CEOs get paid for the ability to bring money in: would it be sales, financing, IPOs, whatever.
Management gets paid for their loyalty to the hierarchy.
Poor slobs get paid the replacement value: there may (or may not) be another one standing at the door waiting for a job.
> old days of the Palm Pilot (Remember all those *Hack programs?)
The *Hack programs are still around. The are really third-party system extensions (remember old Mac days?) using a simplified API originally provided by an application named HackMaster.
I find it interesting that on MacOS 7.5 the critical core OS code (the input event dispatch loop) was still 68K and was emulated on PowerPC! The API and the code probably did not change since the airing of the Big Brother commercial...
I found it hard way - the attached handler did not bother to save 68K base register (we are running on PowerPC only, right?) and random crashes ensued...
Remember: HoTMaiL is for mail. Log out when you are done. Click "shared computer" when you log in. Other sites will have no idea who you are. Problem solved.
Designing the rest of the API, writing the myprintf() function and dealing with macros with variable number of parameters is left as an exercise to the implementor.
Q: What is sustainable computing?
A: The environment we characterize as sustainable computing is one in which:
Software is developed with quality, dependability and security in mind from inception, and these attributes can be accurately measured and validated
Software is resilient in the face of unexpected challenges; and
Developers, users, and policymakers interact based on fairness, precision, and a shared interest in the vitality and competitiveness of the software industry.
Isn't it the same as (not in the same order)
Simplicity, Clarity, Generality? (Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike, The Practice of Programming)
The obligatory joke is that to get an order of magnitude improvement, you first need to drop the sustainability for an order of magnitude. I think the reference to Bill Gates on the home page of sustainablecomputing.org is in acknowledgement of his contributions in this area.
Our application in cable modulates an 18MHz baseband multi-sub-band signal. ... The downstream data capacity of the channel will be 170Mbps, running with an effective baud rate of 10 bits per second per Hz, equivalent to 1024QAM.
1024QAM does give you 25% improvement over 256QAM - after all, it packs 10 bits in space where 8 bits are now. The wavelet may do some additional magic with sidebands, but if you use plain old 256QAM on 18 MHZ channel, you will get about 120 Mbit/s. 40% improvement is good, but is it good enough to convince cable companies to change standards?
If a new application, operating system, computer, or piece of networking equipment comes along that has 10 times the performance at the same price or the same performance at one tenth the cost, it doesn't matter who makes it, that product will take the market. ... Rainmaker customers will get 170 megabits-per-second or more. With wavelet modulation filling the entire one gigahertz capacity of coaxial cable at 10 bits-per-hertz, the ultimate capacity of the system is 10 gigabits-per-second for each segmented subnet.
10 bits-per-hertz sounds like 1024QAM, but to get 170 Mb/s you have to have 17 MHz HDTV channel... Nowdays the plain 256QAM cable modem can get 40 Mb/s on 6 MHz channel, or, in theory, 136 Mb/s on 17 MHz.
Looks like in reality there's only 25% performance improvement. Cringely, hold the purchase!
The DOCSIS standard has only just been developed and it will take at least 3 years for any radical redesign to make it into a spec and another 2 to get into production, then there will be the inevitable delay as results from trial deployments are assesed and so on.
The standard that is currently deployed is DOCSIS 1.0, with DOCSIS 1.1 equipment available and used in new deployments. Cable companies have no desire to upgrade to 1.0 to 1.1: the equipment, expensive CMTSes and numerous CMs, is still new.
Meanwhile, CableLabs just rolled out DOCSIS 2.0 with new upstream PHY (two different modulations that MUST be implemented, because CableLabs couldn't deside which one to use!), so the roadmap is pretty much known for the next 10 years.
MAPCs have many of the properties of ESCs, but they are not identical. Unlike ESCs, for example, they do not seem to form cancerous masses if you inject them into adults.
If this is true, it makes MAPCs much better for organ cloning than ESCs: no immune reaction, less risk of cancer, an no ethical problems.
Did anybody notice that BBC articles are very lightly edited lately?
The picture on the right, "Manhattan from space", actually depicts the smoke clouds from WTC attack over Brooklyn;
The flat statement "Each launch costs around $400m, which is why most of the flights to the International Space Station (ISS), for example, use cheaper Russian rockets" is not exactly true:
There were 11 Shuttle flights to the ISS, and 11 Russian flights: 3 with the crew (one with Expedition 1 and two with visiting crews, so-called taxi flights to replace Soyuz before the end of its 6 months design life), 5 Progress freighters, and 3 station component flights (Zarya, Zvezda and Pirs).
Cost may play a role in selecting Progress and Soyuz, but here are also more important technical reasons:
Progress major role is a tanker that can refuel Russian segment engines that are used for orbit correction; Soyuz is primarilly a lifeboat that remains always docked to the ISS. Shuttle as of today can't deliver fuel to the station, and the maximum flight duration of the Shuttle is about 2 weeks, making it unsuitable for the lifeboat role.
> Senator Bill Nelson, a former astronaut, said this was the
> worst time of all to consider such a move. He pointed to
> the shuttle's role in putting intelligence satellites into orbit.
Last time ANY intelligence satellite was put in orbit by Shuttle was on November 25, 1991, nearly 10 years ago. It's much more effective and cheaper to use Titan 4 for these.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the way I see it:
CEOs get paid for the ability to bring money in: would it be sales, financing, IPOs, whatever.
Management gets paid for their loyalty to the hierarchy.
Poor slobs get paid the replacement value: there may (or may not) be another one standing at the door waiting for a job.
> In 1970 the only way a record could be made and distributed was with a recording studio that cost thousands, perhaps millions
Wrong. Reel-to-reel tape recorders were common in 1960s.
> old days of the Palm Pilot (Remember all those *Hack programs?)
The *Hack programs are still around. The are really third-party system extensions (remember old Mac days?) using a simplified API originally provided by an application named HackMaster.
I find it interesting that on MacOS 7.5 the critical core OS code (the input event dispatch loop) was still 68K and was emulated on PowerPC! The API and the code probably did not change since the airing of the Big Brother commercial...
I found it hard way - the attached handler did not bother to save 68K base register (we are running on PowerPC only, right?) and random crashes ensued...
Hey! Look at this! (And it was there since October 1998...)
Microsoft Linux 98
Remember: HoTMaiL is for mail. Log out when you are done. Click "shared computer" when you log in. Other sites will have no idea who you are. Problem solved.
> I'm sure Intel has put a lot of work into making the backwards compatibility perform at a reasonable speed
:)
Look up what happened when:
1. 80286 was emulating 8086 in protected mode
2. Pentium Pro was running 16-bit code
Designing the rest of the API, writing the myprintf() function and dealing with macros with variable number of parameters is left as an exercise to the implementor.
Oh please.
return (char *) ((((long) cp) + 15) & ~15);
is not portable.
return (char *) ((((size_t) cp) + 15) & ~15);
is much better.
The obligatory joke is that to get an order of magnitude improvement, you first need to drop the sustainability for an order of magnitude. I think the reference to Bill Gates on the home page of sustainablecomputing.org is in acknowledgement of his contributions in this area.
The actual auction page is
t io n5.asp?siteID=1&auctionID=5&CategoryID=20
http://auctions.radiowebnetwork.com/auction/auc
Netscape 4.x users need not apply (duh)
The Soviet cargo planes used for Buran transportation:
r eam.html
Antonov AN-225 Mriya http://k26.com/buran/Future/An-225_Dream/an-225_d
VM-T (modified 3M) - in Russian:
http://www.buran.ru/htm/3m.htm
It was MMDS one-way system by GTE Americast using Zenith settop boxes.
According to Encyclopedia Astronautica, RD-170 and RD-171, the original designs that led to Atlas III and Atlas V RD-180, were developed 1973-1985.
12 years - that's quite a bit of work.
...But not in Russian. At least not in understandable Russian.
1024QAM does give you 25% improvement over 256QAM - after all, it packs 10 bits in space where 8 bits are now. The wavelet may do some additional magic with sidebands, but if you use plain old 256QAM on 18 MHZ channel, you will get about 120 Mbit/s. 40% improvement is good, but is it good enough to convince cable companies to change standards?
Meanwhile, CableLabs just rolled out DOCSIS 2.0 with new upstream PHY (two different modulations that MUST be implemented, because CableLabs couldn't deside which one to use!), so the roadmap is pretty much known for the next 10 years.
Hmm. Current spec (DOCSIS 1.1) downstream symbol rate is 5.360537 Msym/sec 256QAM, more than 40 Mbit/s, and not 30 as Cringley writes.
Anyway.
Did anybody notice that BBC articles are very lightly edited lately?
The picture on the right, "Manhattan from space", actually depicts the smoke clouds from WTC attack over Brooklyn;
The flat statement "Each launch costs around $400m, which is why most of the flights to the International Space Station (ISS), for example, use cheaper Russian rockets" is not exactly true:
There were 11 Shuttle flights to the ISS, and 11 Russian flights: 3 with the crew (one with Expedition 1 and two with visiting crews, so-called taxi flights to replace Soyuz before the end of its 6 months design life), 5 Progress freighters, and 3 station component flights (Zarya, Zvezda and Pirs).
Cost may play a role in selecting Progress and Soyuz, but here are also more important technical reasons:
Progress major role is a tanker that can refuel Russian segment engines that are used for orbit correction; Soyuz is primarilly a lifeboat that remains always docked to the ISS. Shuttle as of today can't deliver fuel to the station, and the maximum flight duration of the Shuttle is about 2 weeks, making it unsuitable for the lifeboat role.
From the BBC article:
> Senator Bill Nelson, a former astronaut, said this was the
> worst time of all to consider such a move. He pointed to
> the shuttle's role in putting intelligence satellites into orbit.
Last time ANY intelligence satellite was put in orbit by Shuttle was on November 25, 1991, nearly 10 years ago. It's much more effective and cheaper to use Titan 4 for these.
There were also a few prototypes (like American "Enterprise"). I think that's what is being sold.