I have a hard time reading text in many X programs that use small font sizes. The same size text is much easier to read on Windows systems. Does X make use of the hints in fonts?
Oh yes, the SBS HYPE-Computer. These were the turkeys who were comparing 4 bit integer addition on their system to floating point arithmetic on a real computer.
FPGAs can do some neat things, but you are not going to build a fast general purpose computer out of FPGAs. They are relatively slow and make inefficient use of silicon. They do a good job on control and glue logic, plus you can fix design errors and add features without having to rework the hardware.
Everyone is so emotional because the kid next door got a new bike a few weeks after you got yours. I hope Apple fails.
Why?
1. The colors (copying the multicolor options) Colors are not subject to patent. So some people are unhappy with their lack of originality. Fine -hold a grudge.
You can have a trademark on a color. Owens-Corning has a trademark for pink colored insulation. Here is a citation.
Yes, the movie was historically inaccurate (especially the way they portrayed Microsoft as a 2-bit company when they sold DOS to IBM. MS at that time was a respectable business selling compilers.)
Microsoft was a "two bit" company at that time. They were a decent sized microcomputer software company, but microcomputer software was a small market. Bill Gates was never going to get rich selling ROM BASIC and compilers to OEMs and geeks.
A 1-10kt device will make a bloody mess of most major metro areas (To put this in perspective, the two bombs dropped in WWII were only in the 50-100kt range...).
Supposedly you can still get Coke with cane sugar in containers marked as Kosher during Passover as corn products are not allowed.
Is there anyone out there familiar with Jewish traditions who can comment on this?
The "Kosher for Passover" Coke is the only Coke that is made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup. Plain "Kosher" Coke may use corn syrup. I believe most Coke bottled in the USA is kosher. It may not be marked as kosher, even if it is. Ask your local Rabbi or kashrut authority if you have questions.
>The interesting thing about the telephone business is that their costs have nothing to do with how many minutes you stay on the phone.
Not true. If you have 100 customers who spend 5% of the time on the phone you need a lot less infrastructure than if the same 100 customers spent 100% of the time on the phone.
It's more complicated than that. It depends on the traffic patterns. If a switch and trunks are engineered for a good quality of service during the busiest hour of the day, say 10-11 AM, an Internet user who stays on-line from 6-12 PM doesn't cost the telephone company a penny. There is a huge amount of underutilized capacity in the system because of the need to provide good quality of service during peak usage periods.
An economically rational (this means that it will never happen) billing system would charge the subscriber a fixed rate for the non-usage sensitive components of the service, and a variable rate that would be based on the subscriber's use of the system during peak usage periods. Use of the system during off-peak periods would be free.
The author states that 56K modems are hampered by TWO D/A conversions. This is not true. Where 56K lines are concerned, only the end user has an analog line. The back end connection to the ISP is pure digital, either via ISDN or leased line.
The problem with multiple D/A conversions is commonly caused by SLC (subscriber loop carrier)configurations that are connected to the central office switch through a channel bank and analog copper pairs. The modem signal is converted from analog to digital at the SLC, multiplexed into a DS1 and transmitted back to the central office. At the central office, the DS1 is fed into a channel bank that demultiplexes the DS1 and converts each channel from digital to analog. The analog signal travels over a copper wire pair to a line card in the central office switch. The line card converts the analog signal back to a 64 KBPS digital signal before sending it on to the destination. I've been told that many phone companies use this configuration, even though it requires a channel bank, extra wire and more line cards. They want all analog voice circuits to connect to the switch via analog copper loops. The SLC is just used as a way of reducing the amount of cabling on the poles between the subscribers and the central office switch.
A few years ago there was a blurb in the local paper about a contract bidding dispute between Sun and the NSA. The contract was for some huge number of UNIX workstations.
If you read government contract bid request lists, look for references to the "Maryland Procurement Office".
DEC made some PDP-8s that were cheap enough to be bought by an individual, about $20K. About the same price as a house at that time. Later on, you could buy a LSI-11 with floppy disks and terminal for about $10K.
The SCELBI 8H is the first computer that I would classify as a PC. It was based on a microprocessor (Intel 8008) and in commercial production.
Actually, the NT kernel is fully multiuser; as is Win32; it's just that because of compatibility reasons, this functionality is usually hidden (older Win3.1 apps and some Win95 apps make major assumptions that they'll only be running one instance per machine, which causes problems).
Are you sure about that? I was setting up some SMB connections from a Linux system to a NT system. The Linux system gave me an error message. A bit of research revealed that only one username/password could be associated with the NETBIOS/SMB connection between two systems. I couldn't have multiple users on the Linux system mounting shared drives on a NT system unless they all used a single username/password.
In America, you have to opposite situation, where because you have never been metered (well, not since the aol days anyways), and the companies are therefore offering DSL and cable at flat rates. Flat rates for lines of 2 megabit/s and above are just as ridiculous as cited Euro numbers however, it just won't hold.
Some major American cities (New York, Chicago) are stuck with metered service for residential lines. Most business lines are metered. In many places, metered service is an option on residential lines.
The problem with metered service is that the price for call minutes or packets is usually far in excess of the true variable costs. Phone companies want to price products on "value", not cost plus reasonable rate of return.
Another problem is the high cost of the infrastructure needed to collect usage information and generate bills. This is a big number for circuit switched voice, I suspect it would be worse for packetized data. It can be cheaper to provide a flat rate pipe than add all the cruft required for metered service.
The last time I saw some numbers, about 70% of the cost in providing local phone service was in non-usage sensitive things like providing and maintaining the subscriber's local loop. The prices charged by phone companies and PTTs have very little to do with the costs of providing service.
I think the catch is that your hardware and device drivers have to be designed to support a restart. That means the driver must be able to reset the hardware to a known state and reload a checkpointed configuration. I've heard that this is difficult with some video cards. There is a lot of on-board state that isn't saved anywhere.
The idea that the frogs would complain about industrial espionage is hilarious. The DGSE has a long history of spying on American companies and passing the information on to their French competitors.
To expect the NSA or any other signals intelligence organization to not collect available information is extremely naive. That is one of their primary missions. If you believe "gentlemen do not read each other's mail", I've got a bridge to sell you.
He would be on my list. He wrote a great C compiler (BDS C) for CP/M and sold it at a very reasonable price. The alternatives at the time were assembler, various dialects of BASIC and bloatware from Microsoft. Many people got their start in C and HLL programming with BDS C.
It's been a while since I've used a language with built-in GC. The one thing that I never found to be acceptable was that the program/system froze for anywhere from 100s of milliseconds to several seconds when the GC decided to clean up. Has this problem been fixed in modern implementations of GC?
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I have a hard time reading text in many X programs that use small font sizes. The same size text is much easier to read on Windows systems. Does X make use of the hints in fonts?
If you had bothered to open a dictionary, you would find that it is perk, not perq. And it is spelling, not grammar.
FPGAs can do some neat things, but you are not going to build a fast general purpose computer out of FPGAs. They are relatively slow and make inefficient use of silicon. They do a good job on control and glue logic, plus you can fix design errors and add features without having to rework the hardware.
Both.
Why?
1. The colors (copying the multicolor options) Colors are not subject to patent. So some people are unhappy with their lack of originality. Fine -hold a grudge.
You can have a trademark on a color. Owens-Corning has a trademark for pink colored insulation. Here is a citation.
Microsoft was a "two bit" company at that time. They were a decent sized microcomputer software company, but microcomputer software was a small market. Bill Gates was never going to get rich selling ROM BASIC and compilers to OEMs and geeks.
More like 15..22 kiloton.
Is there anyone out there familiar with Jewish traditions who can comment on this?
The "Kosher for Passover" Coke is the only Coke that is made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup. Plain "Kosher" Coke may use corn syrup. I believe most Coke bottled in the USA is kosher. It may not be marked as kosher, even if it is. Ask your local Rabbi or kashrut authority if you have questions.
Not true. If you have 100 customers who spend 5% of the time on the phone you need a lot less infrastructure than if the same 100 customers spent 100% of the time on the phone.
It's more complicated than that. It depends on the traffic patterns. If a switch and trunks are engineered for a good quality of service during the busiest hour of the day, say 10-11 AM, an Internet user who stays on-line from 6-12 PM doesn't cost the telephone company a penny. There is a huge amount of underutilized capacity in the system because of the need to provide good quality of service during peak usage periods.
An economically rational (this means that it will never happen) billing system would charge the subscriber a fixed rate for the non-usage sensitive components of the service, and a variable rate that would be based on the subscriber's use of the system during peak usage periods. Use of the system during off-peak periods would be free.
The problem with multiple D/A conversions is commonly caused by SLC (subscriber loop carrier)configurations that are connected to the central office switch through a channel bank and analog copper pairs. The modem signal is converted from analog to digital at the SLC, multiplexed into a DS1 and transmitted back to the central office. At the central office, the DS1 is fed into a channel bank that demultiplexes the DS1 and converts each channel from digital to analog. The analog signal travels over a copper wire pair to a line card in the central office switch. The line card converts the analog signal back to a 64 KBPS digital signal before sending it on to the destination. I've been told that many phone companies use this configuration, even though it requires a channel bank, extra wire and more line cards. They want all analog voice circuits to connect to the switch via analog copper loops. The SLC is just used as a way of reducing the amount of cabling on the poles between the subscribers and the central office switch.
If you read government contract bid request lists, look for references to the "Maryland Procurement Office".
The SCELBI 8H is the first computer that I would classify as a PC. It was based on a microprocessor (Intel 8008) and in commercial production.
If the definition of a PC is something running on a single-chip microprocessor, there must be a few Intel 4004 and 8008 systems in use somewhere.
Before that, some people were homebrewing systems from 7400 series TTL chips.
Try smbmount. I tried using smbclient but it was somewhat flakey on my system (RedHat 5.2). smbmount worked flawlessly.
Are you sure about that? I was setting up some SMB connections from a Linux system to a NT system. The Linux system gave me an error message. A bit of research revealed that only one username/password could be associated with the NETBIOS/SMB connection between two systems. I couldn't have multiple users on the Linux system mounting shared drives on a NT system unless they all used a single username/password.
Didn't look very multiuser to me.
Some major American cities (New York, Chicago) are stuck with metered service for residential lines. Most business lines are metered. In many places, metered service is an option on residential lines.
1. Fixed Costs (local loops)
2. Variable Costs (switch capacity, trunks)
3. Billing Costs (counting packets/calls)
The problem with metered service is that the price for call minutes or packets is usually far in excess of the true variable costs. Phone companies want to price products on "value", not cost plus reasonable rate of return.
Another problem is the high cost of the infrastructure needed to collect usage information and generate bills. This is a big number for circuit switched voice, I suspect it would be worse for packetized data. It can be cheaper to provide a flat rate pipe than add all the cruft required for metered service.
The last time I saw some numbers, about 70% of the cost in providing local phone service was in non-usage sensitive things like providing and maintaining the subscriber's local loop. The prices charged by phone companies and PTTs have very little to do with the costs of providing service.
I think the catch is that your hardware and device drivers have to be designed to support a restart. That means the driver must be able to reset the hardware to a known state and reload a checkpointed configuration. I've heard that this is difficult with some video cards. There is a lot of on-board state that isn't saved anywhere.
The idea that the frogs would complain about industrial espionage is hilarious. The DGSE has a long history of spying on American companies and passing the information on to their French competitors.
To expect the NSA or any other signals intelligence organization to not collect available information is extremely naive. That is one of their primary missions. If you believe "gentlemen do not read each other's mail", I've got a bridge to sell you.
This is already fairly common with regular ATM cards. The robber takes the victim to the nearest ATM machine and forces the victim to withdraw cash.
NAT is a kludge. The sooner it goes away, the better. I want a reasonable number, say 16..256, of static, routable IP addresses. IPV4 must die.
He would be on my list. He wrote a great C compiler (BDS C) for CP/M and sold it at a very reasonable price. The alternatives at the time were assembler, various dialects of BASIC and bloatware from Microsoft. Many people got their start in C and HLL programming with BDS C.
> Beside that point, even on a T3, 1.1gig download (size of the Matrix files) is longer than an hour.
Actually, it would take less than 4 minutes, assuming that you didn't have to share the line.
My understanding of the movie theater business is that they break even on ticket sales, the theater's profits come from the concessions stand.
It sounds wonderful. My concern is that it will end up like TIFF, a standard with so many features that nobody implements them all.
It's been a while since I've used a language with built-in GC. The one thing that I never found to be acceptable was that the program/system froze for anywhere from 100s of milliseconds to several seconds when the GC decided to clean up. Has this problem been fixed in modern implementations of GC?