The C64 had a 1MHz 6502. The Spectrum had a 3.5MHz Z80.
Since I've programmed assembly both on the 6502 and Z80, no I am not an early victim of "clock speeds". A 3.5MHz Z80 blows away a 1MHz 6502 so much so there were a few Spectrum games that couldn't be ported to the C64 despite the C64's hardware that offloaded some jobs from the CPU.
The BBC Micro with a 2MHz 6502 was faster than the Spectrum, though.
But both the C64 and BBC Micro cost almost three times as much as a Spectrum.
No, you can use the CP2200 ethernet chip with an 8 bit machine, and virtually everything will still be left up to the 8 bit system. Someone's made a TCP/IP stack for the ZX-81. You can also port something like the uIP TCP/IP stack.
The Sinclair Z88 (a laptop Z80 based system) has a TCP/IP stack that works, too.
I'm using the W5100 because I don't want to get involved with the TCP/IP side of things, I just don't have the time. But the W5100 chip allows access to the MAC layer so anyone with the time can port uIP or write their own TCP/IP stack if they want the 8 bit machine to actually do all the work.
For us in Rightpondia, it was the Sinclair Spectrum http://www.worldofspectrum.org/. Less than half the price of a Commodore 64, and with a faster processor, and smaller form factor, we got to feel smug despite the rubber keyboard:-)
Also, the BBC Microcomputer. Twice as fast as the C64, and about the same price when it came out, and with a disc system that was actually worth a damn. The Beeb was fast, expandable (it could take sideways ROMs and RAMs), was easily upgradable to being networked (our school had a LAN in 1985 of BBC Microcomputers using Econet).
The nice thing about the 8 bit days were there were lots of different, interesting architectures. It wasn't just a homogenous, boring, Wintel hegemony. So even though us Sinclair fans think the C64 is rubbish, it's still good it existed!
You don't need to do anything fancy - I can make PCBs at home with 7/7 design rules (7mil/7mil - in metric, just under 0.2mm traces and 0.2mm spaces between traces) using a laser printer, cheap "inkjet photo paper", and a clothes iron to iron the circuit design onto copper clad board, then etch with ferric chloride.
You can do surface mount reflow soldering (i.e. the same process an electronics factory uses to solder a PCB) with a toaster oven or even just an electric hotplate.
I don't see how making things opt-in and the bot easily identifiable is a demand to go out of business; it sounds very reasonable to me.
Some channels (particularly support types) will have use for a search bot.
It seems a bit underhanded how they disguised the bots as a human and used tor to hide the activity. Look at the web: the only search engines that try and disguise themselves and which ignore robots.txt belong to spammers. Legitimate search engines obey robots.txt and are easily identifiable by their user agent. They don't disguise themselves as MSIE.
I was searching Google Groups in about 2002, for information on a linking problem when building Nethack (a missing library) on a rather oddball MIPS machine running Linux. The first hit that came back...... was me, asking exactly the same question in 1992.
It was a very strange moment. (Incidentally, no one had an answer then, either. I don't remember how I solved it then, or how I solved it in 2002, but I do remember eventually solving the problem).
I don't agree. IRC isn't some homogenous thing that can go downhill - there are thousands of networks and maybe millions of channels - so while a particular network may have gone 'downhill', others may well have improved.
I've been using irc since about 1991. Our channel doesn't suffer from spam, bots or abuse.
Sadly, I'm not seeing the same thing - I host a server for about 15-odd domains and spam has been inexorably increasing for at least three or four years. It's getting so bad that the spam filter is putting significant and continuous load on the machine, even though 50% of email is rejected flat out by the SBL-XBL.
The internet may be a significant force multiplier for organizations much smaller than traditional governments, but then again, so is the printing press and the telephone. I would argue that the government itself is a much larger force amplifier to the terrorist; indeed - this is just what the terrorist does - uses the government as an amplifier (while their action, however henious, is just a gnat sting to society, the resulting government reaction has a much, much larger impact on society than the terrorist ever did).
Re:Nanosolar: 10 times cheaper than coal already h
on
Google Goes Green
·
· Score: 1
No. Cheap solar hasn't been done until I can actually go out and buy this stuff for 30c/watt. Until then it's just a press release. I hope it's true, but I'm not holding my breath. I keep hearing about solar-power-tech-du-jour that never actually reaches production.
Incidentally, this company whose press release you linked is owned at least in part by Google...
I don't want a user experience. If I'm having a "user experience", then the application or operating system is getting in my way. I want the OS or app to melt into the background so I hardly think that I'm using it.
The thing about XP though was it offered a real, tangible improvement over Windows 98 and Windows ME, the typical desktop of the period, and people quickly found the benefit. XP was much more stable than 98 or ME, and even with the Teletubbies user interface, didn't look all that bad.
But Vista doesn't offer any tangible improvements - it's not more stable, it's questionable if it's better looking (I recently helped a friend set up some hardware on his new Vista computer - he has his Vista machine for business next to his XP machine for home use, and Windows XP looks clean and uncluttered in comparison to Vista), and it's no faster (and indeed, on the same hardware, much slower).
The griping about XP, I recall, had mostly quietened down after 2 or 3 months after its release, and no one was asking for a new computer with Win98 instead of XP. But now a year after Vista came out - few people prefer it over XP, and major manufacturers are still offering pre-installed Windows XP.
The paging out mechanism in Windows is (or was, at least as of at Windows 2000) pretty bizarre. I've not tested this again since then, so this may be wrong for Vista. This is all from memory so some details may be hazy, but you can get the gist.
The bit of the VMM which decides when to push out something to the page file only looks at pages that are in the CPU's translation lookaside buffer. This is somewhat odd since pages referenced by the TLB are going to be recently or frequently used ones. The upshot of this is that if you have a large process that isn't all that active, but frequently touches the relatively few pages that are referenced by the TLB, Windows can *never* swap any of it out, even if 99% of the memory allocated hasn't been touched for days. This means when another large process starts, you get a major never ending swapping storm. I've seen this actually happen, and a while ago, wrote a test program to explore this and confirm my understanding of the VMM was correct.
I think this is why you get the rather costly and inefficient Windows culture of "one server per service" in the data centre.
We are also having signal strength problems with a completely unrelated bit of kit (a Datalogic Jet handheld terminal). The GSM hardware is crap - and whether it works well or not depends on which provider's SIM it's using. It doesn't work worth a damn with either of the mobile providers we have here (Manx Telecom and Cable and Wireless), but it does work with an O2 card. I don't know what might be on a SIM card that would make a radio work worse or better. (We are about to tell the supplier 'not fit for purpose', in fact).
You can drive your 100hp car for 15 minutes *with the throttle pedal floored all the time*. A 100hp electric car will only be using 100hp at wide open "throttle". The 24hp moped will probably run for several hours, since most of the time you'll only be using 2 or 3 hp.
How often do you drive at WOT? Not very often. Additionally, an electric car will have things like regenerative braking, so you get most of the energy back when you slow down, and will not use any power while stopped in traffic. Off a 1 hour charge, you'd be able to easily get an hour's typical commuting driving in a 100hp car.
There's also like an 8 hour period when we sleep and can't use the car; why not fully charge it during that 8 hour period?
Fuel here already costs almost the equivalent of $8/usg but people are STILL buying gigantic SUVs. Admittedly, not as many as do in the US, but people are so addicted to their cars, they'd probably go without food before going without their car.
I couldn't help think about my boss' new MacBook Pro. He got the 2.4 Ghz model with maxed RAM and all the upgrades. It must have cost him over $5000, but boy that thing screams. But 10 years from now, I imagine it'll be much like the G3 iMac is today. A crappy old relic that can't run anything at a decent speed and has very little resale value.
Not necessarily - the rate of improvement has slowed dramatically over the last few years. At home, I have a Compaq laptop from 2000, and it's still entirely adequate for typical day to day use; it's at least 7 years old. (It could do with one extra memory module, but that's not throwing the whole machine away, that's just adding a bit more memory). My main PC at home will be 5 years old in January. A 2GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM is still entirely adequate for virtually any task I care to run. I feel no need to replace the machine.
Neither has much resale value, but neither is a "crappy old relic". They both work very well. I suspect a newly purchased Macbook will still be perfectly usable in 10 years time, even with modern software.
This happens with all technology - take aviation, in a book I'm reading about the air defence of Malta, a design from 1936 was considered old in 1940. But today, things like the Typhoon, the production model designed nearly 15 years old, is considered a brand new cutting edge design, and most military jets are designs from the 70s and constructed in the 1980s and not considered obsolete.
The same thing is happening to computers - eventually, you have all the power you'll ever need for browsing the web, reading email, writing letters and doing spreadheets. Well, not eventually - we passed that mark a good 7 years ago if my Compaq is anything to go by.
Technology also exists to recycle nuclear waste - France uses it, and their entire nuclear industry only produces as much waste as will fill a small garage per year - and most of French electricity is from nuclear power stations.
Point me to a coal plant that captures all its CO2 instead of simply discharging it into the atmosphere. How many hundreds of years will Bangladesh be rendered unusable when sea levels rise?
The Z88 will also run for tens of hours on a set of AA batteries - uses very little power! It really was a very nice machine.
Also, before Sinclair had to sell out to Amstrad, they were working on the Pandora design. Many people credit Apple with inventing the clamshell laptop style, but Rick Dickinson's industrial design for the Pandora was the now ubiquitous clamshell - in 1986. Unfortunately, Amstrad killed the project off when they bought Sinclair (although to be fair, in 1986, LCD technology wasn't really up to much and while monochrome LCD panels existed that would have worked, they wouldn't really have made for a great display!). Looking at Rick Dickinson's pictures and mock-ups of the Pandora design, they did flirt with Clive Sinclair's flat CRT for a while - presumably they concluded it'd be too big and power hungry and an LCD was the right compromise despite Clive Sinclair not really liking them.
Slashdot Mirror
The C64 had a 1MHz 6502. The Spectrum had a 3.5MHz Z80.
Since I've programmed assembly both on the 6502 and Z80, no I am not an early victim of "clock speeds". A 3.5MHz Z80 blows away a 1MHz 6502 so much so there were a few Spectrum games that couldn't be ported to the C64 despite the C64's hardware that offloaded some jobs from the CPU.
The BBC Micro with a 2MHz 6502 was faster than the Spectrum, though.
But both the C64 and BBC Micro cost almost three times as much as a Spectrum.
No, you can use the CP2200 ethernet chip with an 8 bit machine, and virtually everything will still be left up to the 8 bit system. Someone's made a TCP/IP stack for the ZX-81. You can also port something like the uIP TCP/IP stack.
The Sinclair Z88 (a laptop Z80 based system) has a TCP/IP stack that works, too.
I'm using the W5100 because I don't want to get involved with the TCP/IP side of things, I just don't have the time. But the W5100 chip allows access to the MAC layer so anyone with the time can port uIP or write their own TCP/IP stack if they want the 8 bit machine to actually do all the work.
For us in Rightpondia, it was the Sinclair Spectrum http://www.worldofspectrum.org/. Less than half the price of a Commodore 64, and with a faster processor, and smaller form factor, we got to feel smug despite the rubber keyboard :-)
Also, the BBC Microcomputer. Twice as fast as the C64, and about the same price when it came out, and with a disc system that was actually worth a damn. The Beeb was fast, expandable (it could take sideways ROMs and RAMs), was easily upgradable to being networked (our school had a LAN in 1985 of BBC Microcomputers using Econet).
The nice thing about the 8 bit days were there were lots of different, interesting architectures. It wasn't just a homogenous, boring, Wintel hegemony. So even though us Sinclair fans think the C64 is rubbish, it's still good it existed!
You don't need to do anything fancy - I can make PCBs at home with 7/7 design rules (7mil/7mil - in metric, just under 0.2mm traces and 0.2mm spaces between traces) using a laser printer, cheap "inkjet photo paper", and a clothes iron to iron the circuit design onto copper clad board, then etch with ferric chloride.
You can do surface mount reflow soldering (i.e. the same process an electronics factory uses to solder a PCB) with a toaster oven or even just an electric hotplate.
They could install a larger version of these.
This video is most chortlesome...
When Bollards Attack:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_Cw0QJU8ro
Bike helmets aren't compulsory in the UK for anyone.
I don't see how making things opt-in and the bot easily identifiable is a demand to go out of business; it sounds very reasonable to me.
Some channels (particularly support types) will have use for a search bot.
It seems a bit underhanded how they disguised the bots as a human and used tor to hide the activity. Look at the web: the only search engines that try and disguise themselves and which ignore robots.txt belong to spammers. Legitimate search engines obey robots.txt and are easily identifiable by their user agent. They don't disguise themselves as MSIE.
I was searching Google Groups in about 2002, for information on a linking problem when building Nethack (a missing library) on a rather oddball MIPS machine running Linux. The first hit that came back... ... was me, asking exactly the same question in 1992.
It was a very strange moment.
(Incidentally, no one had an answer then, either. I don't remember how I solved it then, or how I solved it in 2002, but I do remember eventually solving the problem).
I don't agree. IRC isn't some homogenous thing that can go downhill - there are thousands of networks and maybe millions of channels - so while a particular network may have gone 'downhill', others may well have improved.
I've been using irc since about 1991. Our channel doesn't suffer from spam, bots or abuse.
Sadly, I'm not seeing the same thing - I host a server for about 15-odd domains and spam has been inexorably increasing for at least three or four years. It's getting so bad that the spam filter is putting significant and continuous load on the machine, even though 50% of email is rejected flat out by the SBL-XBL.
The internet may be a significant force multiplier for organizations much smaller than traditional governments, but then again, so is the printing press and the telephone. I would argue that the government itself is a much larger force amplifier to the terrorist; indeed - this is just what the terrorist does - uses the government as an amplifier (while their action, however henious, is just a gnat sting to society, the resulting government reaction has a much, much larger impact on society than the terrorist ever did).
No. Cheap solar hasn't been done until I can actually go out and buy this stuff for 30c/watt. Until then it's just a press release. I hope it's true, but I'm not holding my breath. I keep hearing about solar-power-tech-du-jour that never actually reaches production.
Incidentally, this company whose press release you linked is owned at least in part by Google...
AAArrrgh. User experience.
I don't want a user experience. If I'm having a "user experience", then the application or operating system is getting in my way. I want the OS or app to melt into the background so I hardly think that I'm using it.
The thing about XP though was it offered a real, tangible improvement over Windows 98 and Windows ME, the typical desktop of the period, and people quickly found the benefit. XP was much more stable than 98 or ME, and even with the Teletubbies user interface, didn't look all that bad.
But Vista doesn't offer any tangible improvements - it's not more stable, it's questionable if it's better looking (I recently helped a friend set up some hardware on his new Vista computer - he has his Vista machine for business next to his XP machine for home use, and Windows XP looks clean and uncluttered in comparison to Vista), and it's no faster (and indeed, on the same hardware, much slower).
The griping about XP, I recall, had mostly quietened down after 2 or 3 months after its release, and no one was asking for a new computer with Win98 instead of XP. But now a year after Vista came out - few people prefer it over XP, and major manufacturers are still offering pre-installed Windows XP.
The paging out mechanism in Windows is (or was, at least as of at Windows 2000) pretty bizarre. I've not tested this again since then, so this may be wrong for Vista. This is all from memory so some details may be hazy, but you can get the gist.
The bit of the VMM which decides when to push out something to the page file only looks at pages that are in the CPU's translation lookaside buffer. This is somewhat odd since pages referenced by the TLB are going to be recently or frequently used ones. The upshot of this is that if you have a large process that isn't all that active, but frequently touches the relatively few pages that are referenced by the TLB, Windows can *never* swap any of it out, even if 99% of the memory allocated hasn't been touched for days. This means when another large process starts, you get a major never ending swapping storm. I've seen this actually happen, and a while ago, wrote a test program to explore this and confirm my understanding of the VMM was correct.
I think this is why you get the rather costly and inefficient Windows culture of "one server per service" in the data centre.
Sure you didn't have some optional sideways ROM or a sideways RAM board? The BBC doesn't have a CMOS battery backed memory (the Master does though).
The officer ordered him out of the vehicle; he complied. He wasn't being threatening at all.
While he was a jackass, I don't think there was a case for a tasing there.
We are also having signal strength problems with a completely unrelated bit of kit (a Datalogic Jet handheld terminal). The GSM hardware is crap - and whether it works well or not depends on which provider's SIM it's using. It doesn't work worth a damn with either of the mobile providers we have here (Manx Telecom and Cable and Wireless), but it does work with an O2 card. I don't know what might be on a SIM card that would make a radio work worse or better. (We are about to tell the supplier 'not fit for purpose', in fact).
That's only a temporary condition, which won't last long (in geological terms). The moon has been closer to earth, and is moving away.
You can drive your 100hp car for 15 minutes *with the throttle pedal floored all the time*. A 100hp electric car will only be using 100hp at wide open "throttle". The 24hp moped will probably run for several hours, since most of the time you'll only be using 2 or 3 hp.
How often do you drive at WOT? Not very often. Additionally, an electric car will have things like regenerative braking, so you get most of the energy back when you slow down, and will not use any power while stopped in traffic. Off a 1 hour charge, you'd be able to easily get an hour's typical commuting driving in a 100hp car.
There's also like an 8 hour period when we sleep and can't use the car; why not fully charge it during that 8 hour period?
Fuel here already costs almost the equivalent of $8/usg but people are STILL buying gigantic SUVs. Admittedly, not as many as do in the US, but people are so addicted to their cars, they'd probably go without food before going without their car.
TNT have simply washed their hands of the problem. "It wasn't recorded, not our problem guv. And even if it is, we won't be compensating anyone".
Not necessarily - the rate of improvement has slowed dramatically over the last few years. At home, I have a Compaq laptop from 2000, and it's still entirely adequate for typical day to day use; it's at least 7 years old. (It could do with one extra memory module, but that's not throwing the whole machine away, that's just adding a bit more memory). My main PC at home will be 5 years old in January. A 2GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM is still entirely adequate for virtually any task I care to run. I feel no need to replace the machine.
Neither has much resale value, but neither is a "crappy old relic". They both work very well. I suspect a newly purchased Macbook will still be perfectly usable in 10 years time, even with modern software.
This happens with all technology - take aviation, in a book I'm reading about the air defence of Malta, a design from 1936 was considered old in 1940. But today, things like the Typhoon, the production model designed nearly 15 years old, is considered a brand new cutting edge design, and most military jets are designs from the 70s and constructed in the 1980s and not considered obsolete.
The same thing is happening to computers - eventually, you have all the power you'll ever need for browsing the web, reading email, writing letters and doing spreadheets. Well, not eventually - we passed that mark a good 7 years ago if my Compaq is anything to go by.
Technology also exists to recycle nuclear waste - France uses it, and their entire nuclear industry only produces as much waste as will fill a small garage per year - and most of French electricity is from nuclear power stations.
Point me to a coal plant that captures all its CO2 instead of simply discharging it into the atmosphere. How many hundreds of years will Bangladesh be rendered unusable when sea levels rise?
The Z88 will also run for tens of hours on a set of AA batteries - uses very little power! It really was a very nice machine.
Also, before Sinclair had to sell out to Amstrad, they were working on the Pandora design. Many people credit Apple with inventing the clamshell laptop style, but Rick Dickinson's industrial design for the Pandora was the now ubiquitous clamshell - in 1986. Unfortunately, Amstrad killed the project off when they bought Sinclair (although to be fair, in 1986, LCD technology wasn't really up to much and while monochrome LCD panels existed that would have worked, they wouldn't really have made for a great display!). Looking at Rick Dickinson's pictures and mock-ups of the Pandora design, they did flirt with Clive Sinclair's flat CRT for a while - presumably they concluded it'd be too big and power hungry and an LCD was the right compromise despite Clive Sinclair not really liking them.