from
IBM 360/40 drives (there were 5 of them, mfd by Fujitsu in the late 60's!)
I should have kept at least one old Byte magazine from ~1981. There were ads for 5MB HDD for a PC, ~$5,000 5.25" full height.
The thing that was so amazing, was running an entire student admissions/registration system, plus student accounts for Fortran IV, (UCSD) Pascal, RSTS Basic and various DP (remember that term, Data Processing, before it was universally replaced by Information Services?) on a PDP 11/50 with 128KWords (256KB) memory, a 4MB Megastore (Core) swapping drive and 2 RP04 drives. Ah, but it sure beat punch cards ;-)
What makes you think you wont? Seems the most logical first adoption.
Fast forward to April 15, 2023
"Whatchu got there, boy? Looks like a wristwatch stuck in each of your eyes."
"Aw, gramps, it's a 3D-VR Relay, I'm in a meeting at work, talking to my girlfriend and watching The Matrix Gets Old, can I get back with you?"
"Shee-yoot, I might be daid by then!"
"That's ok, Gramps, I have your soul digitized and can carry on any conversation with you in Virtual Space, now."
"You can fit my very essence into those things?"
"Yeah, you only take up 3 terabytes."
I just think you're trying to cover your tracks. John Ashcroft will be notified, promptly!
Suppose Ralan Alsky (just to pick a name at random) sends .. uh .. email, routed in such a way that you can't tell he was the originator. He connects with an open relay, possibly the Total Home Network, Coordination and Entertainment device in, say Gill Bates' (just to pull another name at random) house, normally used for counting the wilted stalks of celery in his refridgerator crisper drawer and monitoring dog poop rings in his front lawn (much less mysterious than crop circles, but there they are), the email is sent to thousands of worthy individuals (worth of being on some CD he loaded up with publicly posted email addresses from alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus) Ralan has devised a way to avoid indicating the origin of a missive, a Dell Optiplex GX150 in his garage, which promotes a certain salve, which when applied to a certain private part make a certain HOT penny stock worth 24% more in the morning and consolidates debt to a 2nd mortgage on an old pair of Nikes at 3.85% APR. Further, the affiliate who has paid Ralan for this service accepts calls at a certain payphone booth outside a Southfield, MI, 7-11 for the first 4 hours the missive has been present on the internet.
Now, I ask you in all objectivity, "should that be illegal?"
Hey man, don't knock wood.
That's not just wood, it's Carbon Fibre, the latest thing!
Seriously. This the month that the first Hammers are supposed to emerge and this happens. Do you recall the disaster for Intel when, a couple years ago, they attempted to roll out a PIII 1GHz and it was flawd, then AMD jumped them by getting the Athlon 1GHz to market first. Quite the coupe that was. Looks like Intel's flubbing it again.
Man, how things have changed. I can still remember when Cadillacs had a 500 cu. in. (over 8L) displacement engine with enough weight and torque to affect the earths spin if you stomped on the gas. Then again, recalling the old ways of the Detroit assemply lines which built these things, Rube Goldberg would have been proud.
Well, if you put it like that... I could probably get into a game where I get to slaughter, dismember, torture, eviscerate, perforate, electrocute, vaporize, annihilate, massacre, butcher and really badly hurt spammers... know of such a game?
During times of war I tend away from video games which involve killing people. Images in the news, particularly if you've gone to the Al-Jezeera site and looked at their un-censored images (yes, this is what war is really like, unlike what you see on US news broadcasts), disturb me and I tend to shift of to strategy games and D&D (where I'm hacking monsters to bits, rather than humans.)
I refuse. I'd like to point out, particularly where I do my ~38 mile, each way, trek each day the traffic is such that a 911 call is usually from a stationary vehicle, as accidents tend to stop traffic. There's actually three components to my daily drive:
Fairly predictable Highway 17/880 from Los Gatos to near Highway 101, cell phoners tend to congregate in the left lane, to avoid worrying about merging traffic. Usually identifiable by slow reaction to changing traffic and/or driving slower than surrounding traffic.
Highway 17 winding through the Santa Cruz mountains, from ~sea level to 1,800 feet, back to ~sea level. Slow reactions, distractions, failure to compensate for variability of grade, turn, camber, as well as the occasional scumbucket speed-racer/lane-changer cause no shortage of accidents. Both hands on the wheel and eyes forward are highly recommended. Every trip is an adventure.
City driving. I honestly don't know how people do it. Driving city streets at rush hour requires absolute undivided attention. I've seen more than a few drivers drop their phone to avoid an accident. I've also seen a few who incorrectly decided their precious phone and/or call were more important than avoiding said accident.
It's like smoking. There are those who smoke a 3 packs a day and live to be 100. There's also those who smoke less than a pack a day and develop lung cancer in their 30's. Some get away with the roll of the dice and others don't. Best not to claim mastery of the situation and jinx yourself.
I've had 3 cell phones (first was a bag-phone, yeah, early adopter) and learned early on that you can't drive a stick and use a cell phone. Tricky enough with an automatic. I leave calls to when I'm stationary. I've had various cars in the body shop over the years and, though there's a hit-and-run ding on the front right of the current set of wheels, the inconvenience of doing without while it's in the shop is enough to encourage caution, if not just to keep insurance low.
Which means:
They are probably already using it in Japan.
If they aren't they soon will be.
Several articles about it will appear on slashdot, over which dozens of readers will drool over it and lament why the US is so backward that it doesn't have it yet.
At least one of the articles will be a dupe.
Trivia: Popeye's first words were, "Ya think I am a cowboy?"
No kidding. I laughed at this, not so much because it's funny, but because I know exactly what you mean.
Here's the rub. As of January 1st, 2003 it became illegal to drive while talking on a cell phone. Think it's had any impact? None that I can see, every other car that goes by someone is on the phone and virtually every one that cuts me or someone else off, appears to drive with disregard, or erratically, is the same (except for that one car where it looked like G. Bush Sr. having a debate with the passenger, waving hands all over the place except in the vicinity of the steering wheel.)