My understanding is that there are certain requirements and expectancies from phone companies that aren't expected from ISPs. Services like 911, efforts to maintain uptime and reliability, etc.
Probably not too far off the mark. Just for fun, let's turn things around about an unregulated service.
For starters, 911 calls will be blocked
No listing in the ILEC directories
No listings on 411
No enforcement of harassing/obscene phone call laws, conversely what happens when a VoIP customer makes the calls?
No guarantee of service - phone service out for a month - you're on your own with the VoIP provider
This reminds me of Micro$quats hypocrisy when it comes to regulations - they say they don't want to be regulated, but they are very glad to have regulations in the form of copyright.
The Bloembergen(sp?), Pound and Purcell paper published in 1948 anticipated imaging. The main thrust of the paper was NMR relaxation, which provides much of the contrast in imaging. The paper mentioned that some of the signal effects were localized to specific regions in the sample (the magnet they were using had really rotten homogeneity compared to modern NMR magnets).
In any case I am prepared to pay the fair marked value for the services I recieve and those that choose to live in rural areas should do the same.
Whether you know it or not, you are benefitting from the regulations that limit how much can be charged for the right of ways for the various paths your phone calls / IP packets take to get to their destination. If you're willing to benefit from regulation, you might as well let other people benefit.
Seattle Computing did get a cut -- they got every subsequent version of MSDOS for free until MS finally bought them out in the late 80s.
That's Seattle Computer Products. Think I still have my SCP T-shirt around...
Their last gasp was in 1984-85 selling NEC V-20's with their version of M$-DOS. Billy boy had a fit about that, not sure who sued who, but SCP ended up with a megabuck.
Bear in mind that the 86-DOS con job was the second time that Billy boy fucked over SCP, the first was with the Apple CPM card.
And [sic]becides does it make sense to charge a company in NJ for this? All they have are customers in other states. They don't own any property or goods outside of their centraly located servers... which don't reside in your state.
Your argument would make sense if I got a NJ phone number with a VoIP account even though I was located in CA. Bet people would love calling me from CA.
If I get a CA number with my VoIP account, then my VoIP provider is acting as a CA phone company. Their servers may not be in CA, but with the CA phone numbers they have a CA presence, and thus their exposure to CA regulation.
I was born 1954 - was first exposed to FORTRAN in January 1971 on a CDC-1700 (at CDC's La Jolla facility) - compilation speed for a real simple program was maybe one line every 3 to 5 seconds. The CDC plant is no longer there, but it was about two to three blocks from Sun's new San Diego facility is now located.
Curious about the old power station - would be fun to look it up in one the "World List of Nuclear Power Plants" that showed up in Nuclear News twice a year.
I seem to recall that the last PDP-11 was shipped a few years ago - that architecture showed some staying power.
I wonder how many kids today unedr 10 know what hexadecimal is, let alone could code a hex loader in BASIC off the top of their heads?
Darned few... My 5.5 year old daughter is pretty adept at using a GUI, but not sure if she will ever learn to use a command line, much less Hex. Of course, in my days, we used Octal NOT Hex!
Re:Its not the size, its how you use it...
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 1
Why don't ZILOG come out with a 64 bit? The Z640?:)
Mmmmm. The real question is why didn't Zilog get the Z800 out in 1979? If they did, Zilog would probably still be a dominant manufacturer (as they were in the heyday of the Z80).
FORTRAN, especially in its older incarnations e.g. FORTRAN-77,
Older??? WTF??
Lessee, FORTRAN 66 superceded FORTRAN IV which superceded FORTRAN II...
Old FORTRAN is where you had to be careful how you used Hollerith constants which would be 10 characters of 6 bits each on a CDC-6400.
Old FORTRAN compilers would barf at IF(...)THEN lines and give errors messages for ENDIF.
Old FORTRAN is where the unit numbers for I/O actually connected to physical devices.
Old FORTRAN is where the senseswitch actually read whther the switch was on or off.
F77 isn't old FORTRAN, F77 is new FORTRAN. grumble grumble
The first comments I heard about C were "An abomination in the eyes of the Lord" and "If Bell Labs hadn't invented the transistor, the phone company would still be using vacuum tubes"
Whippersnapper - probably wouldn't know what a keypunch was even if it bit him on the ass. It would be astonishing if he saw a FORTRAN coding pad.
You're complaining about paying an extra $1.77/month for 911 service - but you don't give a rats ass about all of the subsidies in providing your phone service. Are you wwilling to pay each and every landowner whose property is crossed by the phone line serving you for the privilege of providing your phone service? What if one of those property owners decides that they are sick and tired of subsidizing your phone service and rips out your phone line?
Remember, most of the right's of way used by utitilities are acquired by eminent domain - part of the bargain is that the utilities provide a pubic service - and this is something that Ted Turner conveniently forgot to mention when complaining about government interfering with "his" cable lines... grrrr.
Quick question: Has the RIAA or any of its member companies ever paid property tax on their so-called IP??
California is in desperate need of new tax revenue, I'd say the easiest way is to start levying property tax on their collections - they say an individual song is worth $150,000, then they owe the state of California $1,500 per year per song!
At 80T, the energy density of the magnetic field is about the same as gasolene. 25T would have about 1/10th of that energy density, which is nothing to sneeze at. What I see as the big problem with using this for SMES is getting the energy in and out of the magnet fast enough to be useful (magnets can get really unstable when slewed too fast).
If we had a dozen or so SMES facilities (1 GW, 60 seconds storage time) scattered around the northeast, it is likely that the great blackout of 2003 could have been avoided.
The problem for making a good NMR magnet is not the high field but sufficient homogeneity over the sample volume.
And at fields of 25T, you have to take the relative permeability of the sample tube, RF coil and whatnot into account.
OTOH, this magnet could be nice for doing NMR of quadrupolar nuclei - the linewidth due to qudrupolar interactions stay the same, but the chemical shift will increase.
But as well as new shapes, the new supersonic planes will need radically new engines. The Concorde engine is fine at Mach 2.2, but it's very thirsty and noisy on take-off and landing.
The F-22 is designed to cruise supersonically without using afterburners (about Mach 1.4). There's been some talk about making an FB-22 with supercruise capability.
Mach 1.4 would be a good speed to shoot for with a new SST design - stagnation temperature at cruising altitude should be about +100F - it is possible to get nearly 100% recovery of ram air energy with multiple oblique shock waves - which suggests there may be a way of achieving an L/D not much worse than a subsonic design (wild ass guess on my part). With a, say, 5,000 nm range you could shave quite a few hours off of the longer flights - 7,000 nm would allow for non-stop Sydney to L.A. flights.
Most modern long barrel weapons fire bullets at 1.2-1.4 Mach. As a result a silenser for them is pointless.
About the only long guns with that low a muzzle velocity are shotguns. Typical rifle MV's are on the order of Mach 2 to 3, with the 220 Swift pushing close to Mach 4 since the mid-30's.
You are correct about the futility of getting a true silencer on supersonic projectiles, however you can still get some dramatic reduction in sound levels - typical muzzle pressure for centerfire rifles are on the order of 5,000 to 10,000 psi.
The only "silencer" legal in the U.S. is a much longer than normal barrel.
I also recall that the US ASAT system was launched from an F-15 - which would have been especially handy for targeting Soviet birds in the Molniya (sp?) orbit...
Looking at the comments posted, I would gather that most/.'ers wouldn't know a copy of Sutton if it bit them on the ass.
How about doing Orbital Sciences Pegasus launch vehicle one better??
The Pegasus is a small solid rocket launch vehicle that is dropped from an L-1011 - having the inital aunch at 40,000 feet and Mach 0.85 does help a wee bit. Remember, for a given Isp and payload, the propellant mass goes to the e^(delta-V) - slight reductions in delta-V can give significant reductions in propellant mass.
Launching from 100,000 feet and Mach 3 will help even more - there was a proposal to build the third B-70 to support this kind of mission. There are also a couple of advantages of a very high altitude launch - for a given altitude, the velocity will be lower than a ground launch (lower aerodynamic pressure) and the nozzle can be configured for vacuum. The latter allows for a good expansion ratio with moderate pressure - smaller pumps for liquids or thinner cases for solids.
In some ways the current shuttle was designed backwards - the thing that goes into orbit is often the smallest and presumably cheapest component of a launch vehicle. Designing the final stage to survive re-entry adds a lot of weight - both for thermal protection and for fuel to de-orbit the sucker. It would make more sense to recover the most expensive part of the LV, especially if it travelling slowly enough that thermal heating isn't a problem (and that's pretty much how the Shuttle SRM's are treated).
There have been a couple of proposals for a re-usable booster for the shuttle - one would have brought back the F-1 engines and used jet engines to allow a fly-back to the launch site (jets should work fine on RP-1).
The biggest benefit of replacing RISC boxes with Linux is the ability to run on generic PeeCee hardware. The biggest problem with replacing RISC boxes with Linux is putting up with the fact that PeeCee's (including x86 servers) are derived from something designed to be a single user computer.
Remote management with Linux on a typical PeeCee is kind of wimpy compared to Sun box with Lights Out Management (LOM). Provided that you have a terminal server in your server room, it's possible to reboot the machine, load a new OS, etc remotely.
Why is it that we can post the directions for how to properly murder someone or build a bomb (In fact, this seems to be the topic of most movies made today), yet we are barred from posting DVD-copying code?
This has got to one of the most insightful comments I've ever read on this subject - I would really like to be able to force each and every member of the CA Supreme Court the choice of explaining why to my satisfaction or be stripped of all of their rights as provided by the U.S. Constitution - especially the part about "due process of law".
A few years ago someone sued Oliver Stone after a relative was killed by someone who was "inspired" by "Natural Born Killers". By the logic of the **AA's, Oliver Stone is guilty of being an accessory to murder. It was really sickening to se the news media pleading "First Amendment" on that one.
I'd put more of the blame on bloated budgets - the original Star Wars cost 8 million to make.
A couple of years earlier, some blokes in Blighty decided to do a rehash of a theme that had been filmed many times before - on a budget of $600,000. Needless to say, there wasn't much money for special effects (and the SFX were spectacularly cheesy), so they had to improvise a "a bit". The investors saw what was being done and got very worried about the movie flopping - the movie was released as "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" - don't think anyone on/. has ever seen it...
Who the hell modded this moron's post with "insightful"?
FWIW, "power electronics" are devices and systems intended for the conversion of electric power as opposed to devices and systems for communications, computation or control. On a small scale, power electronics would be the mosfets and associated circuitry supplying approx 1.5 volts to your multi-GHz CPU. On a larger scale, it could be GTO thyristors handling 4,000A at 4,000V or a mercury thyratron handling 1,000A at 150,000V.
We're going to see some fairly radical changes when variable frequncy drives are applied to such things as refrigerators.
Has it ever been proven that Nuclear power plants generate more energy in their lifetime then is needed to construct them ?
The rule of thumb is that a nuclear plant will take about a year to generate the energy needed to construct it. Overall energy efficiency would be increased by allowing the plants to operate as long as it is safe to do so.
Probably the key issue with plant longevity is the embrittlement of the pressure vessel by neutron irradiation (and there are techniques to reduce that problem).
All of these people have bought stuff on E-Bay and are surprised when companies turn round and so no. I know it hard but if they went through a reseller then it would be all supported etc.
People have run into something similar when buying Sun gear - although Sun's license fees are "low" for single cpu systems. Basically the RTU only transfers if you buy the used gear from Sun or from an authorized Sun reseller.
In the Solaris 8 days, the RTU was free for systems capable of holding less than 8 CPU's, but declining sales have put an end to that.
I remember reading about his endurance records in the July and August 1965 issues of Model Airplane News. He didn't look like he was fresh out of college at that time.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not too far off the mark. Just for fun, let's turn things around about an unregulated service.
For starters, 911 calls will be blocked
No listing in the ILEC directories
No listings on 411
No enforcement of harassing/obscene phone call laws, conversely what happens when a VoIP customer makes the calls?
No guarantee of service - phone service out for a month - you're on your own with the VoIP provider
This reminds me of Micro$quats hypocrisy when it comes to regulations - they say they don't want to be regulated, but they are very glad to have regulations in the form of copyright.
The Bloembergen(sp?), Pound and Purcell paper published in 1948 anticipated imaging. The main thrust of the paper was NMR relaxation, which provides much of the contrast in imaging. The paper mentioned that some of the signal effects were localized to specific regions in the sample (the magnet they were using had really rotten homogeneity compared to modern NMR magnets).
Whether you know it or not, you are benefitting from the regulations that limit how much can be charged for the right of ways for the various paths your phone calls / IP packets take to get to their destination. If you're willing to benefit from regulation, you might as well let other people benefit.
That's Seattle Computer Products. Think I still have my SCP T-shirt around...
Their last gasp was in 1984-85 selling NEC V-20's with their version of M$-DOS. Billy boy had a fit about that, not sure who sued who, but SCP ended up with a megabuck.
Bear in mind that the 86-DOS con job was the second time that Billy boy fucked over SCP, the first was with the Apple CPM card.
Your argument would make sense if I got a NJ phone number with a VoIP account even though I was located in CA. Bet people would love calling me from CA.
If I get a CA number with my VoIP account, then my VoIP provider is acting as a CA phone company. Their servers may not be in CA, but with the CA phone numbers they have a CA presence, and thus their exposure to CA regulation.
I get most of the functionality by running grpn on a Solaris - x86 box. VUE on HP-UX had a dandy HP calculator emulator.
I was born 1954 - was first exposed to FORTRAN in January 1971 on a CDC-1700 (at CDC's La Jolla facility) - compilation speed for a real simple program was maybe one line every 3 to 5 seconds. The CDC plant is no longer there, but it was about two to three blocks from Sun's new San Diego facility is now located.
Curious about the old power station - would be fun to look it up in one the "World List of Nuclear Power Plants" that showed up in Nuclear News twice a year.
I seem to recall that the last PDP-11 was shipped a few years ago - that architecture showed some staying power.
I wonder how many kids today unedr 10 know what hexadecimal is, let alone could code a hex loader in BASIC off the top of their heads?
Darned few... My 5.5 year old daughter is pretty adept at using a GUI, but not sure if she will ever learn to use a command line, much less Hex. Of course, in my days, we used Octal NOT Hex!
Mmmmm. The real question is why didn't Zilog get the Z800 out in 1979? If they did, Zilog would probably still be a dominant manufacturer (as they were in the heyday of the Z80).
Older??? WTF??
Lessee, FORTRAN 66 superceded FORTRAN IV which superceded FORTRAN II...
Old FORTRAN is where you had to be careful how you used Hollerith constants which would be 10 characters of 6 bits each on a CDC-6400.
Old FORTRAN compilers would barf at IF(...)THEN lines and give errors messages for ENDIF.
Old FORTRAN is where the unit numbers for I/O actually connected to physical devices.
Old FORTRAN is where the senseswitch actually read whther the switch was on or off.
F77 isn't old FORTRAN, F77 is new FORTRAN. grumble grumble
The first comments I heard about C were "An abomination in the eyes of the Lord" and "If Bell Labs hadn't invented the transistor, the phone company would still be using vacuum tubes"
Whippersnapper - probably wouldn't know what a keypunch was even if it bit him on the ass. It would be astonishing if he saw a FORTRAN coding pad.
You're complaining about paying an extra $1.77/month for 911 service - but you don't give a rats ass about all of the subsidies in providing your phone service. Are you wwilling to pay each and every landowner whose property is crossed by the phone line serving you for the privilege of providing your phone service? What if one of those property owners decides that they are sick and tired of subsidizing your phone service and rips out your phone line?
Remember, most of the right's of way used by utitilities are acquired by eminent domain - part of the bargain is that the utilities provide a pubic service - and this is something that Ted Turner conveniently forgot to mention when complaining about government interfering with "his" cable lines... grrrr.
California is in desperate need of new tax revenue, I'd say the easiest way is to start levying property tax on their collections - they say an individual song is worth $150,000, then they owe the state of California $1,500 per year per song!
At 80T, the energy density of the magnetic field is about the same as gasolene. 25T would have about 1/10th of that energy density, which is nothing to sneeze at. What I see as the big problem with using this for SMES is getting the energy in and out of the magnet fast enough to be useful (magnets can get really unstable when slewed too fast).
If we had a dozen or so SMES facilities (1 GW, 60 seconds storage time) scattered around the northeast, it is likely that the great blackout of 2003 could have been avoided.
And at fields of 25T, you have to take the relative permeability of the sample tube, RF coil and whatnot into account.
OTOH, this magnet could be nice for doing NMR of quadrupolar nuclei - the linewidth due to qudrupolar interactions stay the same, but the chemical shift will increase.
The F-22 is designed to cruise supersonically without using afterburners (about Mach 1.4). There's been some talk about making an FB-22 with supercruise capability.
Mach 1.4 would be a good speed to shoot for with a new SST design - stagnation temperature at cruising altitude should be about +100F - it is possible to get nearly 100% recovery of ram air energy with multiple oblique shock waves - which suggests there may be a way of achieving an L/D not much worse than a subsonic design (wild ass guess on my part). With a, say, 5,000 nm range you could shave quite a few hours off of the longer flights - 7,000 nm would allow for non-stop Sydney to L.A. flights.
About the only long guns with that low a muzzle velocity are shotguns. Typical rifle MV's are on the order of Mach 2 to 3, with the 220 Swift pushing close to Mach 4 since the mid-30's.
You are correct about the futility of getting a true silencer on supersonic projectiles, however you can still get some dramatic reduction in sound levels - typical muzzle pressure for centerfire rifles are on the order of 5,000 to 10,000 psi.
The only "silencer" legal in the U.S. is a much longer than normal barrel.
I also recall that the US ASAT system was launched from an F-15 - which would have been especially handy for targeting Soviet birds in the Molniya (sp?) orbit...
Looking at the comments posted, I would gather that most /.'ers wouldn't know a copy of Sutton if it bit them on the ass.
The Pegasus is a small solid rocket launch vehicle that is dropped from an L-1011 - having the inital aunch at 40,000 feet and Mach 0.85 does help a wee bit. Remember, for a given Isp and payload, the propellant mass goes to the e^(delta-V) - slight reductions in delta-V can give significant reductions in propellant mass.
Launching from 100,000 feet and Mach 3 will help even more - there was a proposal to build the third B-70 to support this kind of mission. There are also a couple of advantages of a very high altitude launch - for a given altitude, the velocity will be lower than a ground launch (lower aerodynamic pressure) and the nozzle can be configured for vacuum. The latter allows for a good expansion ratio with moderate pressure - smaller pumps for liquids or thinner cases for solids.
In some ways the current shuttle was designed backwards - the thing that goes into orbit is often the smallest and presumably cheapest component of a launch vehicle. Designing the final stage to survive re-entry adds a lot of weight - both for thermal protection and for fuel to de-orbit the sucker. It would make more sense to recover the most expensive part of the LV, especially if it travelling slowly enough that thermal heating isn't a problem (and that's pretty much how the Shuttle SRM's are treated).
There have been a couple of proposals for a re-usable booster for the shuttle - one would have brought back the F-1 engines and used jet engines to allow a fly-back to the launch site (jets should work fine on RP-1).
Remote management with Linux on a typical PeeCee is kind of wimpy compared to Sun box with Lights Out Management (LOM). Provided that you have a terminal server in your server room, it's possible to reboot the machine, load a new OS, etc remotely.
This has got to one of the most insightful comments I've ever read on this subject - I would really like to be able to force each and every member of the CA Supreme Court the choice of explaining why to my satisfaction or be stripped of all of their rights as provided by the U.S. Constitution - especially the part about "due process of law".
A few years ago someone sued Oliver Stone after a relative was killed by someone who was "inspired" by "Natural Born Killers". By the logic of the **AA's, Oliver Stone is guilty of being an accessory to murder. It was really sickening to se the news media pleading "First Amendment" on that one.
Well I have an Extra class (since 1981). I run Solaris 9. ;-)
A couple of years earlier, some blokes in Blighty decided to do a rehash of a theme that had been filmed many times before - on a budget of $600,000. Needless to say, there wasn't much money for special effects (and the SFX were spectacularly cheesy), so they had to improvise a "a bit". The investors saw what was being done and got very worried about the movie flopping - the movie was released as "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" - don't think anyone on /. has ever seen it...
Who the hell modded this moron's post with "insightful"?
FWIW, "power electronics" are devices and systems intended for the conversion of electric power as opposed to devices and systems for communications, computation or control. On a small scale, power electronics would be the mosfets and associated circuitry supplying approx 1.5 volts to your multi-GHz CPU. On a larger scale, it could be GTO thyristors handling 4,000A at 4,000V or a mercury thyratron handling 1,000A at 150,000V.
We're going to see some fairly radical changes when variable frequncy drives are applied to such things as refrigerators.
The rule of thumb is that a nuclear plant will take about a year to generate the energy needed to construct it. Overall energy efficiency would be increased by allowing the plants to operate as long as it is safe to do so.
Probably the key issue with plant longevity is the embrittlement of the pressure vessel by neutron irradiation (and there are techniques to reduce that problem).
People have run into something similar when buying Sun gear - although Sun's license fees are "low" for single cpu systems. Basically the RTU only transfers if you buy the used gear from Sun or from an authorized Sun reseller.
In the Solaris 8 days, the RTU was free for systems capable of holding less than 8 CPU's, but declining sales have put an end to that.
Nice to see him keep up with his passions.