This is comleatly hypothetical, but is how I would probably do it:
Good GPS/Good Cell: Operate Normally
Good GPS/No Cell: Check for signal every so often, or after moving a certain distance.
No GPS/Good Cell: Operate Normally
No GPS/No Cell: Decide that reception is very poor in general. Enter _really_ low power mode, since operation is pointless. Occassionally wake-up and see if the situation has changed.
Pure speculation anyway, but is how I would probably design such a system.
I really don't know much about the specific details of cellular communications, except for this little experiment we tried a few months ago in our EMC chamber work. For those of you who have never seen one, an EMC chamber is basically a room which has been heavily shielded to prevent any outside electromagnetic signals from getting inside. One day, we locked a cell-phone inside the chamber, just to see what it would do. As soon as the door was closed, the cell-phone did two interesting things: First, the output power seemed to go up, and second, it tried to, for lack of a better word, ping, a cell-tower much more often. Anyway, that would seem to support your observations.
Yes, the thought that a business/organization could sue over legitimate search engine ordering (i.e. no bribes, etc. involved) is scary. This case, however, does not deal with that at all. The decision simply forced the owner of www.university-of-oxford.com, not really a legitimate sounding address anyway, to release control of the domain to Oxford. Yes, a spokesperson for oxford inidicated that they would like all Oxford search results to point to Oxford, but the actual decision had nothing to do with that.
Rather, I think the issue is minimizing the unexpected downtime that occurs at a critical moment. Lets say you are using a computer in surgical equipment. Let also say that, heaven forbid, there is a bug in the software code. While the surgeon is busy fiddling around inside the patients head, the equipment freezes up. Every second that it takes to restart the equipment, there is the possibility of harming the patient.
Obviously, equipment this critical should never ever crash. It's nice to know, though, that should something happen, the equipment will restart quickly.
1)If you only have a few workstations for a lot of people, you are going to end up paying people to twiddle their thumbs while someone else types a memo.
I think the article assumes that you will provide enough workstations to meet the needs of the office. In many offices, this will mean one workstation per user. In some it won't. The availibility of workstations is a seperate issue.
It is cheaper to buy $300 workstations thatn $700 workstations.
2)Slower workstations are, well, slower. those small groups of 30 second waits add up.
The workstation simply provides a display for an X-app running on a central server. If the author's experiance is correct, that $700 workstation will not be perceivably faster than a $300 workstation. Of cousre, YMMV.
3)Older equipment breaks more and is harder to find parts for. Try to find 72 pin simms that are guaranteed to work for a decent price. didnt think so. How about bios issues with those old 2 dollar motherboards when you try to slap a newer hard drive on them. Digging up AT power supplies? Yes, they do still exist, but they are getting a little more difficult to find. and the pain of working with older machines when they break is hellacious. swapping the power supply in an ATX machine takes about 2 minutes. In an AT machine, it takes about half an hour since I have to pull the entire machine apart. And yes, I do do this regularly. I changed 2 AT power supplies last week. (I work at a Uni, not everyone has new machines).
Agreed. However, there should be little need to upgrade the workstation once purchased. That leaves maintainance, which can still be a bitch. Of course, if you are buying $100 workstations, it will probably be cheaper to by a new workstation than repair all but the simplist problems.
4) Old networking sucks. One of the major points of having a network is having the ability to share files.
The workstations have no need to share files for everyday use since the application is running on the central server. The central server is all that needs a good connection to the file-servers.
5) No office is in a vacuum. Abiword and StarOffice may be great, but none of them read all Office file formats perfectly yet. You still need to use microsoft products to communicate with other offices, for better or worse. Not a troll, just the truth.
I agree fully. The one thing that prevents me from using kword on a regular basis it the lack of good word import/export. I hope this is high on the list of office app. developers?
6) Outlook. omygod Outlook is neat. I never saw the utility of outlook and exchange until I worked in an office that used it efficiently. It is at the point where it is indespensible. The ability to share calendars, email, move files around, schedule meetings, etc is wonderful. Yes, this does mean you have to run NT and exchange on a sever, bt we have made this concession. With the exception of our exchange server and our pdc, we are all FreeBSD.
No argument.
Re:um, yeah, whatever
on
Make Your Own DSL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I Am Not And Never Ever Hope To Be A Lawyer, but it seems like you and your 20 best friends (and probably the landlord as well) could form some kind of legal entity which could then contract for business T-1 access.
The best way I can think of is to use the RSA key authentication method. A RSA key pair is used to authenticate, rather than a password. This way, the password is never typed over the network connection.
True. From the article, it seems that they felt the best way to recreate the material was to recreate as closly as possible the centuries old process. If that is the case, I think one should assume that the process is as similar as the researchers were capable of making it. In which case, a patent seems kind of shady. Anyway, just my thoughts.
How can a 600 (or more) year old material be patented? Even assuming that the patent only covers the method used to create the steel, how is the re-discovery of a 600 year old method of steel producton patentable?
The value of a digitally recorded (and usually compressed) copy of a musical composition is almost zero. It has some value because some resourcs are needed to down load it. That's not my main point however.
If we were to wake up tomorrow, and find that all the content companies had gone bankrupt and closed shop, there would be individuals and groups of inidividuals willing to sponsor the production of new content. Thus, only the conviently encoded representation is free, not the original creative composition.
Except that there is a good chance that the index to pi requires more bits to represent than the length of the origional file. It has been mathematically proven that a compression algorithm cannot be created which compresses every file. (Note: I guess this topic comes up so often that the comp.compression FAQ contains a version of this proof.)
How many have used the self-serv checkout at Meijer?
I use the self-serve check-out almost every time I buy something from Meijer. Personally, I find it very easy to use, intuitive and conveniant. However, almost every time I have used the self-serve check-out, there has been another customer who is hopelessly confused.
I think the issue here (and it applies to voting machines as well) is that there is a large segment of the US population which has never used a computer. The reason why people have a problem with this type of system is that many elements of even the most simple user interface don't necessarily look like their real-world counterparts. Most computer users recognize a beveled regtangle as a button which can be somehow actuated to perform a task. Except on computer style keyboards, how often have you seen a mechanical button that looks like a computer UI button? If nobody told you, would you (honestly) know that a beveled rectange would perform some action if pushed? Probably not.
Just because it comes naturally to us does not meant it will to the entire population.
Newer "Green" motherboards normally have just a few large low power CMOS VLSI parts on them, have BIOS support for cycling down HDD's when idle and idle power control for monitors under windows drivers. Linux isn't quite there on the power friendly side of the equation.
My two linux boxes both spin down their hard drives when not in use, and the one with a monitor powers down the monitor after a few minutes of dis-use. Linux is at least as there as windows when it comes to power savings.
If you stream, you must pay royalties to RIAA, ASCAP, and BMI. If you pay royalties, you must recoup those expenses somehow. If you recoup expenses, you are collecting money and must pay Thomson. (Did my logic miss a step?)
You are assuming that everyone streaming MP3's is streaming content owned by the major record labels. Most sites streaming said content legally can probably afford the fees. The step you missed are the small sites run by individuals on little or no budget and streaming things such as independant local bands, interviews, and so forth where there is no profit, but there is streaming related revenue (probably not even enough to cover bandwidth and hosting costs) which would be subject to the $2000/2% fee.
Re:This is cool, but I have to wonder
on
LED Flashlights
·
· Score: 1
Well, after the metetor hits/nuclear war breaks out/other awful event happens, only those people who know flashlights well will survive and have offspring.
But the/. folks will die off as soon as they realize their photon light has fallen victim to the EM pulse...
Well, all computer cases are spec'ed to keep any RF inside the case
I'm not sure this is the case. My understanding is that a case manufacturer is only required to ensure that the case, as sold, meets the requirements. If they sell an empty case, they do not have to meet any EMI/RFI requirements. If they sell a case with power supply, they just have to ensure that the case keeps the power supply's EMI/RFI to an acceptable level. Compare the amount of trouble computer manufacturers go to with shielding with the amount of shielding present in most (especially inexpensive) cases sold.
It is valuable any time we can attribute functions to areas of the brain. This allows, for example, surgeons removing a tumor or treating a severe head injury to plan their work so as to minimize damage to important areas of the brain.
Your calculations assume a power factor of one. In an AC circuit, real power is RMS Volts * RMS Current * Power Factor. Power factor is the cosine of the phase angle between the voltage and current waveforms. When the voltage and current are in phase, which only occurs with a resistive load, the power factor is one. The power factor of the power supply, which probably has an inductive or capacitive component, is less that 1, although probably not much less.
However, hardly anyone rearranges their keyboard keys to make it harder for an attacker to enter their root password. The data (password) is not open, but the method used to enter it (the keyboard layout) is an open standard.
True, broadband access is not, and hopefully never will become, a necessity in the way electricity, water, and fuel are today. However, as more and more services are offered exclusivly on-line, there will be a gap between those with broad-band access, and those with slower access.
An Example:
Here at school all class registration is done on-line via a web-based system. Based on your class standing, you are assigned a period of time in which you can access the system and register for classes for the next term. Everyone with the same class standing registers during the same period of time. For example, everyone in their second sophmore term registered last Monday beginning at 6:00pm. Here is where the inequity between broad-band and traditional access comes into play: If you are registering from the campus LAN (computer labs, dorms, on-campus apartments, etc.) pages load almost instantly, while if you are registering via a modem connection into the university network, pages load much more slowly. The result is that students registering via the campus LAN are more likely to get into their first choice of classes than are those registering via a dial-up connection.
Now lets expand this further. Lets say that many services now provided by traditional means are provided through an application service provider setup. Those without decent bandwidth will become second-class citizens.
We need the government write legislation which provides a fair, competitive market-place, to ensure that everyone has access to broad-band internet. Also, remember that 100 or so years ago, neither electricity, water, phone-service, or natural-gas were a 'utility' by your definition.
Slashdot Mirror
I would rather my future children live a full life in the enjoyment of freedom rather than a long life deprived of freedom.
This is comleatly hypothetical, but is how I would probably do it:
Good GPS/Good Cell: Operate Normally
Good GPS/No Cell: Check for signal every so often, or after moving a certain distance.
No GPS/Good Cell: Operate Normally
No GPS/No Cell: Decide that reception is very poor in general. Enter _really_ low power mode, since operation is pointless. Occassionally wake-up and see if the situation has changed.
Pure speculation anyway, but is how I would probably design such a system.
I really don't know much about the specific details of cellular communications, except for this little experiment we tried a few months ago in our EMC chamber work. For those of you who have never seen one, an EMC chamber is basically a room which has been heavily shielded to prevent any outside electromagnetic signals from getting inside. One day, we locked a cell-phone inside the chamber, just to see what it would do. As soon as the door was closed, the cell-phone did two interesting things: First, the output power seemed to go up, and second, it tried to, for lack of a better word, ping, a cell-tower much more often. Anyway, that would seem to support your observations.
Yes, the thought that a business/organization could sue over legitimate search engine ordering (i.e. no bribes, etc. involved) is scary. This case, however, does not deal with that at all. The decision simply forced the owner of www.university-of-oxford.com, not really a legitimate sounding address anyway, to release control of the domain to Oxford. Yes, a spokesperson for oxford inidicated that they would like all Oxford search results to point to Oxford, but the actual decision had nothing to do with that.
Rather, I think the issue is minimizing the unexpected downtime that occurs at a critical moment. Lets say you are using a computer in surgical equipment. Let also say that, heaven forbid, there is a bug in the software code. While the surgeon is busy fiddling around inside the patients head, the equipment freezes up. Every second that it takes to restart the equipment, there is the possibility of harming the patient.
Obviously, equipment this critical should never ever crash. It's nice to know, though, that should something happen, the equipment will restart quickly.
1)If you only have a few workstations for a lot of people, you are going to end up paying people to twiddle their thumbs while someone else types a memo.
I think the article assumes that you will provide enough workstations to meet the needs of the office. In many offices, this will mean one workstation per user. In some it won't. The availibility of workstations is a seperate issue. It is cheaper to buy $300 workstations thatn $700 workstations.
2)Slower workstations are, well, slower. those small groups of 30 second waits add up.
The workstation simply provides a display for an X-app running on a central server. If the author's experiance is correct, that $700 workstation will not be perceivably faster than a $300 workstation. Of cousre, YMMV.
3)Older equipment breaks more and is harder to find parts for. Try to find 72 pin simms that are guaranteed to work for a decent price. didnt think so. How about bios issues with those old 2 dollar motherboards when you try to slap a newer hard drive on them. Digging up AT power supplies? Yes, they do still exist, but they are getting a little more difficult to find. and the pain of working with older machines when they break is hellacious. swapping the power supply in an ATX machine takes about 2 minutes. In an AT machine, it takes about half an hour since I have to pull the entire machine apart. And yes, I do do this regularly. I changed 2 AT power supplies last week. (I work at a Uni, not everyone has new machines).
Agreed. However, there should be little need to upgrade the workstation once purchased. That leaves maintainance, which can still be a bitch. Of course, if you are buying $100 workstations, it will probably be cheaper to by a new workstation than repair all but the simplist problems.
4) Old networking sucks. One of the major points of having a network is having the ability to share files.
The workstations have no need to share files for everyday use since the application is running on the central server. The central server is all that needs a good connection to the file-servers.
5) No office is in a vacuum. Abiword and StarOffice may be great, but none of them read all Office file formats perfectly yet. You still need to use microsoft products to communicate with other offices, for better or worse. Not a troll, just the truth.
I agree fully. The one thing that prevents me from using kword on a regular basis it the lack of good word import/export. I hope this is high on the list of office app. developers?
6) Outlook. omygod Outlook is neat. I never saw the utility of outlook and exchange until I worked in an office that used it efficiently. It is at the point where it is indespensible. The ability to share calendars, email, move files around, schedule meetings, etc is wonderful. Yes, this does mean you have to run NT and exchange on a sever, bt we have made this concession. With the exception of our exchange server and our pdc, we are all FreeBSD.
No argument.
I Am Not And Never Ever Hope To Be A Lawyer, but it seems like you and your 20 best friends (and probably the landlord as well) could form some kind of legal entity which could then contract for business T-1 access.
The best way I can think of is to use the RSA key authentication method. A RSA key pair is used to authenticate, rather than a password. This way, the password is never typed over the network connection.
True. From the article, it seems that they felt the best way to recreate the material was to recreate as closly as possible the centuries old process. If that is the case, I think one should assume that the process is as similar as the researchers were capable of making it. In which case, a patent seems kind of shady. Anyway, just my thoughts.
How can a 600 (or more) year old material be patented? Even assuming that the patent only covers the method used to create the steel, how is the re-discovery of a 600 year old method of steel producton patentable?
Umm..Isn't water about the last thing you want to put on a magnesium fire?
The dorm I'm in has a LAN (yes, there are nearly continuous (and full) games of CS and UT)
Music is free now. It's value is zero dollars.
Bullshit.
The value of a digitally recorded (and usually compressed) copy of a musical composition is almost zero. It has some value because some resourcs are needed to down load it. That's not my main point however.
If we were to wake up tomorrow, and find that all the content companies had gone bankrupt and closed shop, there would be individuals and groups of inidividuals willing to sponsor the production of new content. Thus, only the conviently encoded representation is free, not the original creative composition.
Except that there is a good chance that the index to pi requires more bits to represent than the length of the origional file. It has been mathematically proven that a compression algorithm cannot be created which compresses every file. (Note: I guess this topic comes up so often that the comp.compression FAQ contains a version of this proof.)
I don't think these are really marketed as servers either. It looks more like they are targeted for use as computation farms.
How many have used the self-serv checkout at Meijer?
I use the self-serve check-out almost every time I buy something from Meijer. Personally, I find it very easy to use, intuitive and conveniant. However, almost every time I have used the self-serve check-out, there has been another customer who is hopelessly confused.
I think the issue here (and it applies to voting machines as well) is that there is a large segment of the US population which has never used a computer. The reason why people have a problem with this type of system is that many elements of even the most simple user interface don't necessarily look like their real-world counterparts. Most computer users recognize a beveled regtangle as a button which can be somehow actuated to perform a task. Except on computer style keyboards, how often have you seen a mechanical button that looks like a computer UI button? If nobody told you, would you (honestly) know that a beveled rectange would perform some action if pushed? Probably not.
Just because it comes naturally to us does not meant it will to the entire population.
What I wouldn't give for a mod-point right now.
Newer "Green" motherboards normally have just a few large low power CMOS VLSI parts on them, have BIOS support for cycling down HDD's when idle and idle power control for monitors under windows drivers. Linux isn't quite there on the power friendly side of the equation.
My two linux boxes both spin down their hard drives when not in use, and the one with a monitor powers down the monitor after a few minutes of dis-use. Linux is at least as there as windows when it comes to power savings.
If you stream, you must pay royalties to RIAA, ASCAP, and BMI. If you pay royalties, you must recoup those expenses somehow. If you recoup expenses, you are collecting money and must pay Thomson. (Did my logic miss a step?)
You are assuming that everyone streaming MP3's is streaming content owned by the major record labels. Most sites streaming said content legally can probably afford the fees. The step you missed are the small sites run by individuals on little or no budget and streaming things such as independant local bands, interviews, and so forth where there is no profit, but there is streaming related revenue (probably not even enough to cover bandwidth and hosting costs) which would be subject to the $2000/2% fee.
Well, after the metetor hits/nuclear war breaks out/other awful event happens, only those people who know flashlights well will survive and have offspring.
/. folks will die off as soon as they realize their photon light has fallen victim to the EM pulse...
But the
Well, all computer cases are spec'ed to keep any RF inside the case
I'm not sure this is the case. My understanding is that a case manufacturer is only required to ensure that the case, as sold, meets the requirements. If they sell an empty case, they do not have to meet any EMI/RFI requirements. If they sell a case with power supply, they just have to ensure that the case keeps the power supply's EMI/RFI to an acceptable level. Compare the amount of trouble computer manufacturers go to with shielding with the amount of shielding present in most (especially inexpensive) cases sold.
It is valuable any time we can attribute functions to areas of the brain. This allows, for example, surgeons removing a tumor or treating a severe head injury to plan their work so as to minimize damage to important areas of the brain.
Your calculations assume a power factor of one. In an AC circuit, real power is RMS Volts * RMS Current * Power Factor. Power factor is the cosine of the phase angle between the voltage and current waveforms. When the voltage and current are in phase, which only occurs with a resistive load, the power factor is one. The power factor of the power supply, which probably has an inductive or capacitive component, is less that 1, although probably not much less.
Uhm...Nobody?
However, hardly anyone rearranges their keyboard keys to make it harder for an attacker to enter their root password. The data (password) is not open, but the method used to enter it (the keyboard layout) is an open standard.
True, broadband access is not, and hopefully never will become, a necessity in the way electricity, water, and fuel are today. However, as more and more services are offered exclusivly on-line, there will be a gap between those with broad-band access, and those with slower access.
An Example:
Here at school all class registration is done on-line via a web-based system. Based on your class standing, you are assigned a period of time in which you can access the system and register for classes for the next term. Everyone with the same class standing registers during the same period of time. For example, everyone in their second sophmore term registered last Monday beginning at 6:00pm. Here is where the inequity between broad-band and traditional access comes into play: If you are registering from the campus LAN (computer labs, dorms, on-campus apartments, etc.) pages load almost instantly, while if you are registering via a modem connection into the university network, pages load much more slowly. The result is that students registering via the campus LAN are more likely to get into their first choice of classes than are those registering via a dial-up connection.
Now lets expand this further. Lets say that many services now provided by traditional means are provided through an application service provider setup. Those without decent bandwidth will become second-class citizens.
We need the government write legislation which provides a fair, competitive market-place, to ensure that everyone has access to broad-band internet. Also, remember that 100 or so years ago, neither electricity, water, phone-service, or natural-gas were a 'utility' by your definition.