Wilson is also to blame for the ongoing crisis that is Yugoslavia. This "country" was patched together by Wilson despite strong opposition from subject peoples which included the Kosovars.
The more I learn about Wilson the more I despise him.
Wilson also deserves quite a bit of the blame for the demise of the mass transit industry in the US - mainly due to prices doubling from 1916 to 1920 - while transit fares typically were held constant. Transit systems were typically profitable before 1916, rarely so after 1920.
Similarly, the railroad's were really hurt by the Wilson administration in particular by the USRA (United States Railway Administration).
Weakened transit systems and railroads lead to increased use of cars and trucks along with increased CO2 emissions.
Look at how Legionaire's Disease was handled when it infected a handful of white, heterosexual people.
A Google search indicated the first known outbreak was 221 infected, and IIRC 43 deaths. The same search indicates that over 10,000 cases of Legionnaire's disease occur every year in the US. The main reason for concern was the sudden outbreak - prompting fears that this was a very communicable disease (it wasn't).
One other thing to keep in mind is that Legionnaire's is caused by bacteria - which is a whole lot easier to determine the cause than a viral infection and a whole lot easier to treat.
The most effective thing Reagan could have done was to treat it as a serious public health matter
Standard operating practice for a serious public health matter is to prevent the spread of disease. Food poisoning traced to a meat packing plant? - shut down the plant. Disease outbreak traced to a carrier? - quarantine the carrier.
The AIDS epidemic was not too far along when it became apparent that people contracting AIDS were in the same groups as people at high risk of hepatitus B. On that basis, one of the first things the public health agencies should have done would have been close down the bathhouses and other venues of extreme promiscuity. Another step would be to ask those in high risk groups not to donate blood - something that did not go over well with some of the more outspoken members of the SF gay community.
IIRC, the infections started when Carter was still president, albeit the nature of the illness didn't make itself clear until the Reagan years. Perhaps the most effective thing that Reagan could have done would have been to restrict the behaviors that lead to the spread of the disease - prevention is way easier than a cure.
If you're really serious about putting the blame for an epidemic on a US President - then focus your wrath on Woodrow Wilson for the influenza epidemic of 1918-20 - which killed a lot more people than AIDS. I would highly recommend reading John M. Barry's book on the Great Influenza.
Yessss, absolutely! It would benefit every software package's portability and quality at the same time! The more platforms are supported, the better!
A very insightful post.
I would contend that the most robust open source software are those packages that have been ported to many different platforms. Porting to a new platform can reveal a lot of previously unseen bugs.
Only the copyright holder can place software under the GPL. Doesn't Novell (or SCO if you believe them - but in any case, not Sun) hold the copyrights to Sys V?
That's my understanding as well - and that's precisely why I don't think Sun can GPL all of Solaris.
I think they can, they've bought very extensive rights about SVR4 from AT&T years ago. And they got based for paying SCO some money some time ago. So I expect they have all the rights to open source Solaris, at least the SVR4 parts.
I beg to disagree - Solaris cotains a lot of code from entities other than AT&T/USL/SCO (even though they have unlimited rights to use the code, i.e. no royalties due to SCO - they don't have the rights to distribute the code to others). One example would be the PostScript code in xsun.
This explains why the USA were so reluctant to get involved.
No way, Jose.
The main reason why the US was reluctant to get involved was the utter fiasco of participating in WW1 - the American public had no desire to get involved in another European war and had very good reasons for not doing so.
The only reason that Europe has been at peace has been the fact that it has been occupied by US forces since the end of WWII.
Say what you will about Sun and Linux; but I'll only believe it when I see Sun sell Linux on Ultrasparcs.
Sun has posted directions to set up an UltraSparc box to dual boot Solaris and Linux.
With a few exceptions, most users would be better off running Solaris than Linux on Sparc boxes - Linux is heavily optimized to run on x86. Solaris supports desktops other than CDE - although you may have to do some work to get the latest versions of Gnome or KDE.
It does sound like that at least some of the interoperability IP from Microsoft has to be kept propietary - and that might mean Sun migrating the "Java Desktop" to Solaris. Ultimately, what Sun would like to do is to migrate the "Java Destop" to SunRay's.
I just looked up the copper wire tables in my copy of Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers - 1kA requires a 700mcm (mcm = 1,000 circular mils (cmils), 1 cmil is the area of a circle 0.001 inch diameter). That cable weighs about 2.2 pounds per foot, so a 1 meter long cable would be about 7.5 pounds. The latest price for copper was a bit less than $1.20/lb - so we're looking at $9/kAm.
The resistance loss with copper can be an issue, but you need to balance it against the refrigeration requirements for supercon's.
Probably the biggest commercial success for superconducting wire has been for NMR magnets - especially for MRI use.
I will add one more thing. I believe that it will only take OpenOffice to get around 25% of the desktop market before compatibility issues start to go away. I believe that at around 25% Microsoft would be forced to make a converter to open OO docs, much like they had to for Word Perfect for years.
I would say MS will have to pay serious attention to OOo/SO interchange when the market share hits 10%. A 25% share for OOo/SO would have MS shitting bricks and pretty much force them to work on compatibility.
I would be curious to know if the recent Sun-MS deal covers application file formats - MS has made noises about patenting aspects of it's XML format - the cross-licensing deal may allow Sun to use those algorithms for StarOffice, but wouldn't be sure if they could be ported to OpenOffice.org.
Crucial is selling 4 GB PC2100 DIMM's for a measly $6999 per stick - so with a dual Opteron box (or dual US-IIIi box) with 4 slots per processor - you can have 32 GB for a mere $56,000.
Notes from a reasonably satisfied gnuplot 3.7.x user.
The developers did a good job of keeping the code portable - not loaded with gcc'isms as is the case with some open source packages. It compiled with no problem other than a scheissload of warning messages under Sun's Forte 6u2.
Documentation is improved and the pdf is much easier to read with Acrobat than was the case for the 3.7 docs.
A bit disappointed with the lack of the "gif" terminal - with the LZW patent now expired in the US. I know "png" is supposed to be superior, but more software groks gif's than png's.
In that case, it's the vendor's responsibility to audit to the gov't requirements. I'm going to seriously doubt it'll cost $500/line, but it should already be a part of the quote.
It might be more like $2,000/line - or more
There's also the issue of what kernel version you want to run - once you've decided on a certain version, it will be extremely painful to updtae to a new one. You've also have to validate that the compilers are generating the expected code. Compared to a well designed RTOS, Linux is bloatware.
One thing many Linux fans forget is that there are situations where you do not want to use Linux - pretty much the same way explaining to PHB's that there are situations where you do not want to use Windows.
Linux is a general purpose OS and there are places where general purpose OS's don't cut it.
Increasing treatment plants makes the most sense to me, though. You're already starting with "fresh" water... Although at least here in San Diego, the people who don't understand the technology keep getting initiatives to build more treatment plants shot down by using a negative "toilet to tap" campaign...
And what a lot of those bozo's don't realize is that unless you're getting the river water from near the source, you're drinking recycled sewage.
Damn shame about the Miramar plant - that water could be put to good use and would be better quality than what's already going into San Vicente.
According to this page, the low end of the scale is about 11kWhr per 1,000 gallons (3,785L) for reverse osmosis. The Tampa plant produces up to 111,000,000 gallons per day. So that comes to 1,221,000 kWhr per day.
Doing the math - hmmm that's a bit over 50 MW (50 MW X 24 hours = 1,200,000 kWhr/day). For comparison, each of the 3 units at the Palo Verde nuke plant in Arizona puts out 1,270 MW each. Peak power capacity required for a community is approaching 1.5 MW per 1,000 people.
IIRC, the Edmonston pumping plants on the California Water Project use about 2,000 MW to pump water over a 4,000 high mountain range. The figures I've seen for RO from sea water show about an 800 psi pressure - or about 2,000 feet of pressure head for the process.
There's been a long running debate in southern California about San Diego buying 100,000 acre-feet/year from the Imperial Valley - it would probably be a lot more efficient to use RO on sea water and the water would be a lot better than Colorado river water.
Opterons are more than capable of doing more than 8-way SMP systems with shared memory. They would do it in EXACTLY the same way that Sun manages to get more than 4 UltraSparc III chips in a shared memory system, ie with crossbars.
IIRC, the Opteron only does cache snooping for up to 8 processors - where the US-III and US-IV can do snooping for up to 1023 processors.
Did Neville get taken in by Adolf or did he realise that blighty was in no position to fight a war and needed time to mobilise?
Actually it was Germany that was in no position to fight - they were outnumbered by the Czechs, Poles and French. By ceding Czechoslovakia to Hitler, it allowed the Germans to move tens of thousands of troops from the Czech border to the French border. In addition, the Germans got access to the Czech armanents makers. In other words, a seriously stupid move on Chamberlain's part.
So what happens if a terrorist destroys the Hoover Dam?
A lot easier said that done - there is a lot of concrete in the structure - besides, other than Yuma, there aren't a lot of population centers on the river.
Your point is well made, dam failures are capable of causing massive loss of life (e.g. what would happen if the Three Gorges dam was breached?). Most people don't realize how close the 1971 Sylmar earthquake came to causing thousands of fatalaties instead of less than 100 - perhaps a few more seconds of shaking and the Van Norman reservoir would have let go - as it was more than 10,000 people were evacuated while the reservoir was drained to relieve pressure on fissures in the dam.
But as far as I've seen, telcos, power utilities, and cable TV companies get exclusive rights from the cities to lay cable under the street.
The right to put stuff under the street isn't quite as exclusive as you think. In most municipalities, if you can convince the powers that be that the utility you want to put under the street is in the public interest, convenience or necessity (and you're willing to pay the appropriate fees) - then you can use the streets. I believe this is covered under franchise law (not talking about restaurant franchises here).
An example - a company decided to approach New York City with an idea to serve the public - and make money for the company. The city said OK and New York got its first subway system. This is a little more disruptive than your fiber optic line.
The rational for granting utilities an exclusive franchise was that it would be cheaper to have a regulated monopoly than having competing entities "wastefully" duplicating service. In return for the monopoly status, the utility would be subject to regulation. This is where I get really uncomfortable with the FCC deciding that local governments have no right to regulate telecommunications.
As long as I'm on the soapbox - if a telecom company states it doesn't want to be subject to local regulations - then I'd say the telecom is not entitled to any special protection from local governments. Say Jim-Bob backhoe operator cuts through the fiber optic lines - I'd say "tough shit".
Anyway, kudos to you for bringing up the issue of who owns the right of way - this is something that a lot of slashdotters have absolutely no fscking clue about.
As someone else mentioned, its 60Hz in the USA (including Cincinnati), not 50Hz.
FWIW, Southern Cal Edison was running 50 Hz up until 1948. If I heard correctly, NYC finally got rid of the last vestiges of DC within the last couple of years.
And in response to the parent poster - it would be a very bad idea to modulate the 60 Hz. One of the advantages of three phase power is that the power flow is constant in a balanced system - modulating the 60 Hz would create vibration problems with any large machinery (e.g. the generators).
That doesn't make it any less real that sensors can be set up in places (like airports) that detect when you're carrying a moderate amount of cash with you.
One of the easiest ways to slow down the trade in illicit drugs is to slow down the flow of cash. It has been illegal for decades to take more than 10k$ in cash out of the country without declaring it first.
The geeky appproach would using ed (from CP/M, not UNIX) to create a file to run through TOP (Text Output Processor). That's assuming you were one of the lucky ones with a floppy disk drive.
IIRC, Wordstar came out not too long after Electric Pencil.
Selectric??? Obviously the young-uns on/. don't know what a real typewriter was - and the ability to change fonts by changing the ball. Hell, I wonder how many would recognize either the Diablo or Qume brands of daisy wheel printers. Then again, we could get into something really high-tech like a Model 15 TTY...
The sampling theorem is, strictly:
If a continuous function only contains frequencies within a bandwidth B, it is completely determined by its value at a series of points spaced less than 1/(2B) seconds apart.
The key assumption is that the frequencies contained by a signal are indeed limited to a bandwidth B. For example, an NMR Free Induction Decay signal may have a linewidth of 1 kHz, but if you try to use a 1 kHz filter on the signal, it is going to look very distorted (even with a gaussian or bessel filter). The key issue here is that while the decay may have a bandwidth of 1 kHz, the initial rise may have a 50 kHz bandwidth.
Basically any time you want to maintain reasonable time domain response, you need to use either a gaussian or bessel filter. Neither of these filters has a particularly rapid roll-off and it ends up that a sample rate of 10X of the bandwidth is useful to minimize aliasing.
Slashdot Mirror
The more I learn about Wilson the more I despise him.
Wilson also deserves quite a bit of the blame for the demise of the mass transit industry in the US - mainly due to prices doubling from 1916 to 1920 - while transit fares typically were held constant. Transit systems were typically profitable before 1916, rarely so after 1920.
Similarly, the railroad's were really hurt by the Wilson administration in particular by the USRA (United States Railway Administration).
Weakened transit systems and railroads lead to increased use of cars and trucks along with increased CO2 emissions.
A Google search indicated the first known outbreak was 221 infected, and IIRC 43 deaths. The same search indicates that over 10,000 cases of Legionnaire's disease occur every year in the US. The main reason for concern was the sudden outbreak - prompting fears that this was a very communicable disease (it wasn't).
One other thing to keep in mind is that Legionnaire's is caused by bacteria - which is a whole lot easier to determine the cause than a viral infection and a whole lot easier to treat.
The most effective thing Reagan could have done was to treat it as a serious public health matter
Standard operating practice for a serious public health matter is to prevent the spread of disease. Food poisoning traced to a meat packing plant? - shut down the plant. Disease outbreak traced to a carrier? - quarantine the carrier.
The AIDS epidemic was not too far along when it became apparent that people contracting AIDS were in the same groups as people at high risk of hepatitus B. On that basis, one of the first things the public health agencies should have done would have been close down the bathhouses and other venues of extreme promiscuity. Another step would be to ask those in high risk groups not to donate blood - something that did not go over well with some of the more outspoken members of the SF gay community.
IIRC, the infections started when Carter was still president, albeit the nature of the illness didn't make itself clear until the Reagan years. Perhaps the most effective thing that Reagan could have done would have been to restrict the behaviors that lead to the spread of the disease - prevention is way easier than a cure.
If you're really serious about putting the blame for an epidemic on a US President - then focus your wrath on Woodrow Wilson for the influenza epidemic of 1918-20 - which killed a lot more people than AIDS. I would highly recommend reading John M. Barry's book on the Great Influenza.
A very insightful post.
I would contend that the most robust open source software are those packages that have been ported to many different platforms. Porting to a new platform can reveal a lot of previously unseen bugs.
That's my understanding as well - and that's precisely why I don't think Sun can GPL all of Solaris.
I think they can, they've bought very extensive rights about SVR4 from AT&T years ago. And they got based for paying SCO some money some time ago. So I expect they have all the rights to open source Solaris, at least the SVR4 parts.
I beg to disagree - Solaris cotains a lot of code from entities other than AT&T/USL/SCO (even though they have unlimited rights to use the code, i.e. no royalties due to SCO - they don't have the rights to distribute the code to others). One example would be the PostScript code in xsun.
No way, Jose.
The main reason why the US was reluctant to get involved was the utter fiasco of participating in WW1 - the American public had no desire to get involved in another European war and had very good reasons for not doing so.
The only reason that Europe has been at peace has been the fact that it has been occupied by US forces since the end of WWII.
Sun has posted directions to set up an UltraSparc box to dual boot Solaris and Linux.
With a few exceptions, most users would be better off running Solaris than Linux on Sparc boxes - Linux is heavily optimized to run on x86. Solaris supports desktops other than CDE - although you may have to do some work to get the latest versions of Gnome or KDE.
It does sound like that at least some of the interoperability IP from Microsoft has to be kept propietary - and that might mean Sun migrating the "Java Desktop" to Solaris. Ultimately, what Sun would like to do is to migrate the "Java Destop" to SunRay's.
Yes, actually. It's about $20-25/kAm right now.
I just looked up the copper wire tables in my copy of Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers - 1kA requires a 700mcm (mcm = 1,000 circular mils (cmils), 1 cmil is the area of a circle 0.001 inch diameter). That cable weighs about 2.2 pounds per foot, so a 1 meter long cable would be about 7.5 pounds. The latest price for copper was a bit less than $1.20/lb - so we're looking at $9/kAm.
The resistance loss with copper can be an issue, but you need to balance it against the refrigeration requirements for supercon's.
Probably the biggest commercial success for superconducting wire has been for NMR magnets - especially for MRI use.
I would say MS will have to pay serious attention to OOo/SO interchange when the market share hits 10%. A 25% share for OOo/SO would have MS shitting bricks and pretty much force them to work on compatibility.
I would be curious to know if the recent Sun-MS deal covers application file formats - MS has made noises about patenting aspects of it's XML format - the cross-licensing deal may allow Sun to use those algorithms for StarOffice, but wouldn't be sure if they could be ported to OpenOffice.org.
Farmer Brown: "Those sheep lie."
Now a quad Opteron box....
The developers did a good job of keeping the code portable - not loaded with gcc'isms as is the case with some open source packages. It compiled with no problem other than a scheissload of warning messages under Sun's Forte 6u2.
Documentation is improved and the pdf is much easier to read with Acrobat than was the case for the 3.7 docs.
A bit disappointed with the lack of the "gif" terminal - with the LZW patent now expired in the US. I know "png" is supposed to be superior, but more software groks gif's than png's.
It might be more like $2,000/line - or more
There's also the issue of what kernel version you want to run - once you've decided on a certain version, it will be extremely painful to updtae to a new one. You've also have to validate that the compilers are generating the expected code. Compared to a well designed RTOS, Linux is bloatware.
One thing many Linux fans forget is that there are situations where you do not want to use Linux - pretty much the same way explaining to PHB's that there are situations where you do not want to use Windows.
Linux is a general purpose OS and there are places where general purpose OS's don't cut it.
And what a lot of those bozo's don't realize is that unless you're getting the river water from near the source, you're drinking recycled sewage.
Damn shame about the Miramar plant - that water could be put to good use and would be better quality than what's already going into San Vicente.
Doing the math - hmmm that's a bit over 50 MW (50 MW X 24 hours = 1,200,000 kWhr/day). For comparison, each of the 3 units at the Palo Verde nuke plant in Arizona puts out 1,270 MW each. Peak power capacity required for a community is approaching 1.5 MW per 1,000 people.
IIRC, the Edmonston pumping plants on the California Water Project use about 2,000 MW to pump water over a 4,000 high mountain range. The figures I've seen for RO from sea water show about an 800 psi pressure - or about 2,000 feet of pressure head for the process.
There's been a long running debate in southern California about San Diego buying 100,000 acre-feet/year from the Imperial Valley - it would probably be a lot more efficient to use RO on sea water and the water would be a lot better than Colorado river water.
IIRC, the Opteron only does cache snooping for up to 8 processors - where the US-III and US-IV can do snooping for up to 1023 processors.
Actually it was Germany that was in no position to fight - they were outnumbered by the Czechs, Poles and French. By ceding Czechoslovakia to Hitler, it allowed the Germans to move tens of thousands of troops from the Czech border to the French border. In addition, the Germans got access to the Czech armanents makers. In other words, a seriously stupid move on Chamberlain's part.
A lot easier said that done - there is a lot of concrete in the structure - besides, other than Yuma, there aren't a lot of population centers on the river.
Your point is well made, dam failures are capable of causing massive loss of life (e.g. what would happen if the Three Gorges dam was breached?). Most people don't realize how close the 1971 Sylmar earthquake came to causing thousands of fatalaties instead of less than 100 - perhaps a few more seconds of shaking and the Van Norman reservoir would have let go - as it was more than 10,000 people were evacuated while the reservoir was drained to relieve pressure on fissures in the dam.
I was about to flame you wrt WABCO, but then realized you were a Pennsy fan...
The right to put stuff under the street isn't quite as exclusive as you think. In most municipalities, if you can convince the powers that be that the utility you want to put under the street is in the public interest, convenience or necessity (and you're willing to pay the appropriate fees) - then you can use the streets. I believe this is covered under franchise law (not talking about restaurant franchises here).
An example - a company decided to approach New York City with an idea to serve the public - and make money for the company. The city said OK and New York got its first subway system. This is a little more disruptive than your fiber optic line.
The rational for granting utilities an exclusive franchise was that it would be cheaper to have a regulated monopoly than having competing entities "wastefully" duplicating service. In return for the monopoly status, the utility would be subject to regulation. This is where I get really uncomfortable with the FCC deciding that local governments have no right to regulate telecommunications.
As long as I'm on the soapbox - if a telecom company states it doesn't want to be subject to local regulations - then I'd say the telecom is not entitled to any special protection from local governments. Say Jim-Bob backhoe operator cuts through the fiber optic lines - I'd say "tough shit".
Anyway, kudos to you for bringing up the issue of who owns the right of way - this is something that a lot of slashdotters have absolutely no fscking clue about.
FWIW, Southern Cal Edison was running 50 Hz up until 1948. If I heard correctly, NYC finally got rid of the last vestiges of DC within the last couple of years.
And in response to the parent poster - it would be a very bad idea to modulate the 60 Hz. One of the advantages of three phase power is that the power flow is constant in a balanced system - modulating the 60 Hz would create vibration problems with any large machinery (e.g. the generators).
One of the easiest ways to slow down the trade in illicit drugs is to slow down the flow of cash. It has been illegal for decades to take more than 10k$ in cash out of the country without declaring it first.
IIRC, Wordstar came out not too long after Electric Pencil.
Selectric??? Obviously the young-uns on /. don't know what a real typewriter was - and the ability to change fonts by changing the ball. Hell, I wonder how many would recognize either the Diablo or Qume brands of daisy wheel printers. Then again, we could get into something really high-tech like a Model 15 TTY...
If a continuous function only contains frequencies within a bandwidth B, it is completely determined by its value at a series of points spaced less than 1/(2B) seconds apart.
The key assumption is that the frequencies contained by a signal are indeed limited to a bandwidth B. For example, an NMR Free Induction Decay signal may have a linewidth of 1 kHz, but if you try to use a 1 kHz filter on the signal, it is going to look very distorted (even with a gaussian or bessel filter). The key issue here is that while the decay may have a bandwidth of 1 kHz, the initial rise may have a 50 kHz bandwidth.
Basically any time you want to maintain reasonable time domain response, you need to use either a gaussian or bessel filter. Neither of these filters has a particularly rapid roll-off and it ends up that a sample rate of 10X of the bandwidth is useful to minimize aliasing.