Here in Tacoma, the local power company provides cable TV and internet access. So not only does the local power company pull in extra bucks, but they do so at a (slightly) lower price then Comcast. Net access starts at roughly $28.00 monthly for 1.5meg/128k which isn't exactly stellar but damn good bang for the buck. There is also a webTV style solution for roughly $10 monthly... less then stellar speed but better then dialup.
No ISPs jobs are lost because the city power provides just the backbone, local ISPs who are already equiped to provided internet access do the last bit.
Before the city was going to do this, TCI / AT&T took out full page adverts titled "Citizens for Fair cable" who were trying to tell us that compotition was bad, monopolys are good. Fortuantly the project continued, though we had to fight tooth and nail in order to get the service in neighboring cities.
One of the main reasons they could do this is they wanted to put in an automated system to read the power meters, rather then some guy going door to door. The amount of money saved justified the expence in fiberoptics, and as long as you are laying fiberoptics, it's not so much a further leap to offer services via the fiber, esp since TCI at the time was pussy footing around the idea of broadband, marketing it but not actually providing it.
LOL, not everyone in Utah is of this upbrining. Some of the law makers are. For example, they passed a law some years back where bars serving mixed drinks had to do so using those small sample bottles rather then out of a full sized 1/5 or 1/2 gal. As a direct result those interested in something like a gin and tonic always got just a little too much jin, and the drunkards got extra drunk as sample bottles are larger then a typical shot, typical shot being I believe sub one ounce.
Needless to say, they were better served letting the bars water down their drinks rather then using an exact specification, esp one larger then standard.
Bab 5 was cool, really cool, but I wouldn't go so far as saying I mourned it because they did manage to actually complete their 5 year story arch.
Crucade on the other hand didn't really get a chance to go anywhere, other then some hints that the shadow virus that infected earth might be nano based.
Farscape on the other hand didn't complete their 5 year story arch... we were left at a cliff-hanger awaiting a next season doomed to never come. I caught the BBC download of it, and they basicly said something to the effect of "yea that's it, it's a cliff hanger but no more episodes".
Actually, I was thinking something along the lines of creating a small enclosed enviroment in order to peform such a modification, much in the same way that a sand blasting cabinet needs to be enclosed.
1. Wash externals with ether, it leaves no residue. 2. Place drive in enclosure with window and glove access. 3. Flush out the air remove all particulate mater. 4. Add air from compressed tanks, perhaps helium as it's a nobel gas.
I don't know the specifics of a true hard drive cleanroom enviroment, but i'm sure it's possible for someone to construct a clean enclosure that would meet with the requirements.
The only problem is even a sandblasting cabinet costs a good deal of money, about $300.00 for an entry level one. Modifying one to meet with a cleanroom standard with cost even more money. Given the high cost of the equipment to peform the mod, I feel one would be better served by taking their drive to a place that has the real deal and paying to peform the mod.
It's a bit diffrent in America as we don't have goverment owned stations. With the exception of the one staring Paul McGahn (FOX), Dr. Who was carried by our PBS (Public Broadcasting system), which is a publicly funded (comercial free) network. I can't honestly say every PBS station in America carried dr. who... the first time I saw it was when I was visiting relitives in Philly circa early 1980's, but clearly wasn't shown in Virginia.
But here in Washington they are also showing the very first episodes as well.
I agree the artical is skewed, though the gent does have a valid point, even if it's hidden under *don't buy this product*. What would be spiffy is if there was an option for the IPOD to replace the onboard HD with a flash drive, for cases where you want the benifits of flash media. Either that or have it accept flash media.
Apple typicaly being turn key technology, isn't likely to support such a drive replacement.
What is this fuel used for? Just for communicating, or does it still need acceleration? If it's just for communication, couldn't they make it last longer by increasing the intervals between each time it communicates?
I believe they are talking about the nuclear battery that's onboard to power it's 20watt transmitter. Near as I remember the decay of plutonium causes heat which keeps the craft warm and operational, and is used to generate power. Given that this was launched in 1978, this is a major accompishment.
Well, they did the same thing to hotmail, hotmail if i'm not mistaken was BSD / apache [http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/200008010080 6PSMS]. Based on my memory and this article, it was an embarrassment to microsoft to have one of their flagship services run on BSD.
It's one of the hazzards of being microsoft. It makes perfect sence to aquire rather then develop, but unfortunatly content is still more often served by apache then IIS. It wouldn't shock me if they didn't already have a building on campus dedicated to adapting stuff for *nix/apache to NTx.x/IIS. After all, adapting is often easier making your own origional code.
Based on Microsoft's past history, when they buy content / service oriented organizations, they tend to replace the existing software with their own. It reminds me of good old hotmail, it seemed to be a priority with microsoft to switch over a working system over to NT after they purchaced it, the only likely rational being a PR move rather then a fuctional one. It doesn't matter whether or not which platform is better, it's about taking a working solid information system and adapting it to another platform resulting in the usual slew of bugs.
Yea, I could also switch to Slack 8.1, I could check out this vector stuff. Or I could just forget about it and declair victory.
Caldera was my choice not because it offers anything special over Slack, it was just something that I got in the mail that had a pre-compiled kernel that wouldn't choke on my lack of a mathco.
I have an older 486 laptop that I still use as a glorified terminal. I currently have Caldera on it but it's a bit bulky for a 486sx with only 4megs of ram.
I *could* buy more ram, I could buy a bigger HD, but that would be investing money in a POS 486sx laptop. I could buy a new laptop but all I need is a glorified terminal.
I was just thinking about the fact that one logical application for telnet from an atari 8 bit is for some form of mp3 remote control. I don't remember my history really well, but I believe the 800xl offered chroma/luma output, aka svideo. It wouldn't be anything fancy, stock 40col support is a might bit limited, but hey, good readable TV support isn't anything to sneeze at.
This kind of stuff is what would have happened if Microsoft and IBM had not destroyed "choice" back in the day.
I'm not sure that the PC revolution was such a bad thing. Part of the reason that the PC took over as the master platform was the low cost clone market. The TI was a really cool platform, as was the amiga. Hell the commodore and atari 8-bits ran circles around the XTs dispite the fact that they had 10x the ram.
But I don't feel I would enjoy computing in the 21century based on commodore style policies on hardware. Commodore was big on nickle diming you to death as far as trivial upgrades are concerned, and wasn't too hip on the idea of end user upgrades, they would rather you buy a whole new machine, even if the latest offering only added a tint control.
TI wasn't around long enough to actually see their policies in action.
I really don't blame microsoft for market domination. I blame the clone market and the ease of piracy of MS-dos.
Righto... I'm not going to say the atari was better then the commodore... instead i'll give you a list of hardware I had before I switched to a 386sx machine.
1. 130xe 2. One MIO board by ICD, a little box that had a 1meg ram disk, scsi host adapter, serial and printer ports. 3. Seagate st-419 15meg full height HD in external case 4. Adaptec mfm scsi controler 5. Spartados
While the commodore was very spiffy in it's day in many ways, the atari had damn good hardware and software support. I prefered spartados over the commodore 8-bit offerings at the time because it was rather *nix/vms like, much in he same way that ms-dos and amiga/os were. I liked the fact there were a number of scsi host adapters you could get for the atari-8bit where in my experence most of the commodore offertings were pretty much bundled with drives.
300 baud datasette? I rather thought the commodore (vic-20) also used 300baud data cassettes.
What the atari 8-bit lacked, for the most part anyway, was DD (180k) and DS (360k) floppy support. Where were a number of 3rd party disk drive solutions where you could pop on standard PC drives and get DS/DD disks, but any store bought offering chances are was on a 90k floppy, or a 130k ED floppy. Another annoyance was the lack of support for 64k of ram, basicly to be compatable with the atari 800 most programs were designed to run within 48k, where commodore I believe leaped directly to 64k.
I'm all for free speech, even in cases were I don't agree with the person's view point. The stormwatch neo-nazi group is one example of bozos and foofoo heads while I strongly disagree with them, I feel it's their right to make total asses out of them selves.
At the same time, I reserve the right to censer what i'm exposed to, as a consumer I have every right to do this. To allow adverts of viagra and penis enlargements on the net should be considered free speech and protected under the law. However, spam in my inbox is steping over personal boundries. I accept advertisments as a way to pay for content I view, however spam is getting a free ride and providing income to people who are not associated with providing me e-mail.
I was thinking more water based then solvent based. There are a number of them on the market, which would include crayola large tip, to nice small tips in the 5mm range. I use such pens with graph paper my self
I would think that felt tips would be as practical as a pencil in space due to the fact that the basic idea is direct leaching of the ink stored within to paper.
Obviously, people are willing to pay the higher book prices in the US.
I don't think WILLING is the correct term here. If given a choice, I'm sure that anyone in the US would choose to pay less for a text book. I think the problem was, and still is to a large extent, ignorance of where else to buy the books.
You wouldn't believe how many people don't realize you can fry a motherboard that way...
I have to pleed ignorance here, never knew you COULD fry a motherboard this way. In fact... I can't think of a hell of alot you can do to the ps/2 ports that would fry a motherboard. I'll tell ya why, cause the 5volt line has a fuse on it. I can't remember the rating, something like 2amp @ 120v or some such, a pretty damn massive fuse considering the typical load on those ports.
I can believe that you can do harm with a straight short, but i've seen motherboards survive coffee in the keyboard and my self i've shorted out a keyboard or two being foolish, and the motherboards in question only needed a replacement fuse.
Besides the speed advantage, SCSI drives also typically last two to three times longer than their IDE counterparts, and generally go through more rigorous testing.
I'd have to look at more recent IDE specs to be sure, but I was under the assumption that scsi drives don't have to jump back to cyl 1 for multi-reads. If this is still true, this could be directly responcible for scsi's longer life.
I read this elsewhere, not sure where I found the link, but I was thinking something along those lines as well.
What I'm most curious about is how efficent such a system is in contrast to a typical generator. If so I can think of a few normal run of the mill sources of engery.
1. Heat water to produce steem as with traditional power plants 2. gravity fed as with rain and rivers as with traditional hydro plants 3. Wave / Tidal forces
Steem power seems a touch impractical for this system, except to provide presure to force water through.
Hydro generation without moving parts would be nice if it was more safe then present hydro plants. Waste treetment and rain run off might be another source of power.
Tidal is the aspect i'd look into as far as this form of power generation. The few system i've seen for tidal generations were basicly underwater windmills, which do indeed get the job done. It seems to me that one could use a large holding tank which would fill at high tide, and flow out at low tide.
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Why not do it by the goverment and for profit?
Here in Tacoma, the local power company provides cable TV and internet access. So not only does the local power company pull in extra bucks, but they do so at a (slightly) lower price then Comcast. Net access starts at roughly $28.00 monthly for 1.5meg/128k which isn't exactly stellar but damn good bang for the buck. There is also a webTV style solution for roughly $10 monthly... less then stellar speed but better then dialup.
No ISPs jobs are lost because the city power provides just the backbone, local ISPs who are already equiped to provided internet access do the last bit.
Before the city was going to do this, TCI / AT&T took out full page adverts titled "Citizens for Fair cable" who were trying to tell us that compotition was bad, monopolys are good. Fortuantly the project continued, though we had to fight tooth and nail in order to get the service in neighboring cities.
One of the main reasons they could do this is they wanted to put in an automated system to read the power meters, rather then some guy going door to door. The amount of money saved justified the expence in fiberoptics, and as long as you are laying fiberoptics, it's not so much a further leap to offer services via the fiber, esp since TCI at the time was pussy footing around the idea of broadband, marketing it but not actually providing it.
LOL, not everyone in Utah is of this upbrining. Some of the law makers are. For example, they passed a law some years back where bars serving mixed drinks had to do so using those small sample bottles rather then out of a full sized 1/5 or 1/2 gal. As a direct result those interested in something like a gin and tonic always got just a little too much jin, and the drunkards got extra drunk as sample bottles are larger then a typical shot, typical shot being I believe sub one ounce.
Needless to say, they were better served letting the bars water down their drinks rather then using an exact specification, esp one larger then standard.
Bab 5 was cool, really cool, but I wouldn't go so far as saying I mourned it because they did manage to actually complete their 5 year story arch.
Crucade on the other hand didn't really get a chance to go anywhere, other then some hints that the shadow virus that infected earth might be nano based.
Farscape on the other hand didn't complete their 5 year story arch... we were left at a cliff-hanger awaiting a next season doomed to never come. I caught the BBC download of it, and they basicly said something to the effect of "yea that's it, it's a cliff hanger but no more episodes".
Hopefully it's not running microsoft.
Your system is about to melt down. (A)bort (R)etry (E)vacuate city?
Actually, I was thinking something along the lines of creating a small enclosed enviroment in order to peform such a modification, much in the same way that a sand blasting cabinet needs to be enclosed.
1. Wash externals with ether, it leaves no residue.
2. Place drive in enclosure with window and glove access.
3. Flush out the air remove all particulate mater.
4. Add air from compressed tanks, perhaps helium as it's a nobel gas.
I don't know the specifics of a true hard drive cleanroom enviroment, but i'm sure it's possible for someone to construct a clean enclosure that would meet with the requirements.
The only problem is even a sandblasting cabinet costs a good deal of money, about $300.00 for an entry level one. Modifying one to meet with a cleanroom standard with cost even more money. Given the high cost of the equipment to peform the mod, I feel one would be better served by taking their drive to a place that has the real deal and paying to peform the mod.
It's a bit diffrent in America as we don't have goverment owned stations. With the exception of the one staring Paul McGahn (FOX), Dr. Who was carried by our PBS (Public Broadcasting system), which is a publicly funded (comercial free) network. I can't honestly say every PBS station in America carried dr. who... the first time I saw it was when I was visiting relitives in Philly circa early 1980's, but clearly wasn't shown in Virginia.
But here in Washington they are also showing the very first episodes as well.
I agree the artical is skewed, though the gent does have a valid point, even if it's hidden under *don't buy this product*. What would be spiffy is if there was an option for the IPOD to replace the onboard HD with a flash drive, for cases where you want the benifits of flash media. Either that or have it accept flash media.
Apple typicaly being turn key technology, isn't likely to support such a drive replacement.
What is this fuel used for? Just for communicating, or does it still need acceleration? If it's just for communication, couldn't they make it last longer by increasing the intervals between each time it communicates?
I believe they are talking about the nuclear battery that's onboard to power it's 20watt transmitter. Near as I remember the decay of plutonium causes heat which keeps the craft warm and operational, and is used to generate power. Given that this was launched in 1978, this is a major accompishment.
Well, they did the same thing to hotmail, hotmail if i'm not mistaken was BSD / apache [http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/200008010080 6PSMS]. Based on my memory and this article, it was an embarrassment to microsoft to have one of their flagship services run on BSD.
It's one of the hazzards of being microsoft. It makes perfect sence to aquire rather then develop, but unfortunatly content is still more often served by apache then IIS. It wouldn't shock me if they didn't already have a building on campus dedicated to adapting stuff for *nix/apache to NTx.x/IIS. After all, adapting is often easier making your own origional code.
Based on Microsoft's past history, when they buy content / service oriented organizations, they tend to replace the existing software with their own. It reminds me of good old hotmail, it seemed to be a priority with microsoft to switch over a working system over to NT after they purchaced it, the only likely rational being a PR move rather then a fuctional one. It doesn't matter whether or not which platform is better, it's about taking a working solid information system and adapting it to another platform resulting in the usual slew of bugs.
Yea, I could also switch to Slack 8.1, I could check out this vector stuff. Or I could just forget about it and declair victory.
Caldera was my choice not because it offers anything special over Slack, it was just something that I got in the mail that had a pre-compiled kernel that wouldn't choke on my lack of a mathco.
I have an older 486 laptop that I still use as a glorified terminal. I currently have Caldera on it but it's a bit bulky for a 486sx with only 4megs of ram.
I *could* buy more ram, I could buy a bigger HD, but that would be investing money in a POS 486sx laptop. I could buy a new laptop but all I need is a glorified terminal.
I was just thinking about the fact that one logical application for telnet from an atari 8 bit is for some form of mp3 remote control. I don't remember my history really well, but I believe the 800xl offered chroma/luma output, aka svideo. It wouldn't be anything fancy, stock 40col support is a might bit limited, but hey, good readable TV support isn't anything to sneeze at.
This kind of stuff is what would have happened if Microsoft and IBM had not destroyed "choice" back in the day.
I'm not sure that the PC revolution was such a bad thing. Part of the reason that the PC took over as the master platform was the low cost clone market. The TI was a really cool platform, as was the amiga. Hell the commodore and atari 8-bits ran circles around the XTs dispite the fact that they had 10x the ram.
But I don't feel I would enjoy computing in the 21century based on commodore style policies on hardware. Commodore was big on nickle diming you to death as far as trivial upgrades are concerned, and wasn't too hip on the idea of end user upgrades, they would rather you buy a whole new machine, even if the latest offering only added a tint control.
TI wasn't around long enough to actually see their policies in action.
I really don't blame microsoft for market domination. I blame the clone market and the ease of piracy of MS-dos.
Good old 8-bit wars.
Righto... I'm not going to say the atari was better then the commodore... instead i'll give you a list of hardware I had before I switched to a 386sx machine.
1. 130xe
2. One MIO board by ICD, a little box that had a 1meg ram disk, scsi host adapter, serial and printer ports.
3. Seagate st-419 15meg full height HD in external case
4. Adaptec mfm scsi controler
5. Spartados
While the commodore was very spiffy in it's day in many ways, the atari had damn good hardware and software support. I prefered spartados over the commodore 8-bit offerings at the time because it was rather *nix/vms like, much in he same way that ms-dos and amiga/os were. I liked the fact there were a number of scsi host adapters you could get for the atari-8bit where in my experence most of the commodore offertings were pretty much bundled with drives.
300 baud datasette? I rather thought the commodore (vic-20) also used 300baud data cassettes.
What the atari 8-bit lacked, for the most part anyway, was DD (180k) and DS (360k) floppy support. Where were a number of 3rd party disk drive solutions where you could pop on standard PC drives and get DS/DD disks, but any store bought offering chances are was on a 90k floppy, or a 130k ED floppy. Another annoyance was the lack of support for 64k of ram, basicly to be compatable with the atari 800 most programs were designed to run within 48k, where commodore I believe leaped directly to 64k.
I'm all for free speech, even in cases were I don't agree with the person's view point. The stormwatch neo-nazi group is one example of bozos and foofoo heads while I strongly disagree with them, I feel it's their right to make total asses out of them selves.
At the same time, I reserve the right to censer what i'm exposed to, as a consumer I have every right to do this. To allow adverts of viagra and penis enlargements on the net should be considered free speech and protected under the law. However, spam in my inbox is steping over personal boundries. I accept advertisments as a way to pay for content I view, however spam is getting a free ride and providing income to people who are not associated with providing me e-mail.
I was thinking more water based then solvent based. There are a number of them on the market, which would include crayola large tip, to nice small tips in the 5mm range. I use such pens with graph paper my self
I would think that felt tips would be as practical as a pencil in space due to the fact that the basic idea is direct leaching of the ink stored within to paper.
I can imagine your typical bic pen might have issues spilling out in the event you happen to have one not oriented in the right direction on takeoff.
I think thats Douglass adams that you're refering to. Scott is still alive and sarcastic.
Let's not forget the other scott adams not responcible for the dilbert comics, but rather for early text adventures
http://www.msadams.com/new/index.htm
Obviously, people are willing to pay the higher book prices in the US.
I don't think WILLING is the correct term here. If given a choice, I'm sure that anyone in the US would choose to pay less for a text book. I think the problem was, and still is to a large extent, ignorance of where else to buy the books.
You wouldn't believe how many people don't realize you can fry a motherboard that way...
I have to pleed ignorance here, never knew you COULD fry a motherboard this way. In fact... I can't think of a hell of alot you can do to the ps/2 ports that would fry a motherboard. I'll tell ya why, cause the 5volt line has a fuse on it. I can't remember the rating, something like 2amp @ 120v or some such, a pretty damn massive fuse considering the typical load on those ports.
I can believe that you can do harm with a straight short, but i've seen motherboards survive coffee in the keyboard and my self i've shorted out a keyboard or two being foolish, and the motherboards in question only needed a replacement fuse.
Besides the speed advantage, SCSI drives also typically last two to three times longer than their IDE counterparts, and generally go through more rigorous testing.
I'd have to look at more recent IDE specs to be sure, but I was under the assumption that scsi drives don't have to jump back to cyl 1 for multi-reads. If this is still true, this could be directly responcible for scsi's longer life.
I read this elsewhere, not sure where I found the link, but I was thinking something along those lines as well.
What I'm most curious about is how efficent such a system is in contrast to a typical generator. If so I can think of a few normal run of the mill sources of engery.
1. Heat water to produce steem as with traditional power plants
2. gravity fed as with rain and rivers as with traditional hydro plants
3. Wave / Tidal forces
Steem power seems a touch impractical for this system, except to provide presure to force water through.
Hydro generation without moving parts would be nice if it was more safe then present hydro plants. Waste treetment and rain run off might be another source of power.
Tidal is the aspect i'd look into as far as this form of power generation. The few system i've seen for tidal generations were basicly underwater windmills, which do indeed get the job done. It seems to me that one could use a large holding tank which would fill at high tide, and flow out at low tide.
Should be obvious but...
USE A JEWEL CASE!
Jewel cases are FAR too fragile. You look at it funny and it breaks. floppies on the otherhand could take a touch more impact.
Also, your media often times doesn't actually come with a jewel case.
Wi-Fi enabled shopping cards found in local pond. Wildlife and waterfoul go high-tech.