I thought MS had done away with 16-bit Windows app support in Vista (certainly the 64 bit versions). In Tiger, I can still run Crystal Quest, a game written in 1985 I think on the M68K based Mac running System 6. I think being backward compatible for 22 years is really not such a bad record. (Still, I'm not sure I will upgrade to Leopard just yet, I do like Crystal Quest!)
For small actions like this, customers can always use the small claims court in most places - no lawyers required. Hundreds of small claims court cases for a company like Verizon would act as a pretty good deterrent over deceptive advertising - it would cost a huge amount for them to defend them all, but a trivial amount for the customers they bilked.
Of course, we won't see the tail because what They are not telling us is that it's headed directly for us - and that means that you of course won't see the tail, and we are all going to be extinct by next Friday!
(In less paranoid mode, we've had a good long period of settled weather with nice clear skies. As soon as something new and interesting shows up in the sky? A week's unsettled cloudy weather is forecast! Typical.)
Unless you drive an immense distance on your commute, a month's gas money won't buy you a bike, it will buy you a BSO (Bike Shaped Object) which will be not very pleasant to ride, and unreliable, and likely a mountain bike which really doesn't make for a very good road bike. Cycling will suck on such a BSO, and the cyclist will soon give up.
It's far better to spend at least $600 on a bike - the bike will be enjoyable to ride, and therefore you're more likely to keep riding. I've had my $600 bike for 10 years and 6 months, and my expenditure on it since buying it has been a fraction of its value. The only major repair I've had to make was this year after being rammed by a car doing 50 mph. Fortunately, *I* didn't need repair.
I see people on Slashdot all the time waiting and waiting and waiting for the next innovation in solar power (which will hit the market no sooner than 20 years from now) that they can use to save energy in the home... when just cycling to work two or three times a week instead of driving will probably save more energy than completely turning off everything in the house at the main breaker. And then they spend four hours a week in the gym. They could have saved themselves a gym membership by getting a bike. Unfortunately, people say they are for saving energy, but the reality is that for most people, in the list of priorities, having a nice haircut is more important to saving energy (I can't cycle, it'll mess up my hair!)
You don't have to stink - you can make yourself acceptably clean and odor free without a shower; just don't ride like a lunatic - use a slower pace, and you can usually get adequate cleaning of that using a handbasin and flannel.
But what IP does SCO actually own? It's already been established that SCO are merely a toll collector for Unix, it's Novell who still actually owns it.
Good grief, I never knew games were so expensive in 1982 in the USA. In Britain, games for the Spectrum/C64/BBC Micro etc. in 1982 were typically £5 for a full price title, and £1.49 for a budget title. Today, full price games are generally around £50. So at least here, games are now much, much more expensive in real terms than they were "back in the day".
802.11g isn't the last mile, though - is it? It's the last 25 metres if you're lucky (with packet loss), or less if you have walls with aluminium coated insulation.
Comparable wireless (from the phone exchange to the subscriber's home) that's widely avaialable at the moment is GPRS (slightly faster than a modem that's 15 years old, with latency 10 times worse), 3G (about the speed of broadband 5 years ago, with latency ten times worse), or WiMAX (very good quality, and low latency - but only available in very few places, and only up to about 4Mbit/s).
802.11g with a home made cantenna doesn't count. Wireless doesn't come anywhere near close 250Mbit/sec between the subscriber and the phone exchange. Copper wires already in the ground and already paid for have a good few years, possibly decades, before they are obsolete if this technology meets the hype. (And that's a big 'if'. The details don't even say what kind of distance is possible).
I'm a general aviation pilot though, and looking at the stats, GA flying (light aircraft) is approximately the same risk as riding a motorcycle on the road - i.e. it is VASTLY more dangerous than driving. Most of the risk is from stupid pilot tricks, rather than ATC or mechanical failures.
...Being involved with old computers like the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Micro, where most of the games are now easy to get hold of, I can tell you that the rose tinted view of all old games being great is just that - a rose tinted view. People remember the games they like from 'back in the day'. However, most of the games back then were dross. Only a few actually stood out. Nothing has actually changed (well, except the games are much, much more expensive in real terms now).
Actually, it doesn't go right through spam detectors, it gets caught by the URLBLs (that have been going already for a couple of years). SpamAssassin has become a LOT more effective since the spammers switched to URLs. Although I get more spam sent to me (up from about 100 a day last year to 250 a day now), about 40 a day this time last year got through the filters - generally less than 10 a day are getting through now thanks to the URLBLs and the ease of filtering bad URLs.
It would? An EMP attack is likely to destroy every transistor, regardless of technology. As I said, a small signal transistor is a small signal transistor. Huge EMP currents would totally destroy them all whether they are in an analogue or digital circuit, so they would need complete replacement.
Anecdotes about old TVs don't necessarily shed light on their performance in the proximity of EMP. Unless it's full of valves instead of transistors, it'll be completely destroyed.
If you want to keep your old analogue tv, just use a set top box. I've never had analogue TV signal coming into my house (there was no point three or four years ago in putting up the antenna for an analogue signal, given that it would be getting switched off relatively soon), but my TV is a 14 year old Sony (and it works very nicely). The digibox provides a perfectly usable RGB signal for the tv. The digibox can also provide a UHF TV signal on channel 36.
Given that the only likely attack involving EMP is a nuclear one, I think you'll be worrying about other things if you're close enough to the explosion for your TV to get broken, like fall out, getting food, finding cover before the blast arrives etc.
An EMP attack would kill off analogue TVs just as badly as it kills a digital one. A small signal transistor is a small signal transistor, whether it's being used in a digital circuit or analogue one. A severe voltage spike will still destroy the gate oxide.
The only analogue TVs that would survive an EMP attack would be ancient valve sets - the really ancient ones, with no transistors at all. How many people still have functioning valve sets?
It's certainly high. Looking at my spam filter for the last week, 99% of email sent to me is spam - I'm now getting in excess of 250 spam emails a day, but generally only a couple of legitimate email messages per day. Fortunately, SpamAssassin filters nearly all of it.
The method consists in extracting of soluble substances in dried tea leaf, containing in a porcelain or earthenware pot, by means of freshly boiling water, pouring of the liquor into a white porcelain or earthenware bowl, examination of the organoleptic properties of the infused leaf, and of the liquor with or without milk or both.
And... it costs 42 Swiss francs to buy the actual document.
Solar arrays don't need to use land, they can be on building rooftops. That land is already taken up by the building, so no loss of land. In any case, land is hardly in short supply in the United States.
I do have the bad habit of drinking tea while soldering though:-)
My hobby projects are hardly high density though - mostly 0.1in pitch pin through hole ICs, maximum of 2 layer PCBs, and minimum design rules of 10 mil spacing/10 mil tracks, except in the rare instance I need to use something in an SSOP/QFN/TQFP type fine pitch SMD package (which is very slow and labourious to hand solder, so I generally avoid it, however it is satisfying once done because so many people tell me you can't hand solder fine pitch SMD:-))
Lead free solder is a bit of a nightmare when making electronics at home. I've been going through soldering iron tips at a furious rate since starting to use it - you have to use a hotter bit temperature, and any slight wear on the tip's plating, and the lead free solder just starts dissolving the tip (and it then erodes amazingly fast).
Still, I can buy new soldering iron tips - I can't buy a new central nervous system, so it's probably better overall.
Actually, it's "user experience". Microsoft and Steve Ballmer chunter on about "experience" all the time.
This is the root problem. If an operating system is giving me an "experience", it's getting in my way. An operating system should fade into the background and do its damndest to not give me an experience. Little balloons annoyingly popping up all over the place is getting in my way. Endless "Are you sure" dialogs get in my way. Windows keeps having to shout "LOOK AT ME! I'M WINDOWS! I'M HERE! I'M GIVING YOU AN EXPERIENCE!!!111eleventyone!" Look at how garish the transparency effects are in Vista to draw attention to themselves and "how cool" they are.
However, Mac OS X doesn't - it really does try and melt into the background. Transparency, for instance, is subtle, and used in a way that's helpful - to provide visual cues. It's not trying to shout out how cool transparency is. Drop shadows in OS X - same thing - they are subtle and provide useful visual cues instead of being bold to be "cool". I've never even had the urge to tinker with OS X's default theme - in fact, I don't even know how to because I've never had the urge to find out how to do it, it's just unnecessary. With Windows it's the first thing I want to do because it's so damned garish. Apple seems to understand industrial design doesn't just mean making hardware look nice, it involves not having the system software get in your way.
I'm not a teenager, but I can tell you right now my concept of value is incongruent with a mega-corporation's concept of value, too. The concept of value that many corporations espouse is bizarre, highly twisted, and more than slightly evil in all too many cases.
Being able to submit journals is very handy. Since only 1 in 20 submissions ever get published, I used to cut and paste all the submissions into my journal, so the few that read it could at least see it and discuss it. This just saves me the effort of having to double-enter a submission - I can just submit it as a JE.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought MS had done away with 16-bit Windows app support in Vista (certainly the 64 bit versions). In Tiger, I can still run Crystal Quest, a game written in 1985 I think on the M68K based Mac running System 6. I think being backward compatible for 22 years is really not such a bad record. (Still, I'm not sure I will upgrade to Leopard just yet, I do like Crystal Quest!)
For small actions like this, customers can always use the small claims court in most places - no lawyers required. Hundreds of small claims court cases for a company like Verizon would act as a pretty good deterrent over deceptive advertising - it would cost a huge amount for them to defend them all, but a trivial amount for the customers they bilked.
Of course, we won't see the tail because what They are not telling us is that it's headed directly for us - and that means that you of course won't see the tail, and we are all going to be extinct by next Friday!
(In less paranoid mode, we've had a good long period of settled weather with nice clear skies. As soon as something new and interesting shows up in the sky? A week's unsettled cloudy weather is forecast! Typical.)
Unless you drive an immense distance on your commute, a month's gas money won't buy you a bike, it will buy you a BSO (Bike Shaped Object) which will be not very pleasant to ride, and unreliable, and likely a mountain bike which really doesn't make for a very good road bike. Cycling will suck on such a BSO, and the cyclist will soon give up.
It's far better to spend at least $600 on a bike - the bike will be enjoyable to ride, and therefore you're more likely to keep riding. I've had my $600 bike for 10 years and 6 months, and my expenditure on it since buying it has been a fraction of its value. The only major repair I've had to make was this year after being rammed by a car doing 50 mph. Fortunately, *I* didn't need repair.
I see people on Slashdot all the time waiting and waiting and waiting for the next innovation in solar power (which will hit the market no sooner than 20 years from now) that they can use to save energy in the home... when just cycling to work two or three times a week instead of driving will probably save more energy than completely turning off everything in the house at the main breaker. And then they spend four hours a week in the gym. They could have saved themselves a gym membership by getting a bike. Unfortunately, people say they are for saving energy, but the reality is that for most people, in the list of priorities, having a nice haircut is more important to saving energy (I can't cycle, it'll mess up my hair!)
You don't have to stink - you can make yourself acceptably clean and odor free without a shower; just don't ride like a lunatic - use a slower pace, and you can usually get adequate cleaning of that using a handbasin and flannel.
But what IP does SCO actually own? It's already been established that SCO are merely a toll collector for Unix, it's Novell who still actually owns it.
Slashdot even has a Turbolinux icon for stories (they didn't use for this one). Not even Ubuntu has a Slashdot icon.
Good grief, I never knew games were so expensive in 1982 in the USA. In Britain, games for the Spectrum/C64/BBC Micro etc. in 1982 were typically £5 for a full price title, and £1.49 for a budget title. Today, full price games are generally around £50. So at least here, games are now much, much more expensive in real terms than they were "back in the day".
802.11g isn't the last mile, though - is it? It's the last 25 metres if you're lucky (with packet loss), or less if you have walls with aluminium coated insulation.
Comparable wireless (from the phone exchange to the subscriber's home) that's widely avaialable at the moment is GPRS (slightly faster than a modem that's 15 years old, with latency 10 times worse), 3G (about the speed of broadband 5 years ago, with latency ten times worse), or WiMAX (very good quality, and low latency - but only available in very few places, and only up to about 4Mbit/s).
802.11g with a home made cantenna doesn't count. Wireless doesn't come anywhere near close 250Mbit/sec between the subscriber and the phone exchange. Copper wires already in the ground and already paid for have a good few years, possibly decades, before they are obsolete if this technology meets the hype. (And that's a big 'if'. The details don't even say what kind of distance is possible).
Airline travel is very safe.
I'm a general aviation pilot though, and looking at the stats, GA flying (light aircraft) is approximately the same risk as riding a motorcycle on the road - i.e. it is VASTLY more dangerous than driving. Most of the risk is from stupid pilot tricks, rather than ATC or mechanical failures.
...Being involved with old computers like the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Micro, where most of the games are now easy to get hold of, I can tell you that the rose tinted view of all old games being great is just that - a rose tinted view. People remember the games they like from 'back in the day'. However, most of the games back then were dross. Only a few actually stood out. Nothing has actually changed (well, except the games are much, much more expensive in real terms now).
It's also a company that makes spamming software.
Actually, it doesn't go right through spam detectors, it gets caught by the URLBLs (that have been going already for a couple of years). SpamAssassin has become a LOT more effective since the spammers switched to URLs. Although I get more spam sent to me (up from about 100 a day last year to 250 a day now), about 40 a day this time last year got through the filters - generally less than 10 a day are getting through now thanks to the URLBLs and the ease of filtering bad URLs.
It would? An EMP attack is likely to destroy every transistor, regardless of technology. As I said, a small signal transistor is a small signal transistor. Huge EMP currents would totally destroy them all whether they are in an analogue or digital circuit, so they would need complete replacement.
Anecdotes about old TVs don't necessarily shed light on their performance in the proximity of EMP. Unless it's full of valves instead of transistors, it'll be completely destroyed.
If you want to keep your old analogue tv, just use a set top box. I've never had analogue TV signal coming into my house (there was no point three or four years ago in putting up the antenna for an analogue signal, given that it would be getting switched off relatively soon), but my TV is a 14 year old Sony (and it works very nicely). The digibox provides a perfectly usable RGB signal for the tv. The digibox can also provide a UHF TV signal on channel 36.
Given that the only likely attack involving EMP is a nuclear one, I think you'll be worrying about other things if you're close enough to the explosion for your TV to get broken, like fall out, getting food, finding cover before the blast arrives etc.
An EMP attack would kill off analogue TVs just as badly as it kills a digital one. A small signal transistor is a small signal transistor, whether it's being used in a digital circuit or analogue one. A severe voltage spike will still destroy the gate oxide.
The only analogue TVs that would survive an EMP attack would be ancient valve sets - the really ancient ones, with no transistors at all. How many people still have functioning valve sets?
It's certainly high. Looking at my spam filter for the last week, 99% of email sent to me is spam - I'm now getting in excess of 250 spam emails a day, but generally only a couple of legitimate email messages per day. Fortunately, SpamAssassin filters nearly all of it.
And... it costs 42 Swiss francs to buy the actual document.
Solar arrays don't need to use land, they can be on building rooftops. That land is already taken up by the building, so no loss of land. In any case, land is hardly in short supply in the United States.
I do have the bad habit of drinking tea while soldering though :-)
:-))
My hobby projects are hardly high density though - mostly 0.1in pitch pin through hole ICs, maximum of 2 layer PCBs, and minimum design rules of 10 mil spacing/10 mil tracks, except in the rare instance I need to use something in an SSOP/QFN/TQFP type fine pitch SMD package (which is very slow and labourious to hand solder, so I generally avoid it, however it is satisfying once done because so many people tell me you can't hand solder fine pitch SMD
I think swm (Solbourne Window Manager) may have had this in 1991 or earlier.
Lead free solder is a bit of a nightmare when making electronics at home. I've been going through soldering iron tips at a furious rate since starting to use it - you have to use a hotter bit temperature, and any slight wear on the tip's plating, and the lead free solder just starts dissolving the tip (and it then erodes amazingly fast).
Still, I can buy new soldering iron tips - I can't buy a new central nervous system, so it's probably better overall.
Actually, it's "user experience". Microsoft and Steve Ballmer chunter on about "experience" all the time.
This is the root problem. If an operating system is giving me an "experience", it's getting in my way. An operating system should fade into the background and do its damndest to not give me an experience. Little balloons annoyingly popping up all over the place is getting in my way. Endless "Are you sure" dialogs get in my way. Windows keeps having to shout "LOOK AT ME! I'M WINDOWS! I'M HERE! I'M GIVING YOU AN EXPERIENCE!!!111eleventyone!" Look at how garish the transparency effects are in Vista to draw attention to themselves and "how cool" they are.
However, Mac OS X doesn't - it really does try and melt into the background. Transparency, for instance, is subtle, and used in a way that's helpful - to provide visual cues. It's not trying to shout out how cool transparency is. Drop shadows in OS X - same thing - they are subtle and provide useful visual cues instead of being bold to be "cool". I've never even had the urge to tinker with OS X's default theme - in fact, I don't even know how to because I've never had the urge to find out how to do it, it's just unnecessary. With Windows it's the first thing I want to do because it's so damned garish. Apple seems to understand industrial design doesn't just mean making hardware look nice, it involves not having the system software get in your way.
I still have programs that date back to System 6 on the Mac Plus. These run just fine and dandy on Mac OS X Tiger.
I'm not a teenager, but I can tell you right now my concept of value is incongruent with a mega-corporation's concept of value, too. The concept of value that many corporations espouse is bizarre, highly twisted, and more than slightly evil in all too many cases.
Being able to submit journals is very handy. Since only 1 in 20 submissions ever get published, I used to cut and paste all the submissions into my journal, so the few that read it could at least see it and discuss it. This just saves me the effort of having to double-enter a submission - I can just submit it as a JE.