Comcast _seems_ to be guilty as hell of degrading our service when we do VOIP. We have run pings to a server at another of our locations and we get a respectable 12msec average latency. We start a VOIP call (Vonage) on one of the several lines here and the ping time for a few packets ramps to 40 seconds or so and then our entire internet connection drops for 10-20 seconds. This causes havoc on the call in progress and when the called party answers thinks we've hung up on them. Neither Vonage nor Comcast want to address the issue. Vonage modded the settings on our two (one cisco one moto) VOIP boxen and that didn't help and was the best they could do. Comcast sent a wireing tech out who didn't even electrically test anything and just said the installation looked OK and he'd schedule another tech for the next day. A week later we are still waiting. seems our request fell off the end of the world and when we checked up on it they rescheduled but the tech was a no show. Coincidently my Vonage service used to allow my TiVo to phone home and post the latest updates it is a not an option. Any call to a modem just fails to connect at all. (Not too surprising) We get failures on almost all international calls and 30% or so of domestic ones.
My online terms and conditions state that if I give out my online account and password I am responsible for their use. So if I give a phisher the information I lose. If my information is gained without my consent ot knowledge, it is their loss. So it would depend on the phishing scam. If my browser is hooked and I go directly to the real bank website I should trust the technology (sorry LOL) that I should be secure in trusting that transmitting the data of my account, password, etc. is secure. I should not be responsible for "man in the middle" schemes even if instigated by phishers. On the other hand if I go to bankofamerika.com and don't notice they swiped all of bankofamerica.com's graphics, etc. (which BofA should prevent from being used on any page but their own anyway) then I am liable. Your milage and terms of service may vary.
Take out Nokia E61 phone and browse web. Find sites with marketing info for gas station owners. Thier come-on will mention values as of a few months/years ago. And usually growth. For hack and slash assume linear growth if only 1-2 years. Set of the pants adjustment for gas price fluctuations and car sales trends (SUVs vs Hybrids).
Alternate is estimate based on US population and new car warranty and/or lease assumptions for driving habits (or insurance companies if you know them). Guess average MPG is slightly below 20 MPG as that is an important "cut off" figure. Add a guess for commercial traffic. Like say 30% more.
Got time? Do both and see if they are close. Tune each fudge factor to come close.
These questions are more fun. MSFT interviews can be rough. They ask interesting questions but want code to solve them. They _seem_ to be more interested in how you attack the problem than your solution. Also they ask simple logic puzzles... I spent less time talking about my own abilities during the 5.5 hour interview through 6 people than solving puzzels or writing code (which is the same thing). Often I could explain the approach very simply but the code was longer to write.. especially since it was on a white board which makes top down a tough design choice. Hard to insert lines at some point.
I use mostly simple logic problems when hiring folks myself. Sometimes real world, sometimes abstract. It depends on the position I am looking to fill. Only time I have made a regretted hire was hiring my own boss so I could get back to research and architecture. He just turned out to have been less than truthful about the answers to the "ambitions if you are hired" questions. But we are who we are.
No, it's mostly proof that you can play the game.
There are two games.
1. The technical education which is the following game.
They ask a question.
You determine what the real question is.
You find the right book.
You read how to answer the question.
You answer the question.
You determine the answer they really want.
Often the correct answer is not the one they think is correct due to numerous factors (like ambiguous questions or requirements) and sometimes there are just answers they don't see.
Did you ever consider that maybe the problem is with Cingular?
Yes. Yes I did. The point is that if it was standardized and the standards implemented, like the majority of the Internet, then SMS would work. Like email on the Internet. When a product or service provider messes up implementation of SMTP, POP or IMAP their product is fixed. Most of the time. SMS has standards and when you tell Cingular their gateway is not operating to them, they don't bother to fix it. And again. The non-deterministic handling of MMS messages is even worse. But SMS in latin characters from Ukraine to US and back works for both major Ukraine mobile providers and to Cingular at least. And What phone makes entry of cyrillic tough? On Motorloa phones that have the correct language pack it is pretty easy as iTAP and TAP are supported for cyrillic. I have not tried on the Nokia e61 yet as I don't have the russian language loaded yet and the phone is not supported in the US yet.
We hardly ever have lines at polling stations though, and nearly everyone, except for the most remote farms, votes at a station in walking distance from his house. It is just a matter of having very small polling districts, which is basically a function of the number of election committee volunteers available per capita.
Sometimes in the US the nextdoor neighbor is not in walking distance. The US is afterall about 2.5 times the size of the entire EU and just shy of 232 times the size of the Netherlands. In major cities local schools are often the polling stations and are closed for the day, in those cases it is an easy walk to your polling place. As the set up of the polling places is dependant on the individual states then there is quite a bit of variation. Personally I signed up for permanent absentee ballot forms and a week or so before the election they show up in my mailbox, I vote and mail it back. No lines, no hassels. And if I mail it back in time to arrive by election day it is counted when the other ballots are counted. (Otherwise they are counted when they arrive after the election up to the cut-off limit.)
All agreements between the various states require approval of congress. So to form the compact the US Congress would have to authorize them. And the Supremes may say that when a state balks the first time it is within its rights as the Constitution is "The Supreme Law of the Land".
That said, fix it the correct and accepted way. Pass an amendment. If there is not enough agreement to do so then those states forming the compact are doing against the views of the protected remaining states and those states may well take them to court to force disolution of the aforementioned compact.
I can write a letter in the cyrillic characterset on either my phone or computer. I can send the message via computer from the US to Eastern Europe or the other direction with few problems (especially if in Unicode). I can not send or receive cyrillic (or other alternet non-latin character sets) to or from Cingular with SMS, but while in Ukraine the same phone sends the same text without problems to other Ukraine phones. Worse, I can MMS a message from Ukraine to Cingular in cyrillic and it is garbled by Cingular, but on the way from US to Ukraine (starting on Cingular and ending on Kyivstar) the MMS message _sometimes_ arrives intact. Other times it is just replacement characters. So parts of Cingular are different than others (I have wondered if the ATT Wireless vs Cingular from the acquisition is the cause).
If the cell phone networks worked like the Internet it would just work if both ends adopted the same standards (i.e., the phones used the same standards) as the telephone network would be a layer above that doing just data delivery.
As long as "The Brotherhood of the Bell" available I'll buy at least one. Far better than "The Skulls" which was a later movie of similar (almsot pirated:) ) concept. So as long as they can sell one movie to everyone they have a viable market...
What is the total lifetime cost... not dollars but gallons of crude oil. Or the equivalent for your choice of power generation. Don't forget it takes a lot of energy to manufacture all those lithium cells that need repalcement and that the weight of those batteries contributes to the weight of the vehicle associated with propulsion. A gasoline drived relatively high performance two seater could be made for around 1 quarter the cost and achieve 30 or so miles to the gallon. Over the life of the vehilcle if properly maintained replacement parts manufactureing cost in terms of energy use is relatively small. When you start replacing the cells of something like the litium cells with over 6000 of them then you best also have sophisticated technology to assure charging correctly to avoid reverse charging if some cells go bad, identify the bad cells, etc. They would be better off making a few larger cells to deal with the problems that come about from such a huge number of individaul cells. This is just not real viable technology from a overall including manufacturing energy usage and recycling cost yet.
More power too 'em for the effort though as we have to get real alternatives to get real numbers. Personally I'd rather see them crack gasoline more efficiently into better burning fuels that can be processed with less harmful emissions and that can allow better efficiency in terms of energy extraction from the fuel. That like the somewhat dubious better efficiency of electric cars (the electric current to charge them comes from the same fossil fuels in a large number of cases) would result in transferrence of the energy use to a larger scale and might result in significant efficiency gains...
My second thought was when StarTrek writers alternate future predicted the death of television that now we know how it died. The Television companies committed suicide. But my first thought was if they limit fast forward in the commercials and I can still fast forward the main program material, then the content has to be marked as being a commercial. This means the technically inclined can then extract that information and very quickly skip past all the commercials in a segemnt with a zero second window on restarting after the commercial. So boot-leg, add-on, home-built, etc., commercial zappers will very accurate. No more skip 30 seconds etc. and guess at the shows start or time the fastforward out of third stage (TiVo has three speed FF) back to normal time the jump back just right syndrome. It would just work. Skip the commercial and it is skipped...
Of course the (or at least a) correct solution would be compelling commercials. Like the old Folgers romantic series... lots of people watched the first few seconds to see if it was a new installemnt. Make the ads tell a story. And of course the last few frames commercials already are on TiVo supplied feeds were the whole audience exposure is so short there is a compelling feeling to see just what that was. Smarter ads not restrictive hardware. Don't play with MY HARDWARE to make up for your miserable ads.
for WinHPC it will just be just another VS programmer of which there are a lot
And those "another VS Programmer types will know all the pitfalls that are relevant to distributed computations in a cluster environment because of... It is not the environment for development that is important. XCode for Mac is not really hard to learn. Heck, even at MS on campus, most large projects eschew the IDE in favor of command files that invoke nmake directly. (And I worked in Visual Studio Enterprise Edition, so have first hand knowledge, as well as having done a stint earlier with Visual Basic.) This is all marketing hype to make it appear that MS is on top of the game, when it has been quite some time since they created a first mover product. They usually sit back and watch, and then either build a product in an existing market that shows promise or buy a company to acquire a product in the market space of interest. Nothing new to see here... move along...
"...Or is a blood sample like a fingerprint, something that everyone should provide to their government?"
It is comments like this that really scare me. I assume it is meant to be limited to those arrested, but if this applies to the authors thoughts for the general populace we are way to far down the slippery slope already and all hope may be lost. Might as well just get chipped at birth. Wow. The government has no right or need to fingerprint all of its citizens. It is presumption that they will commit a crime. Ben Franklin is spinning at warp speed tonight.
As tempting as it is to send DVDs that have firmware upgrades for players, etc. or just random noise there is a downside. The false positive insures an opened package and as I learned this Christmas sending a stuffed suitcase through customs, not all inside made it back in afer inspection, curiously the canned crab went missing, and they are not real smart. They opened the sealed package of dog treats in one bag. In another they punched a hole through the bag of coffee (coffee is often used to mask drugs, now the dogs sniff out coffee too) instead of just unfolding the top like a normal person who has seen a store ground coffee bag. And when they repacked the cases they didn't bother to pad the Christmas ornaments (small ones for a small tree) they packed a now unwrapped bottle of wine next to the now unpadded glass ornaments. Needless to say Christmas carnage ensued. So maybe think twice about just what packages you ship with a blank CD inside. Oh, and if you do, think about using hot melt glue to bond the disc to the box. "But you really shouldn't do that!"(TM)
Maybe the first commercial micro-processor. DECs VAX-8600 was asynchronous. And it smoked for the day. I worked on some of the multi-variant multi-source clock skew calculations for the simulator used to model the processor, among other duties. Very slick hardware for the time. External syncronous contexts are maintained of course for syncronous busses but the internal processor speed is quicker in theory and cheaper power since you have fewer switching transitions. Think of the fun in ECL logic back then.:)
Note the source is a union organization wanting to organize unions of technical workers and make MSFT a union shop. Nothing wrong with that but it will make life fun for contractors like myself who occasionally get work there. And the programmers will be on salary schedules so no bright stars need apply, they won't be rewarded for their extra efforts. So this particular news source has just a bit of bias. MSFT used to have the best and brightest and paid for the priviledge. That has not been true for many years so this is not exactly news to the folks around here.
Check out the firm, Cryptocybernetics, LLC. as this is our bread and butter area of development. We work with such companies as General Dynamics (and Microsoft) for unique DRM solutions and have a DRM/PVR offering we can port to either Mac or Linux for PVR applications. I know DRM is not your primary concern, but one of our systems was approved by the major motion picture studios for early content release on portable players (for airplanes). We are security / virus protection aware and would welcome an oppurtunity to create a custom solution for you based on our existing code base and intellectual property. We also are the primary contractors for one of the top virus scanner companies in the US for cross platform solutions.
All the off world contacts and the Ori? Oh SG-I- not SG-1-... Nevermind...
Two items the article fails to correctly account 4
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
·
· Score: 1
First dt/dt means is in the spatial frame of reference of Newtonian physics. So as he travels through time his relative time does not change in Newtonian physics. We already know that in relativistic terms spatial physics in a Newtonian sense is often violated. So as he travels through time his personal timepiece in the "bubble" traveling through time won't read the change in time (hands won't move backwards, etc.) outside the "bubble". Sorry I could not think of a easy name for the smoo consisting of all the volume in three space that would be moving through time differently than the rest. Second: No matter when you go, then you are.
Pay my company 400 million and we'll deliver a better than Opera cross platform browser. The SDKs for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and maybe even the BSD ones to boot. MS would haev a state of the art object oriented design from the ground up. All pure code written for hire, standards compliant SVG wrangling, CSS current standard support, kitchen sink thrown in (read Active X /.NET) browser that had the smallest possible footprint based on what the user enabled, integrated with Exchange, and supporting just about anything else they care to name. 400 million USD is a lot people!!!
{insert little finger at edge of mouth fingers curled palm facing out}400... MILLION... DOLLARS!
I am just back of the envelope scratching, but these appear to cost the same as about 375,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. And they introduce a new set of mechanical parts that can break down so maintenance needs to be figured in. Is it just me or does it seem the cost initially spent on the device would pay for a lanes worth of traffic lights (since you would need one of these for each direction anyway), essentially forever given LED traffic lights and electronic controllers? And that is without the additional periodic maintenance.
If a portion of the Internet is broken it will be routed around.
If the telcos charge too much, the independant backbone providers will do what Google already is. They'll buy dark fiber. More than they have now. When the telco raises the rates they'll slowly eliminate the telcos from the equation. When the telcos then want to reach thier customers the ISPs will have the regulations in place to charge the telcos approriately. The seeming chaos of the Internet can and will work against them. Someone at a peering point will always attempt to offer a better deal for transit of the traffic. Google is the tourist trap, ultimately they and places like them, or well P*rn Sites as well realistically, are why people are on the net. They have the ultimate power. "Hi, you are an XYZ Telco IP address, we ration our access to XYZ customers due to XYZ tarrifed costs we pay to support their customers. Do you have another Internet access account, please use that for faster more reliable service. Sorry for the inconvienience. XYZ officials need to know you're not happy. Call them at +1 800.555.1212" I could just see this on some site (maybe not successful ones, but enough that it would smart to be XYZs service department). It will be fun to watch the reaction of the collective intelligence of the Internet et. al. in opposition to the Telcos. Really. It will be fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Comcast _seems_ to be guilty as hell of degrading our service when we do VOIP. We have run pings to a server at another of our locations and we get a respectable 12msec average latency. We start a VOIP call (Vonage) on one of the several lines here and the ping time for a few packets ramps to 40 seconds or so and then our entire internet connection drops for 10-20 seconds. This causes havoc on the call in progress and when the called party answers thinks we've hung up on them. Neither Vonage nor Comcast want to address the issue. Vonage modded the settings on our two (one cisco one moto) VOIP boxen and that didn't help and was the best they could do. Comcast sent a wireing tech out who didn't even electrically test anything and just said the installation looked OK and he'd schedule another tech for the next day. A week later we are still waiting. seems our request fell off the end of the world and when we checked up on it they rescheduled but the tech was a no show. Coincidently my Vonage service used to allow my TiVo to phone home and post the latest updates it is a not an option. Any call to a modem just fails to connect at all. (Not too surprising) We get failures on almost all international calls and 30% or so of domestic ones.
My online terms and conditions state that if I give out my online account and password I am responsible for their use. So if I give a phisher the information I lose. If my information is gained without my consent ot knowledge, it is their loss. So it would depend on the phishing scam. If my browser is hooked and I go directly to the real bank website I should trust the technology (sorry LOL) that I should be secure in trusting that transmitting the data of my account, password, etc. is secure. I should not be responsible for "man in the middle" schemes even if instigated by phishers. On the other hand if I go to bankofamerika.com and don't notice they swiped all of bankofamerica.com's graphics, etc. (which BofA should prevent from being used on any page but their own anyway) then I am liable. Your milage and terms of service may vary.
Take out Nokia E61 phone and browse web. Find sites with marketing info for gas station owners. Thier come-on will mention values as of a few months/years ago. And usually growth. For hack and slash assume linear growth if only 1-2 years. Set of the pants adjustment for gas price fluctuations and car sales trends (SUVs vs Hybrids).
... I spent less time talking about my own abilities during the 5.5 hour interview through 6 people than solving puzzels or writing code (which is the same thing). Often I could explain the approach very simply but the code was longer to write .. especially since it was on a white board which makes top down a tough design choice. Hard to insert lines at some point.
Alternate is estimate based on US population and new car warranty and/or lease assumptions for driving habits (or insurance companies if you know them). Guess average MPG is slightly below 20 MPG as that is an important "cut off" figure. Add a guess for commercial traffic. Like say 30% more.
Got time? Do both and see if they are close. Tune each fudge factor to come close.
These questions are more fun. MSFT interviews can be rough. They ask interesting questions but want code to solve them. They _seem_ to be more interested in how you attack the problem than your solution. Also they ask simple logic puzzles
I use mostly simple logic problems when hiring folks myself. Sometimes real world, sometimes abstract. It depends on the position I am looking to fill. Only time I have made a regretted hire was hiring my own boss so I could get back to research and architecture. He just turned out to have been less than truthful about the answers to the "ambitions if you are hired" questions. But we are who we are.
You forgot the most important step...
No, it's mostly proof that you can play the game.
There are two games.
1. The technical education which is the following game.
They ask a question.
You determine what the real question is.
You find the right book.
You read how to answer the question.
You answer the question.
You determine the answer they really want.
Often the correct answer is not the one they think is correct due to numerous factors (like ambiguous questions or requirements) and sometimes there are just answers they don't see.
Most security software that is downloaded comes with checksums you can and should check. That way you do know what you download is what you expect.
Did you ever consider that maybe the problem is with Cingular?
Yes. Yes I did. The point is that if it was standardized and the standards implemented, like the majority of the Internet, then SMS would work. Like email on the Internet. When a product or service provider messes up implementation of SMTP, POP or IMAP their product is fixed. Most of the time. SMS has standards and when you tell Cingular their gateway is not operating to them, they don't bother to fix it. And again. The non-deterministic handling of MMS messages is even worse. But SMS in latin characters from Ukraine to US and back works for both major Ukraine mobile providers and to Cingular at least. And What phone makes entry of cyrillic tough? On Motorloa phones that have the correct language pack it is pretty easy as iTAP and TAP are supported for cyrillic. I have not tried on the Nokia e61 yet as I don't have the russian language loaded yet and the phone is not supported in the US yet.
We hardly ever have lines at polling stations though, and nearly everyone, except for the most remote farms, votes at a station in walking distance from his house. It is just a matter of having very small polling districts, which is basically a function of the number of election committee volunteers available per capita.
Sometimes in the US the nextdoor neighbor is not in walking distance. The US is afterall about 2.5 times the size of the entire EU and just shy of 232 times the size of the Netherlands. In major cities local schools are often the polling stations and are closed for the day, in those cases it is an easy walk to your polling place. As the set up of the polling places is dependant on the individual states then there is quite a bit of variation. Personally I signed up for permanent absentee ballot forms and a week or so before the election they show up in my mailbox, I vote and mail it back. No lines, no hassels. And if I mail it back in time to arrive by election day it is counted when the other ballots are counted. (Otherwise they are counted when they arrive after the election up to the cut-off limit.)
All agreements between the various states require approval of congress. So to form the compact the US Congress would have to authorize them. And the Supremes may say that when a state balks the first time it is within its rights as the Constitution is "The Supreme Law of the Land".
That said, fix it the correct and accepted way. Pass an amendment. If there is not enough agreement to do so then those states forming the compact are doing against the views of the protected remaining states and those states may well take them to court to force disolution of the aforementioned compact.
I can write a letter in the cyrillic characterset on either my phone or computer. I can send the message via computer from the US to Eastern Europe or the other direction with few problems (especially if in Unicode). I can not send or receive cyrillic (or other alternet non-latin character sets) to or from Cingular with SMS, but while in Ukraine the same phone sends the same text without problems to other Ukraine phones. Worse, I can MMS a message from Ukraine to Cingular in cyrillic and it is garbled by Cingular, but on the way from US to Ukraine (starting on Cingular and ending on Kyivstar) the MMS message _sometimes_ arrives intact. Other times it is just replacement characters. So parts of Cingular are different than others (I have wondered if the ATT Wireless vs Cingular from the acquisition is the cause).
If the cell phone networks worked like the Internet it would just work if both ends adopted the same standards (i.e., the phones used the same standards) as the telephone network would be a layer above that doing just data delivery.
As long as "The Brotherhood of the Bell" available I'll buy at least one. Far better than "The Skulls" which was a later movie of similar (almsot pirated :) ) concept. So as long as they can sell one movie to everyone they have a viable market...
What is the total lifetime cost ... not dollars but gallons of crude oil. Or the equivalent for your choice of power generation. Don't forget it takes a lot of energy to manufacture all those lithium cells that need repalcement and that the weight of those batteries contributes to the weight of the vehicle associated with propulsion. A gasoline drived relatively high performance two seater could be made for around 1 quarter the cost and achieve 30 or so miles to the gallon. Over the life of the vehilcle if properly maintained replacement parts manufactureing cost in terms of energy use is relatively small. When you start replacing the cells of something like the litium cells with over 6000 of them then you best also have sophisticated technology to assure charging correctly to avoid reverse charging if some cells go bad, identify the bad cells, etc. They would be better off making a few larger cells to deal with the problems that come about from such a huge number of individaul cells. This is just not real viable technology from a overall including manufacturing energy usage and recycling cost yet.
More power too 'em for the effort though as we have to get real alternatives to get real numbers. Personally I'd rather see them crack gasoline more efficiently into better burning fuels that can be processed with less harmful emissions and that can allow better efficiency in terms of energy extraction from the fuel. That like the somewhat dubious better efficiency of electric cars (the electric current to charge them comes from the same fossil fuels in a large number of cases) would result in transferrence of the energy use to a larger scale and might result in significant efficiency gains...
My second thought was when StarTrek writers alternate future predicted the death of television that now we know how it died. The Television companies committed suicide. But my first thought was if they limit fast forward in the commercials and I can still fast forward the main program material, then the content has to be marked as being a commercial. This means the technically inclined can then extract that information and very quickly skip past all the commercials in a segemnt with a zero second window on restarting after the commercial. So boot-leg, add-on, home-built, etc., commercial zappers will very accurate. No more skip 30 seconds etc. and guess at the shows start or time the fastforward out of third stage (TiVo has three speed FF) back to normal time the jump back just right syndrome. It would just work. Skip the commercial and it is skipped...
... lots of people watched the first few seconds to see if it was a new installemnt. Make the ads tell a story. And of course the last few frames commercials already are on TiVo supplied feeds were the whole audience exposure is so short there is a compelling feeling to see just what that was. Smarter ads not restrictive hardware. Don't play with MY HARDWARE to make up for your miserable ads.
Of course the (or at least a) correct solution would be compelling commercials. Like the old Folgers romantic series
What if I made a bunch of copies for myself and carelessly put them where they could easily be taken by stangers?
Please rip them to iPods and carelessly scatter them about in front of my house. (Obligitory humorless RIAA bastards explanation: THIS IS A JOKE)
for WinHPC it will just be just another VS programmer of which there are a lot
... It is not the environment for development that is important. XCode for Mac is not really hard to learn. Heck, even at MS on campus, most large projects eschew the IDE in favor of command files that invoke nmake directly. (And I worked in Visual Studio Enterprise Edition, so have first hand knowledge, as well as having done a stint earlier with Visual Basic.) This is all marketing hype to make it appear that MS is on top of the game, when it has been quite some time since they created a first mover product. They usually sit back and watch, and then either build a product in an existing market that shows promise or buy a company to acquire a product in the market space of interest. Nothing new to see here... move along ...
And those "another VS Programmer types will know all the pitfalls that are relevant to distributed computations in a cluster environment because of
"...Or is a blood sample like a fingerprint, something that everyone should provide to their government?"
It is comments like this that really scare me. I assume it is meant to be limited to those arrested, but if this applies to the authors thoughts for the general populace we are way to far down the slippery slope already and all hope may be lost. Might as well just get chipped at birth. Wow. The government has no right or need to fingerprint all of its citizens. It is presumption that they will commit a crime. Ben Franklin is spinning at warp speed tonight.
As tempting as it is to send DVDs that have firmware upgrades for players, etc. or just random noise there is a downside. The false positive insures an opened package and as I learned this Christmas sending a stuffed suitcase through customs, not all inside made it back in afer inspection, curiously the canned crab went missing, and they are not real smart. They opened the sealed package of dog treats in one bag. In another they punched a hole through the bag of coffee (coffee is often used to mask drugs, now the dogs sniff out coffee too) instead of just unfolding the top like a normal person who has seen a store ground coffee bag. And when they repacked the cases they didn't bother to pad the Christmas ornaments (small ones for a small tree) they packed a now unwrapped bottle of wine next to the now unpadded glass ornaments. Needless to say Christmas carnage ensued. So maybe think twice about just what packages you ship with a blank CD inside. Oh, and if you do, think about using hot melt glue to bond the disc to the box. "But you really shouldn't do that!"(TM)
Maybe the first commercial micro-processor. DECs VAX-8600 was asynchronous. And it smoked for the day. I worked on some of the multi-variant multi-source clock skew calculations for the simulator used to model the processor, among other duties. Very slick hardware for the time. External syncronous contexts are maintained of course for syncronous busses but the internal processor speed is quicker in theory and cheaper power since you have fewer switching transitions. Think of the fun in ECL logic back then. :)
Twilight Zone future medical doctor bag. Already been done... NO PATENT FOR YOU!!!
Note the source is a union organization wanting to organize unions of technical workers and make MSFT a union shop. Nothing wrong with that but it will make life fun for contractors like myself who occasionally get work there. And the programmers will be on salary schedules so no bright stars need apply, they won't be rewarded for their extra efforts. So this particular news source has just a bit of bias. MSFT used to have the best and brightest and paid for the priviledge. That has not been true for many years so this is not exactly news to the folks around here.
Check out the firm, Cryptocybernetics, LLC. as this is our bread and butter area of development. We work with such companies as General Dynamics (and Microsoft) for unique DRM solutions and have a DRM/PVR offering we can port to either Mac or Linux for PVR applications. I know DRM is not your primary concern, but one of our systems was approved by the major motion picture studios for early content release on portable players (for airplanes). We are security / virus protection aware and would welcome an oppurtunity to create a custom solution for you based on our existing code base and intellectual property. We also are the primary contractors for one of the top virus scanner companies in the US for cross platform solutions.
...
End soulless self promotion
All the off world contacts and the Ori? Oh SG-I- not SG-1- ... Nevermind...
First dt/dt means is in the spatial frame of reference of Newtonian physics. So as he travels through time his relative time does not change in Newtonian physics. We already know that in relativistic terms spatial physics in a Newtonian sense is often violated. So as he travels through time his personal timepiece in the "bubble" traveling through time won't read the change in time (hands won't move backwards, etc.) outside the "bubble". Sorry I could not think of a easy name for the smoo consisting of all the volume in three space that would be moving through time differently than the rest.
Second:
No matter when you go, then you are.
Pay my company 400 million and we'll deliver a better than Opera cross platform browser. The SDKs for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and maybe even the BSD ones to boot. MS would haev a state of the art object oriented design from the ground up. All pure code written for hire, standards compliant SVG wrangling, CSS current standard support, kitchen sink thrown in (read Active X / .NET) browser that had the smallest possible footprint based on what the user enabled, integrated with Exchange, and supporting just about anything else they care to name. 400 million USD is a lot people!!!
... MILLION ... DOLLARS!
{insert little finger at edge of mouth fingers curled palm facing out}400
I am just back of the envelope scratching, but these appear to cost the same as about 375,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. And they introduce a new set of mechanical parts that can break down so maintenance needs to be figured in. Is it just me or does it seem the cost initially spent on the device would pay for a lanes worth of traffic lights (since you would need one of these for each direction anyway), essentially forever given LED traffic lights and electronic controllers? And that is without the additional periodic maintenance.
If a portion of the Internet is broken it will be routed around.
If the telcos charge too much, the independant backbone providers will do what Google already is. They'll buy dark fiber. More than they have now. When the telco raises the rates they'll slowly eliminate the telcos from the equation. When the telcos then want to reach thier customers the ISPs will have the regulations in place to charge the telcos approriately. The seeming chaos of the Internet can and will work against them. Someone at a peering point will always attempt to offer a better deal for transit of the traffic. Google is the tourist trap, ultimately they and places like them, or well P*rn Sites as well realistically, are why people are on the net. They have the ultimate power. "Hi, you are an XYZ Telco IP address, we ration our access to XYZ customers due to XYZ tarrifed costs we pay to support their customers. Do you have another Internet access account, please use that for faster more reliable service. Sorry for the inconvienience. XYZ officials need to know you're not happy. Call them at +1 800.555.1212" I could just see this on some site (maybe not successful ones, but enough that it would smart to be XYZs service department). It will be fun to watch the reaction of the collective intelligence of the Internet et. al. in opposition to the Telcos. Really. It will be fun.