Needless to say, the remote is long lost, and the box has been 'destroyed' (via disassembly and reassembly).
That means that if/when they finally cancel their
cable service, they'll get socked with an inflated
damage fee to top off their 20 years of expenditures.
On a related note - anyone care to explain why the *economy* has to grow?
Don't worry, we live on a finite planet, so it will stop growing
one way or another. Let's assume the economy
grows at a modest 3% rate for the next
1000 years. Let's see... we'd end up with
6.87e+12 times the economic output we have
today. At that rate, we'd use up most any natural
resource on this planet within milliseconds.
Clearly, some limiting factor is going to stop the concept
of exponential growth sooner or later. Probably
sooner.
A small fraction of a cents in gold per 1000 terabytes.
I'm curious; let's do the math:
Atomic weight of Gold: ~197
Price of Gold: $300 per ounce = $10.70 per gram
Atoms per gram: 6.02e+23 / 197 = 3e+21
Price per atom: $10.70/3e+21 = 3.57e-21 cents
Price per Terabyte: 1/357000 cent
This conclusively proves that the vast majority of the
$100 you might pay for a 1-terabyte atomic
storage unit
goes to marketing overhead and sales
commissions.
In the case of phone calls: valid caller-ID information, and, on request, phone number and address.
Actually, if you buy Privacy Manager (TM) from
the phone company, you appreciate the fact
that almost no telemarketers send valid caller ID
info. Without caller ID, the system makes you
identify yourself by voice before ringing through.
These people almost never bother to attempt
to manually bypass the filter, so I don't even
get a ring. If they were forced to send Caller ID
info, I'd have to get up off of my ass to see who's
calling.
Commercial Office and Telecommunications equipment electricity consumption represents just under 3% of national electricity consumption, and a little over 1% of national energy consumption.
It's funny how everyone focuses on how much
energy computers consume. Computerization has
brought about efficiency improvements in all areas
of the economy that saves vastly more energy than the
1% they use. They provide a net benefit for
energy usage, but somehow get blamed for
blackouts.
Still, I can't help thinking about how much
electricity my computers consume. It's probably
because the fans make so much noise and
the monitors heat up the air in front of my face.
It would really make more sense to try to maximize
the efficiency of my house's air conditioner,
which alone probably accounts for 70% of the electricity
I use in the summer.
But with no discernable feedback on how much
energy it uses, no 1337 energy saving mods
available, and nobody who would be
impressed by those mods,
the A/C unit remains out of sight, out of mind.
If it is just a key change, they would have been
better off if they had used one-time PROM cells
inside the chip to hold the key. Then, the key
could be set as the last step before the box
leaves the factory. No need to throw away chips.
Yeah, that's a stunningly good idea. Make every date manipulation have to rely on floating point arithmetic, making things far slower than they need to be. How much did Intel pay them for that?
... Except that on any X86 made
in the last 8 years, a 64-bit
floating point operation is liable to be as
fast or faster
than a 64-bit integer operation. Better go actually
profile the code before you spend any effort
optimizing around that one.
Further, there are ASCII dates hanging around, look at all the perl webpages or the programming language MUMPS which is probably holding your medical record information somewhere.
I work with all sorts of computers every day.
It's funny, the only Y2K bug I actually spotted in the wild
was a piece of medical equipment:
an ultrasound machine. It spat out the
due date for my kid as "02/12/19:0".
Toyota is far better than any Chevy or Ford. That silly idiot is probably a geek among the idiot rednecks.
Wrong. The only vehicles worthy of comparison
in this case are 1980's
short wheelbase SUVs. The valid contenders are
Ford Bronco vs. Chevy Blazer.
AFAIK Toyota Land Cruisers weren't available
in 2-door models, and more importantly,
suitably oversized wheels and
tires aren't available for them. Without these,
the vehicle is as useful as a doorstop.
To sum things up, the South, like many other
places, practices slavery for centuries. Then
as technology progresses, most civilized societies eliminate
slavery, except for the South, who continue to
"require" it for "cheap labor".
Then the South fights in a war costing hundreds of
thousands of lives over the issue of "high taxes".
Then for almost 100 years further, it continues
to ensure cheap labor by continuing with the
biggest subset of the condition slavery it can get away with.
Sounds mainly like avoiding hard moral choices
in favor of grabbing a few bucks.
That's not setting a very high "holy" bar to beat.
The post office is nothing but another example of failed socialism [cato.org], and should be phased out and replaced with market solutions which offer an incentive to deliver (pardon the pun;). The answer is to allow the market to supply the demand by voluntary means, instead of by coercion (the tool of government).
We need to get to the root of this socialist
plot:
U.S. Constitution, section 8:
Congress shall have th power... Clause 7: To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
AHA!!! It was those commie pinko Founding Fathers!
Washington, Jefferson, Adams... All scheming
leftist pinko scumbags, bent on stealing money
from FedEx and UPS and using it to subsidize
post cards to welfare mothers from their bastard
children!
Just goes to show again, that every single thing
that the government does is completely worthless
and wasteful, even if it takes 220 years to
find it out!
clue me in please... why is the resistance such a problem, if the third rail is how they are powering the trains in the first place? Why does the braking energy from the trains get wasted, but the energy from the systems that are powering the third rail does not?
IAAEE, so I'll hazard a guess. They say in the article that the
3rd rail uses 650V DC. For power distribution,
this is a relatively low voltage. To minimize
resistance losses, power is typically distributed
at thousands of volts. To be able to easily convert
voltages, you need AC, not DC so you can run
it through a transformer.
I'll bet that they have high-voltage AC power
distribution throughout the system, and they
step it down to 650 V and rectify to DC it at frequent
intervals along the tracks. The distance the
power needs to run at low voltage along a
high-resistance steel rail would never be very
long, so losses are minimal. (I assume they
use DC becuase it's easier to design train motors
for DC, or something like that.)
The AC -> DC rectification is not reversible,
however, so there would be no way for power
generated by a train to get back into the main
distribution grid, and the average distance
the 650V DC would have to flow throught the
3rd rail to the next train would be too far
to be economical.
(Of course, I could be wrong about all of this,
since I don't really know anything about
their system.)
What if they sold low-end real
cellphones, unbundled from any plan or network,
for, say, $40. Then various companies could sell
phone cards for these cellphones at 5 or 10 cents
per minute. This would cover most of the
needs of people who would consider
disposable cellphones without the "disposable"
gimmick.
The core of these chips like Pentiums are really RISC chips with hardware wrappers to implement the X86 instructions. So it's just a waste if die space. IA64 is purer and a much better long term choice.
Except that two CPU generations from now, Intel
will have had to change the underlying architecture
of the IA-64 chips to get performance
improvemets, but they'll have to leave the instruction
set compatible. So, they'll have a hardware
wrapper around the IA-64 instruction set. And this
wrapper is going to have to try and second-guess
the output of those rocket-science IA-64 compilers
and rewrite the results on the fly.
Why not just leave well enough alone and
let the CPU rewrite code from today's simple, well understood
compilers? The current x86 instruction set
works like a bytecode VM. There's nothing
wrong with that, especially since the IA-64
CPUs and compilers haven't exactly been blowing
away the x86 chips in the performance area.
good idea! Public libraries have been operating like this for centuries.
Not to mention Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.
In both of those examples, the content is
still embedded in a matrix of protons and neutrons
when it is handed over to the renter or patron.
Lawmakers and courts seem to have decided
that this is OK, because it makes the content
seem enough like real objects (that you can
touch and feel) for them to understand.
Transmitting the ROM images over the Internet
avoids the step of physically transfering the protons and
neutrons to the users. Rightly or wrongly, the
lawmakers and courts will not be able to relate
to this, and it will be judged to be illegal.
(It doesn't
matter that only one user is assigned to the
protons and neutrons at a time. The fact that they
weren't sent to the user will be the deciding
factor. The law may not say this in so many words, but
the net effect of any court rulings will be the same.)
Physically moving around heavy particles along
with abstract content seems to set a "threshold
of inconvenience" which affirms that
your usage of the associated content is fair and morally
upstanding.
Security through obscurity is when you run your relaying smtp server on port 27 instead of port 25.
That's why I choose real security. My
relaying smtp server runs on a prime number port,
protected by factoring. In fact, I can go ahead and tell you
that the port is one of the prime factors of 899 without
reducing my security at all.
(The example of 27 is a particularly lame choice, since it's
3x3x3. That's not even nearly prime.)
2.18 gigabytes a second. Jesus - does anyone else see why this is wierd to me?
The really weird part is that a few grams of
wet meat at the back of your eye can actually
process and perceive 2.18 gigabytes per
second of information.
Then within a few milliseconds, more meat analyzes it, distills it into
high-level representations, calculates 3-D
trajectories, then moves meat-based servos
to aim and fire weapons. All for no other
reason than it seems fun.
You too can learn to replace any simple, small
table of hyperlinks with an annoying pseudo-GUI
menubar that takes 5 minutes of mousing to
see the possible options, and doesn't even work
20% of the time.
Once you've mastered that, you can go on
to advanced topics like a "browser detection
script", that refuses to show users any of the
website unless they happen to have the same
version of IE that you are using right now!
The best type of technology is not a means
to an end, it is an end in itself. Javascript is one of them.
Hrm, my motherboards don't recognize drives over 120 gigs due to some weird LBA limit of 132 gigs.
For the love of God, when will the PC industry
stop with these damned limits? I thought they
had fixed things, but here's another one. For the last
20 years it's been an endless parade of hard
drive capacity limits, one after the next. I can't remember
the last time I installed more than 1 OS on a
box without being nagged about dire warnings
about hard drive geometry crap.
Why the hell do they need
to be so stingy with the address bits? Don't
they learn anything from experience? Is it a
conspiracy to make a few people pay 3X for
SCSI?
Here's a hint:
Send 64-bits of address to the drive! Store
64-bits of address in the BIOS! Use 64 bits
in the device drivers! Use linear addressing! NO EXCEPTIONS ANYWHERE!
For once, they wouldn't run out of space in 6 months and
cause new headaches for everyone.
Or maybe because all the shitty stuff from way-back-then has already broken, and only the quality stuff remains. That way we only have evidence of old quality stuff. That doesn't mean only quality stuff was made.
I remind my mother of this line of reasoning every time she
asserts that everything made back in the old days
was high quality, and everything made now is
flimsy. It just never seems to sink in, though.
I'd argue that most things made today are more
durable. A lot of old cheap stuff was made out
of cardboard, wood, or rustable metal, and it eventually disintegrated
without leaving a trace. Today, most
cheap stuff is made of plastic. Even if it breaks,
you'll still have the faded, ungluable pieces
to look at many decades from now.
Re:.net is not evil
on
.NET for Apache
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
To write a document, I open up AbiWord. If I'm writing a story about the stock market, why can't I just open up my stock market program, drag a box into my document, and have live numbers for the Dow? If I'm writing a story about AMD, why can't I just open up my Slashdot program, drag a box into my document, and have a link to the story inserted into my document; and why can't the person on the other end open the document, double-click my link, and have the Slashdot story opened in place - without needing a web browser?.
Why not? Because there won't be a standard
way to show banner ads and popup ads to
pay for the content, and no casual user is going
to pay to read slashdot articles.
Moreover, I predict that there will be a versioning
nightmare. The content providers and software
writers are going to have a terrible time trying
to stay in sync on the data formats and protocols
between the sources and clients. Slashdot changes
all the time, for instance. What if you had just
bought a karma monitor that had a cool numerical
widget to keep tabs on your karma in real time?
Now its useless, because karma isn't a number
any more.
Look at a current example that is similar to
"web services". It's the billing infrastructure
that interfaces doctors and hospitals to insurance
companies. They've been working on this system
for decades, and it is still a complete piece of
crap. I'd estimate that my healtchare bills get significantly screwed
up in the system at least 25% of the time. How hard
can this be? Apparently pretty hard. Now
everybody is working feverishly to make every
aspect of our lives just as buggy. In the end,
a lot of this hype is going to get discredited.
Because you end up with a CPU that has layers of compatibility upon layers of compatiblity.
you'll have real mode, protected mode and now probably something like 64 bit mode.
The vast majority of the old cruft in the X86
architecture that nobody uses any more has
been demoted into microcode or other
non-optimized crevices. Ever since the
Pentium came out, good programmers and
compilers have been using an almost RISC-like
subset of the X86's myriad possible instructions,
operands and addressing modes. IOW, all
that old stuff really doesn't slow things down
in the real world.
Anyway, recent CPUs have been transforming
X86 instructions on-the-fly into bizarre internal
parallelized architectures anyway. This hidden
logic is an order of magnitude more complex
than what is visible in the X86 instruction spec.
The implementers are free to completely redo
the hidden stuff with every new generation
of X86 chip.
What is the purported advantage of the new scheduler?
Doesn't anybody read the submitters' article summaries
any more? It says right at the top of this page that the new scheduler
is Proportional. That's the advantage.
We can therefore infer that the old one is inferior
for a related reason: it's not Proportional.
I'm all for good proportions. Kudos to the
implementors. Keep up the good work.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope it's soon. It would replace the current inefficient and error-prone cycle of:
work->money->shiny objects->attract woman->pleasure
with the more elegant and foolproof:
work->pleasure
This could be a huge timesaver.
That means that if/when they finally cancel their cable service, they'll get socked with an inflated damage fee to top off their 20 years of expenditures.
Don't worry, we live on a finite planet, so it will stop growing one way or another. Let's assume the economy grows at a modest 3% rate for the next 1000 years. Let's see... we'd end up with 6.87e+12 times the economic output we have today. At that rate, we'd use up most any natural resource on this planet within milliseconds.
Clearly, some limiting factor is going to stop the concept of exponential growth sooner or later. Probably sooner.
I'm curious; let's do the math:
Atomic weight of Gold: ~197
Price of Gold: $300 per ounce = $10.70 per gram
Atoms per gram: 6.02e+23 / 197 = 3e+21
Price per atom: $10.70/3e+21 = 3.57e-21 cents
Price per Terabyte: 1/357000 cent
This conclusively proves that the vast majority of the $100 you might pay for a 1-terabyte atomic storage unit goes to marketing overhead and sales commissions.
Actually, if you buy Privacy Manager (TM) from the phone company, you appreciate the fact that almost no telemarketers send valid caller ID info. Without caller ID, the system makes you identify yourself by voice before ringing through.
These people almost never bother to attempt to manually bypass the filter, so I don't even get a ring. If they were forced to send Caller ID info, I'd have to get up off of my ass to see who's calling.
It's funny how everyone focuses on how much energy computers consume. Computerization has brought about efficiency improvements in all areas of the economy that saves vastly more energy than the 1% they use. They provide a net benefit for energy usage, but somehow get blamed for blackouts.
Still, I can't help thinking about how much electricity my computers consume. It's probably because the fans make so much noise and the monitors heat up the air in front of my face. It would really make more sense to try to maximize the efficiency of my house's air conditioner, which alone probably accounts for 70% of the electricity I use in the summer.
But with no discernable feedback on how much energy it uses, no 1337 energy saving mods available, and nobody who would be impressed by those mods, the A/C unit remains out of sight, out of mind.
Here you go:
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.3/en/os/i3 86/RedHat/RPMS/kernel-2.4.18-3.i686.rpm
Would you like fries with that?
If it is just a key change, they would have been better off if they had used one-time PROM cells inside the chip to hold the key. Then, the key could be set as the last step before the box leaves the factory. No need to throw away chips.
I work with all sorts of computers every day. It's funny, the only Y2K bug I actually spotted in the wild was a piece of medical equipment: an ultrasound machine. It spat out the due date for my kid as "02/12/19:0".
Wrong. The only vehicles worthy of comparison in this case are 1980's short wheelbase SUVs. The valid contenders are Ford Bronco vs. Chevy Blazer.
AFAIK Toyota Land Cruisers weren't available in 2-door models, and more importantly, suitably oversized wheels and tires aren't available for them. Without these, the vehicle is as useful as a doorstop.
Then the South fights in a war costing hundreds of thousands of lives over the issue of "high taxes".
Then for almost 100 years further, it continues to ensure cheap labor by continuing with the biggest subset of the condition slavery it can get away with.
Sounds mainly like avoiding hard moral choices in favor of grabbing a few bucks. That's not setting a very high "holy" bar to beat.
We need to get to the root of this socialist plot:
U.S. Constitution, section 8:
Congress shall have th power ...
Clause 7: To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
AHA!!! It was those commie pinko Founding Fathers! Washington, Jefferson, Adams... All scheming leftist pinko scumbags, bent on stealing money from FedEx and UPS and using it to subsidize post cards to welfare mothers from their bastard children!
Just goes to show again, that every single thing that the government does is completely worthless and wasteful, even if it takes 220 years to find it out!
IAAEE, so I'll hazard a guess. They say in the article that the 3rd rail uses 650V DC. For power distribution, this is a relatively low voltage. To minimize resistance losses, power is typically distributed at thousands of volts. To be able to easily convert voltages, you need AC, not DC so you can run it through a transformer.
I'll bet that they have high-voltage AC power distribution throughout the system, and they step it down to 650 V and rectify to DC it at frequent intervals along the tracks. The distance the power needs to run at low voltage along a high-resistance steel rail would never be very long, so losses are minimal. (I assume they use DC becuase it's easier to design train motors for DC, or something like that.)
The AC -> DC rectification is not reversible, however, so there would be no way for power generated by a train to get back into the main distribution grid, and the average distance the 650V DC would have to flow throught the 3rd rail to the next train would be too far to be economical.
(Of course, I could be wrong about all of this, since I don't really know anything about their system.)
What if they sold low-end real cellphones, unbundled from any plan or network, for, say, $40. Then various companies could sell phone cards for these cellphones at 5 or 10 cents per minute. This would cover most of the needs of people who would consider disposable cellphones without the "disposable" gimmick.
Except that two CPU generations from now, Intel will have had to change the underlying architecture of the IA-64 chips to get performance improvemets, but they'll have to leave the instruction set compatible. So, they'll have a hardware wrapper around the IA-64 instruction set. And this wrapper is going to have to try and second-guess the output of those rocket-science IA-64 compilers and rewrite the results on the fly.
Why not just leave well enough alone and let the CPU rewrite code from today's simple, well understood compilers? The current x86 instruction set works like a bytecode VM. There's nothing wrong with that, especially since the IA-64 CPUs and compilers haven't exactly been blowing away the x86 chips in the performance area.
Not to mention Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.
In both of those examples, the content is still embedded in a matrix of protons and neutrons when it is handed over to the renter or patron.
Lawmakers and courts seem to have decided that this is OK, because it makes the content seem enough like real objects (that you can touch and feel) for them to understand.
Transmitting the ROM images over the Internet avoids the step of physically transfering the protons and neutrons to the users. Rightly or wrongly, the lawmakers and courts will not be able to relate to this, and it will be judged to be illegal.
(It doesn't matter that only one user is assigned to the protons and neutrons at a time. The fact that they weren't sent to the user will be the deciding factor. The law may not say this in so many words, but the net effect of any court rulings will be the same.)
Physically moving around heavy particles along with abstract content seems to set a "threshold of inconvenience" which affirms that your usage of the associated content is fair and morally upstanding.
That's why I choose real security. My relaying smtp server runs on a prime number port, protected by factoring. In fact, I can go ahead and tell you that the port is one of the prime factors of 899 without reducing my security at all.
(The example of 27 is a particularly lame choice, since it's 3x3x3. That's not even nearly prime.)
The really weird part is that a few grams of wet meat at the back of your eye can actually process and perceive 2.18 gigabytes per second of information.
Then within a few milliseconds, more meat analyzes it, distills it into high-level representations, calculates 3-D trajectories, then moves meat-based servos to aim and fire weapons. All for no other reason than it seems fun.
Life is strange.
Once you've mastered that, you can go on to advanced topics like a "browser detection script", that refuses to show users any of the website unless they happen to have the same version of IE that you are using right now!
The best type of technology is not a means to an end, it is an end in itself. Javascript is one of them.
For the love of God, when will the PC industry stop with these damned limits? I thought they had fixed things, but here's another one. For the last 20 years it's been an endless parade of hard drive capacity limits, one after the next. I can't remember the last time I installed more than 1 OS on a box without being nagged about dire warnings about hard drive geometry crap.
Why the hell do they need to be so stingy with the address bits? Don't they learn anything from experience? Is it a conspiracy to make a few people pay 3X for SCSI?
Here's a hint: Send 64-bits of address to the drive! Store 64-bits of address in the BIOS! Use 64 bits in the device drivers! Use linear addressing! NO EXCEPTIONS ANYWHERE! For once, they wouldn't run out of space in 6 months and cause new headaches for everyone.
I remind my mother of this line of reasoning every time she asserts that everything made back in the old days was high quality, and everything made now is flimsy. It just never seems to sink in, though.
I'd argue that most things made today are more durable. A lot of old cheap stuff was made out of cardboard, wood, or rustable metal, and it eventually disintegrated without leaving a trace. Today, most cheap stuff is made of plastic. Even if it breaks, you'll still have the faded, ungluable pieces to look at many decades from now.
Why not? Because there won't be a standard way to show banner ads and popup ads to pay for the content, and no casual user is going to pay to read slashdot articles.
Moreover, I predict that there will be a versioning nightmare. The content providers and software writers are going to have a terrible time trying to stay in sync on the data formats and protocols between the sources and clients. Slashdot changes all the time, for instance. What if you had just bought a karma monitor that had a cool numerical widget to keep tabs on your karma in real time? Now its useless, because karma isn't a number any more.
Look at a current example that is similar to "web services". It's the billing infrastructure that interfaces doctors and hospitals to insurance companies. They've been working on this system for decades, and it is still a complete piece of crap. I'd estimate that my healtchare bills get significantly screwed up in the system at least 25% of the time. How hard can this be? Apparently pretty hard. Now everybody is working feverishly to make every aspect of our lives just as buggy. In the end, a lot of this hype is going to get discredited.
The vast majority of the old cruft in the X86 architecture that nobody uses any more has been demoted into microcode or other non-optimized crevices. Ever since the Pentium came out, good programmers and compilers have been using an almost RISC-like subset of the X86's myriad possible instructions, operands and addressing modes. IOW, all that old stuff really doesn't slow things down in the real world.
Anyway, recent CPUs have been transforming X86 instructions on-the-fly into bizarre internal parallelized architectures anyway. This hidden logic is an order of magnitude more complex than what is visible in the X86 instruction spec. The implementers are free to completely redo the hidden stuff with every new generation of X86 chip.
Doesn't anybody read the submitters' article summaries any more? It says right at the top of this page that the new scheduler is Proportional. That's the advantage. We can therefore infer that the old one is inferior for a related reason: it's not Proportional.
I'm all for good proportions. Kudos to the implementors. Keep up the good work.