Plenty of Itanium 2's not one single AMD64 based system. Why?
All but one of those Itanium systems are running windows. Windows for x86-64 isn't out yet. If you want to run Transaction Processing software under windows, you CAN'T use x86-64.
Here's what I wonder...has backwards-compatibility caused hardware to get so kludgy that things would actually run faster if we designed a brand new system and ran an Intel-compatible VM in firmware?
Modern x86 CPUs already do essentially that-- you just don't see it happening. I'm talking third-hand out of my ass a little, but as I recall x86 opcodes are translated internally to the processor's native language, which is a sort of RISC/CISC hybrid.
I think yes...and that would provide the perfect opportunity for companies to transition to a new platform over a number of years. I think we need to free ourselves from the rules that applied to the 8086 soon.
The problem with the transition is that any significantly redesigned processor running emulation is going to be markedly slower running x86 code than a comparable x86-class CPU (Itanium is good illustration). A slow, incremental move away from traditional x86 is the only feasible way, really. If everyone recompiled for the new processor, bought recompiled software, and replaced their x86 hardware all at the same time, then sure, we'd be better off. But that's like saying "if everyone on the freeway traffic stepped on the gas at once, we'd all be moving faster"-- reality has a fistfull of monkey wrenches for plans like that.
So it'd be pretty pointless for say, giving gps coordinates to a hardened underground bunker deep in the jungle canopy?
If I'm 100m north of said bunker in a clearing, my GPS will give me enough info to know where the bunker is (MGRS* makes this easy). GPS is a just an aid to navigation and generally goes along with a map and compass. If the bunker is your own, you probably already know the Lat-Lon position of it because it's marked on your map; and if it's NOT yours and you want an air strike on it, well, you're not inside it so the point is moot. GPS (for the infantry at least) exists to tell you where you are and, by extension, where the things around you are. Even if it did work underground, why would you want your lat-lon position in a bunker?
Makes you wonder why they didn't give the transmitters a few hundred(thousand?) more watts of power...
1) they can't put up a sat with a large enough solar array to make any significant difference in Xmitted power (inverse square law - those sats are FAR AWAY), and
2) they have nothing to gain by doing so.
The GPS system works as intended already.
The question I have is whether VoIP will be expected to provide the same level of universal access that we have with the phone system. I doubt it.
They're fundamentally different technologies. They both provide voice communication, but their methods are so dissimilar that some services feasible on one will not be feasible on the other. By way of analogy, let us examine the horse and the automobile. Both provide transportation, but while a child can operate a horse without difficulty, a child most certainly cannot operate an automobile. Should the auto be banned because it doesn't provide universal access to children?
VoIP isn't necessarily tied to any hardware-- it's just a delivery method. In cases where it is hardware, it's usually a box inside a phone closet. GPS doesn't work unless it can see the sky.
So how exactly does the military use GPS in the jungle?
It finds a clearing where it gets enough open sky to acquire the sats. (heh - sounds like something Buffalo Bill would say)
When we were first instructed on the use of GPS in the army, one of the things they repeatedly pounded into our thick, kevlar covered skulls was overhead cover blocks the signal.
911 centers already get waaaay too many calls from people who can't be bothered to look up the police department's phone number so they can complain about their neighbor's dog pooping on their lawn.
My favorite is the ones here in California who flood the 911 center with calls to report an earthquake! (really? is that what that shaking was? Gosh, thanks for calling and telling us!)
why can you still relatively easily buy a F-15 on Ebay?
You can't. Perhaps you are referring to the story about the F-18 for sale on ebay. That auction was cancelled before it ended. I don't personally know why, but I imagine one likely reason is ebay not wanting to be on the hook for assisting the sale of full mil-spec hardware which, by government regulations, must be "de-milled" before being sold to the public.
These are police officers, they don't have time to lean how to use whatever system you want to hack together. They want a picture menu on the screen that they can touch to get at what ever information they need.
Police officers are just like regular folks-- many of them have computers at home, and some even know how to use them! A "picture menu"? What are they, illiterate chimps? If my boss can learn to use a laptop, a cop certainly can.
Nit: Speeding is not (usually) criminal. It is an administrative offense. This allows a looser process, more akin to a contractual breach than a crime.
Further nit: speeding is indeed usually just an infraction, but failure to post bail (pay the fine) and subsequent Failure To Appear by the court date on the ticket generally results in a bench warrant being issued. FTA for a traffic violation is a misdemeanor and pretty much always results in a driver's license suspension. Stuff like license suspension will always show up when the cops punch your name in.
An impact puch might serve (and I recommend every car carry one in its glove box)
Why? It just takes up space that could be used by more useful items. About six months ago, one of the columnists for Car & Driver Magazine did some testing. He went down to the local junk-yard with the biggest musclehead he could find and they tried breaking windows using one of those gadgets.
The result was, that no matter what, the writer was unable to even crack a window. The musclehead was able to gets some spiderweb cracks - but in order to do so, he had to be standing outside of the car so that he had clearance to swing as hard as he possibly could. Inside the car, neither of them were able to have any useful effect on the glass in the car.
I think he's talking about one of these rather than opne of those lame hammer-type tools. I've used punch-type breakers on all kinds of safety glass and they work GREAT. Press, *TINK*, -fwoosh-. The glass crumbles to little bits.
Turns out, while that was his saturn, they wern't his keys. Another saturn key opened the door, and started the car. As far as I know, there's no way to make each car have it's own key values(for all the pins in the lock). They just stuff like what happened to that guy rarely happens.
According to my research (I have CodeSource by HPC, a key code lookup app) there are only about 4000 different key bittings for all Saturns from '92 to '99. In '00 they added about 2000 more, and in '03 they added about 3000. I'd wager that the odds of finding two alike aren't too bad-- divide the number of cars they've sold in the last 12 years by 10,000, you get a sizable number. Not many cases where the cars are valet parked at the same restaurant at the same time though...
I'm honestly not sure why this is, but I do have a suspicion. The intent is probably that you can't make a key that fits the car from the outside. First you'd need to make a key using the door lock, then you'd have to get inside the car, then make another key using the ignition. Hopefully this takes too long or requires too many visits to the car, and before you can make keys for both locks either the owner will return and catch you, or a passerby will notice what you're doing.
My boss is a locksmith, so I've picked up some of the trade. Your suspicion is correct to some degree, but don't forget to throw in "cheapness" and "simplicity". Say you have a car key that has 8 cuts in it. Only the ignition lock will have all 8 wafer tumblers. The trunk might have wafers for cuts 1-6, the doors for 2-7, and the glove box 5-8. It's cheaper to make a lock cylinder with 6 tumblers than one with 8. Also, a 6 tumbler lock is shorter and fits better in doors and the trunk. The glove box is really small so it just works on like the last 4 at the tip.
Why is your use of the EM more benificial thein their use?
They're not using the spectrum, they're trampling it. Those frequencies they're blasting are still officially designated for other uses. Look at it this way: What if the water company came up with a way to transmit data using pressure waves in the water mains, but the side effect was that water would leak out of the joints in the mains under the street and create hundreds of sinkholes in the road, rendering the road useless. Is their right to deliver internet-over-watermain so important that they should be permitted to ruin road transportation anywhere they put this in service?
The internet is useful to the community, and with widespread broadband, could be even more useful.
Network connectivity can be delivered over any number of mediums (satellite, fiber, cable, etc) whereas ham radio is limited to RADIO. Your argument is stupid.
We, the people, own the spectrum, and let you use it. Your rights in the matter end at your right to vote.
hams are part of "we, the people" as well, jackass. "Voting" isn't how rights work. Your right to trample the RF spectrum to the detriment of other users of said spectrum must be weighed against others' rights to the spectrum. The necessity for you to have access to yet another network delivery medium doesn't outweigh the incidental damage it does to huge swathes of the RF spectrum. Your second argument is double-stupid.
There are many other reasons why ham bands should be given to more useful purposes.
They aren't reassigning ham bands, they're just letting them be jammed. Clobbering several RF frequencies with noise is a ridiculous price to pay just so power companies can get in on the ISP business.
but couldn't this sort of "morph-as-you-go" theory be used to obfuscate -- and essentially hide -- a network path used to get (or put) a piece of data? Kinda like BitTorrent -- but in a much more severe, much more shifty way? You getting the data -- eventually -- and you're both downloading and uploading as you go -- but the paths through which your current bit of data is being retrieved are both unknown until you visit it and obscured once you leave it?
The problem with that, even if such a thing were possible, is that it would only obfuscate sources from someone looking through a log they seized after the fact. In reality, all they have to do to identify the source of something via P2P is download it themselves and record who they're getting it from. There's no way to send data to nowhere and have it arrive at a secret destination or request data from an unknown address and have that request get there. The totally anonymous medium you're looking for does exist, but it's not P2P, it's called USENET.
Renaming all the variables `a'. Er, yeah. Given that the writer seems to think that makes sense, I wouldn't trust anything he writes. Ever.
Reminds me of a story I heard (may be true, but who knows) about a newspaper employee giving a tour of their typesetting facility. He was showing off their fancy typesetting machines which were, basically, early word processing machines. He demonstrated some of their more advanced features, such as find and replace.
"I can tell it, for example, to replace every instance of the letter 'o' with a letter 'i'", he said doing so with a few deft alt-macro keystrokes.
"And then I can change them right back again", and with a few more keystrokes he changed all the instances of 'i' into 'o'-- including the ones that were originally 'o'...
Slashdot Mirror
s/mulsim/muslim
Also, if a mulsim dies in a Piggly Wiggly, does he go to heaven?
Plenty of Itanium 2's not one single AMD64 based system. Why?
All but one of those Itanium systems are running windows. Windows for x86-64 isn't out yet. If you want to run Transaction Processing software under windows, you CAN'T use x86-64.
At least you can't YET...
Modern x86 CPUs already do essentially that-- you just don't see it happening. I'm talking third-hand out of my ass a little, but as I recall x86 opcodes are translated internally to the processor's native language, which is a sort of RISC/CISC hybrid.
I think yes...and that would provide the perfect opportunity for companies to transition to a new platform over a number of years. I think we need to free ourselves from the rules that applied to the 8086 soon.
The problem with the transition is that any significantly redesigned processor running emulation is going to be markedly slower running x86 code than a comparable x86-class CPU (Itanium is good illustration). A slow, incremental move away from traditional x86 is the only feasible way, really. If everyone recompiled for the new processor, bought recompiled software, and replaced their x86 hardware all at the same time, then sure, we'd be better off. But that's like saying "if everyone on the freeway traffic stepped on the gas at once, we'd all be moving faster"-- reality has a fistfull of monkey wrenches for plans like that.
If I'm 100m north of said bunker in a clearing, my GPS will give me enough info to know where the bunker is (MGRS* makes this easy). GPS is a just an aid to navigation and generally goes along with a map and compass. If the bunker is your own, you probably already know the Lat-Lon position of it because it's marked on your map; and if it's NOT yours and you want an air strike on it, well, you're not inside it so the point is moot. GPS (for the infantry at least) exists to tell you where you are and, by extension, where the things around you are. Even if it did work underground, why would you want your lat-lon position in a bunker?
Makes you wonder why they didn't give the transmitters a few hundred(thousand?) more watts of power...
1) they can't put up a sat with a large enough solar array to make any significant difference in Xmitted power (inverse square law - those sats are FAR AWAY), and
2) they have nothing to gain by doing so.
The GPS system works as intended already.
*Military Grid Reference System
Phone is a LOT more reliable than power. The public utilities are, in order of reliability:
1. gas
2. water
3. phone
4. electricity
5. cable
Damn...I used to have a list of average "uptimes" for them, but the URL is gone from my list. Stupid impermanent internet!
They're fundamentally different technologies. They both provide voice communication, but their methods are so dissimilar that some services feasible on one will not be feasible on the other. By way of analogy, let us examine the horse and the automobile. Both provide transportation, but while a child can operate a horse without difficulty, a child most certainly cannot operate an automobile. Should the auto be banned because it doesn't provide universal access to children?
--
Play Frustration: The Trivia Game
Is that the game where we try to figure out what the hell you just tried to say?
What ARE those things flying over my head?
VoIP isn't necessarily tied to any hardware-- it's just a delivery method. In cases where it is hardware, it's usually a box inside a phone closet. GPS doesn't work unless it can see the sky.
It finds a clearing where it gets enough open sky to acquire the sats. (heh - sounds like something Buffalo Bill would say)
When we were first instructed on the use of GPS in the army, one of the things they repeatedly pounded into our thick, kevlar covered skulls was overhead cover blocks the signal.
My favorite is the ones here in California who flood the 911 center with calls to report an earthquake! (really? is that what that shaking was? Gosh, thanks for calling and telling us!)
Anyone else see anything wrong with this plan?
There are.
why can you still relatively easily buy a F-15 on Ebay?
You can't. Perhaps you are referring to the story about the F-18 for sale on ebay. That auction was cancelled before it ended. I don't personally know why, but I imagine one likely reason is ebay not wanting to be on the hook for assisting the sale of full mil-spec hardware which, by government regulations, must be "de-milled" before being sold to the public.
Police officers are just like regular folks-- many of them have computers at home, and some even know how to use them! A "picture menu"? What are they, illiterate chimps? If my boss can learn to use a laptop, a cop certainly can.
Nit: Speeding is not (usually) criminal. It is an administrative offense. This allows a looser process, more akin to a contractual breach than a crime.
Further nit: speeding is indeed usually just an infraction, but failure to post bail (pay the fine) and subsequent Failure To Appear by the court date on the ticket generally results in a bench warrant being issued. FTA for a traffic violation is a misdemeanor and pretty much always results in a driver's license suspension. Stuff like license suspension will always show up when the cops punch your name in.
It was Martin Blank, as played by John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank. And wasn't it just a regular fork? I don't remember it being a shrimp fork.
Why? It just takes up space that could be used by more useful items. About six months ago, one of the columnists for Car & Driver Magazine did some testing. He went down to the local junk-yard with the biggest musclehead he could find and they tried breaking windows using one of those gadgets. The result was, that no matter what, the writer was unable to even crack a window. The musclehead was able to gets some spiderweb cracks - but in order to do so, he had to be standing outside of the car so that he had clearance to swing as hard as he possibly could. Inside the car, neither of them were able to have any useful effect on the glass in the car.
I think he's talking about one of these rather than opne of those lame hammer-type tools. I've used punch-type breakers on all kinds of safety glass and they work GREAT. Press, *TINK*, -fwoosh-. The glass crumbles to little bits.
According to my research (I have CodeSource by HPC, a key code lookup app) there are only about 4000 different key bittings for all Saturns from '92 to '99. In '00 they added about 2000 more, and in '03 they added about 3000. I'd wager that the odds of finding two alike aren't too bad-- divide the number of cars they've sold in the last 12 years by 10,000, you get a sizable number. Not many cases where the cars are valet parked at the same restaurant at the same time though...
My boss is a locksmith, so I've picked up some of the trade. Your suspicion is correct to some degree, but don't forget to throw in "cheapness" and "simplicity". Say you have a car key that has 8 cuts in it. Only the ignition lock will have all 8 wafer tumblers. The trunk might have wafers for cuts 1-6, the doors for 2-7, and the glove box 5-8. It's cheaper to make a lock cylinder with 6 tumblers than one with 8. Also, a 6 tumbler lock is shorter and fits better in doors and the trunk. The glove box is really small so it just works on like the last 4 at the tip.
They're not using the spectrum, they're trampling it. Those frequencies they're blasting are still officially designated for other uses. Look at it this way: What if the water company came up with a way to transmit data using pressure waves in the water mains, but the side effect was that water would leak out of the joints in the mains under the street and create hundreds of sinkholes in the road, rendering the road useless. Is their right to deliver internet-over-watermain so important that they should be permitted to ruin road transportation anywhere they put this in service?
Network connectivity can be delivered over any number of mediums (satellite, fiber, cable, etc) whereas ham radio is limited to RADIO. Your argument is stupid.
We, the people, own the spectrum, and let you use it. Your rights in the matter end at your right to vote.
hams are part of "we, the people" as well, jackass. "Voting" isn't how rights work. Your right to trample the RF spectrum to the detriment of other users of said spectrum must be weighed against others' rights to the spectrum. The necessity for you to have access to yet another network delivery medium doesn't outweigh the incidental damage it does to huge swathes of the RF spectrum. Your second argument is double-stupid.
There are many other reasons why ham bands should be given to more useful purposes.
They aren't reassigning ham bands, they're just letting them be jammed. Clobbering several RF frequencies with noise is a ridiculous price to pay just so power companies can get in on the ISP business.
you're right! I totally suck! crap!
The problem with that, even if such a thing were possible, is that it would only obfuscate sources from someone looking through a log they seized after the fact. In reality, all they have to do to identify the source of something via P2P is download it themselves and record who they're getting it from. There's no way to send data to nowhere and have it arrive at a secret destination or request data from an unknown address and have that request get there. The totally anonymous medium you're looking for does exist, but it's not P2P, it's called USENET.
Reminds me of a story I heard (may be true, but who knows) about a newspaper employee giving a tour of their typesetting facility. He was showing off their fancy typesetting machines which were, basically, early word processing machines. He demonstrated some of their more advanced features, such as find and replace.
"I can tell it, for example, to replace every instance of the letter 'o' with a letter 'i'", he said doing so with a few deft alt-macro keystrokes.
"And then I can change them right back again", and with a few more keystrokes he changed all the instances of 'i' into 'o'-- including the ones that were originally 'o'...