The I-Opener should have had this built in. Dialup OR dsl, or LAN access. Then sell the internet service with it as planned, but sell dsl service instead of dialup where dsl is available.
They don't need built in ethernet. They have the USB port. I got some (ARK?) 10Mb ethernet with 3 port hubs for about $40 that work in my i-opener.
What they did need was a way to tap into the DSL (or other broadband) dollar stream, and to make the software work with a USB enet that they sold/gave away (assuming a real contract got signed).
I think less then 25% of the people with i-openerws would have DSL, so paying $40 each for them would be better then $10 on each i-opener. Actually less then $40, because they don't need the built in hub.
They had the hardware side Ok. It was the bisness side (as usual) that they failed on.
It's not a question of school property, it's a question of students being minors. Minors, generally, have very
little rights and not all constitutional rights apply to them (e.g. right to vote, to bear arms, etc.)
The right to vote does not apply because the enumerated right itself states the age limit (via some random web page):
Amendment XXVI (1971)
Section 1.
The right of citizens of the United States, who are 18 years of age or older, to vote, shall not be denied or abridged by the United
States or any state on account of age.
Nothing is in there denying the right to bear arms to persons of a specific age, so I imagine it was a ruling by a court somewhere which may or may not be a proper one. Or maybe even an oridance not yet chalange in court.
Nothing in "We the people" says "We the people over 18 years of age", nor
The important thing to remember here though is that the President doesn't have the power to force any
system of government onto the states.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that Browne as Prisident would try to mandate state policy. He is pretty dead set against it. But the Libertarian Party has candiates for 1500 to 2000 state and local positions as well. In fact they have 343 in office now. I was making a statment about them.
I'll concede part of the point about AT&T being a government mandated monopoly. That was more through
government inaction than government action. AT&T said "We can be a monopoly, can't we?" and the
government shrugged and sure, "Sure, do whatever."
I thought the other phone componies were forced to connect to the Bell System, or prevented from starting service in new towns (with the exception of GTE for some reason). But my recall on this is somewhat murky. Does anyone out there know? I poked around on the history channel's pages, but no dice.
As for monopolies not being able to put you in jail, I would say they can (almost). On April 26th, there was a
Slashdot article called "Get a Cable Modem...Go to Jail" (link is dead, can't find another) about a woman
who signed up for Comcast@home but not Comcast cable TV. She was facing jail time for "stealing" cable
despite the fact that she called both Comcasts repeatedly saying that she was not supposed to be getting cable
TV. An awesome read if anyone can track down a working link.
That was up in B'more - almost local to me. I think EEtimes had the original article. Comcast couldn't put her in jail. They had to ask the goverment to do it for them. And I don't think the goverment would have (if she had any reciepts). It was still a very unplesent situation, and Comcast acted poorly. But monopolies can't put you in jail. Only the goverment can. They will sometimes use it at the behest of monopolies, sometimes for large campaign contributors, sometimes for totally innane reasons, sometimes for good reasons.
I could argue with you that IBM was never a monopoly. My evidence would be that the public did in fact vote
them out of office using their checkbooks.
That isn't the definition of monopoly, controling more then some percentage of the market is a monopoly. They probbably had one in mainfram class machines, depending on what percentage you argue for, and what counts as a mainframe. Amdahl, Burougs, and others notwithstanding IBM pretty much owned the mainframe world (literally -- you only leased their machines...).
Yes, the phone system came about, for the most part, without government involvement. Unforntunately, it
created a monopoly that lasted decades before the government stepped in and broke it up
The monopoly was actually created by the goverment. The Bell compony conviced the goverment that a single phone compony was a must, having one phone compony hooking up doctors, and another for lawyers, and another set in the next town over was loony. Of corse they downplayed that the diffrent phone componies were in the act of hooking together (so had allready).
We got a usable phone system out of it. Faster I think then otherwise possiable. But we got a goverment mandiated monopoly out of it.
Or to say it Browne's way "frist the goverment broke our legs by creating a phone monopoly, then to prove how we couldn't live with out them they gave us cruches later by breaking up the Bell System -- arn't they a great bunch of guys?"
Monopolies are
even worse than the government.
Are they? Monopolies tend not to make more monoplies (but who granted the cable compony monoplies?). Monopolies don't imprison people for doing things they don't like (but goverments will send you to jail for smoking the wrong kind of plant, or impound your car because you decided to pay by cash rather then check).
I don't like monoplies. I fear goverments.
A
free market is supposed to be the checks and balances and your checkbook is supposed to be your vote, but by
the time a monopoly is in place that system has already broken down.
Not allways. The goverment may have haul'ed Microsoft to court and declared them guilty, but their market share appears to be eroding on it's own. IBM was never declared a monopoly by the goverment, but it imploded on it's own (well with help from Microsoft).
In both cases there may have been help from public perception brough on by goverment's investigation, but the goverment didn't directly do anything.
he failed to give any answer to the question about the current electoral system.
Browne doesn't beleve in passing (or promoting) laws that violate the constution. So he may hate the electoral system, but were he elected he would not be able to alter it. It isn't a presendital power. So I'm guessing he doesn't want to waste time talking about what he won't change when there are so many things he will (given the chance).
Browne also fails to explain "Free Market's" naughty effect - monopolistic behavior such as that of
Microsoft.
He talks about it on his web site somewhere. I don't agree with his answer, but I agree with his positions more then the other candiates, so (baring the unexpected) I'll be voting for him.
I agree with everything he said up to the "No income tax" part. I think that is quite irresponsible.
Why? Once reduced to it's constutional limits the federal goverment won't really need much money at all. It won't provide much in the way of services, but that's OK, we mostly don't use them now. Those that we do will be provided by someone else, probbably cheeper too.
The state goverments are more of a problem. The provide a lot more useful services. That means it would be much harder to live through a transition from public provided services to private provided services at the local level.
Browne fails to explain how a lot of people will survive in his vision. If wellfare system is taken off
immediately, the country will no doubt be in chaos and violence. Simply put, some people will go out and rob
if they don't have food in thier hands. This is more costly than wellfare.
He talks about it on his web pages. The short answer is private charity, which manges to do more for the poor now then the goverment does, and could do even more if people who cared actually had spare money to donate, and who would have to do even less for the working poor as theur pay checks wopuld go twice as far.
Overall, thought. I feel that at least we are not fed with bullocks. We got honest answers to problems without
any moral references. That's what I like.
Good. Go visit his web pages. See if you still agree after you read in depth. Visit the Libertarian Party as well for more background.
You won't agree with 100% of his choices. I don't. But it is wonderful to find someonw where you agree with more then 20% of the choices!
That's a straw man argument. You set too high a standard. What about the autopilot code that runs commercial jet liners? Millions of lives depend on it daily. Seems to work fine.
Auto-pilot on a comercial jet can be fairly fucked up as long as it will turn off when the trained pilot or copilot grabs control to save the plane. The comercial planes also only use the auto-pilot in the relitavly safe part of the trip, the non-take-off/landing part.
If you want to do the same on a single-person flight craft, then they have to have the same kind of training. If you want to skip that training then the auto-pilot has to be far better then current auto-pilots. It isn't complex, pick one.
So many posters on this bord are naysayers. While you're all out there running around yelling "it can't be done" at the top of your lungs, someone's out there doing it.
Yeah, some people are. Others are lising off real problems, ones that might spark someone else's good idea, or at least make us realise that putting our life's savings into an air-car-start-up may not be such a hot idea.
I didn't even say "it can't be done". In fact I came right out and said NASA has pretty bug-free code in a place or too. It is expensave and slow to write. I fully intended people to gather that maybe an air-car auto-pilot could actually be pretty damm bug free, but it will take a while to write, and cost real money. That ain't never.
Point: it doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to be close. Point: the shuttle's code is close. Please connect the dots. Did you get hard but not impossable?
Why not focus your energy on doing something productive?
I did. I wrote some code to visualise dependencies from a make file, shot a roll of color film (if I'm lucky it'll have three good pictures), and most of my first roll of Tmax ASA3200 black n' white film (I'm looking for a lot of visable grain), no idea if any of those shots are good. Oh, and I got back my last few rolls of film, including some three and a half OK shots of my dog jumping a fence.
Yeah. I guess those guys at Nasa's Ames research center don't know what they're talking about. I'll bet none of them even has a pilot's license, especially that former Navy fighter pilot who developed the thing.
Yeah, the thing may well fly. That isn't what the pilots are saying is impractal (in the next 10 years). If it works doctors may fly to patents, or paramedics. After a lot of training. Infentry may fly over minefileds, again after training (maybe somewhat less because someone might decide to risk it rather then letting them get shot cleaing a mine field under fire). But who will you not see flying? The guy who drives 45 in the fast lane. The guy who doesn't check his tires every few days. In fact almost anyone that wouln't pay a big chunk of cash and go through a longish training program with the risk of failing the test at the end and not being allowed to fly.
At least until we get some pretty damm bug free auto-flight/landing/takeoff code, and you know how little bug free code is out there... (NASA comes pretty damm close on the shuttle code, but it is very expensave and slow code to have written, and doesn't to as much real-time machine vision and control system work as this would...)
I don't know if the feeble hardware platform is really that much of an excuse. My Amiga 500 was running on a 68000 at 7.49 MHz and its windowing performance was quite acceptable, while doing a lot more than I would expect off a Palm. True, it had some hardware support, but by today's standards that was quite feeble.
It had really really really good hardware acceleration compaired to the none that the DragonBall has. It also had much more effectave memory because the 512K/1M/2M/8M in the Palm/Visor includes all the storage that would have been a stack of floppies or a hard drive on the Amiga.
Besides your Amiga may well have sucked for the task "look through 8M of data for the string 'wing' - decoding any and all file formats as needed" which is exactly what the Palm find button does (assuming you have a 8M palm), and was one of the cheif "excuses" given by Hawkings to limit the memory.
Motorola could easily build some simple graphics acceleration hardware into the Dragonball (haven't they already?) to help a bit.
If Mot had they might have lost in the pager market (where the DragonBall also sells, see the black berry), or the programable remote market (Phillips Pronto and the Mirantz work-alike), or...
I'm just perplexed that they went with a CPU that doesn't offer a true clean 32-bit architecture without segementation and all.
The DragonBall has a fine 32 bit model ('tho maybe only 24 bits get off the chip). It has a limited immediate offset, but so do a lot of CPUs. Including the 80386. Including the SPARC. It isn't segmentation, it just means you can only do "LOAD (A2+32000), D2", and not "LOAD (A2+64000), D2", you would need "ADD #64000, D2; LOAD (A2), D2" (trashing A2, which you may need to copy to another register or something...). (P.S. sorry if I don't quite rember the 68000 asm syntax, it is has been about 10 years since I wrote any!)
Aren't there embedded 386 derivatives that could have fit the power and price bill equally well? Maybe not, but I'm wondering.
I don't know of any 386 derivataves that are as cheap as the DeagonBall, consume as little power, and have the LCD controler, memory controler, chipselects, and pretty much everything else built into it. Plus the 68000 is nicer to hand code for.
Besides the thing the Palms could use but don't have is an MMU. Sure it can't page in from a disk, but it could keep the flaky copy of "Pocket Crack Monkey" from trashing my phone list! Or allow things to page into and out of FLASH letting power off mode be a real power off...
Anyway, I'm starting to wonder whether Palm OS is really as great as it's made out to be. It's one thing to
encourage programmers to keep the apps small and simple, but it's quite another if you force them to do so
through architectural limitations and artificial shortcoming. Forcing small apps just because you yourself as
an OS creator can't really see any use for large apps on a handheld smacks of shorsightedness.
PalmOS and the Palm hardware (and Visor hardware) has lots of short term thinking in it. I think that is part of why it was the only succesful PDA. I don't think it will serve them as well in the long run, but if they hadn't done it they wouldn't even have gotten this far.
The hardware limitations are easier to forgive, how could they have hit their price point with a CPU with a MMU? Or high clock rate? If they had put in more memory what would have happened to battery life? And how could the feeble CPU search it all? The software ones are harder to forgive (esp things like LoadLib and CloseLib that have no good reason not to do ref counting in the OS).
Will Palm manage to switch to a longer term mode? Who knows, I hope they can. Switching to faster CPUs will help (it is hard to justify making resulition independent programs when they will draw t-o-o-s-l-o-w on a 16Mhz CPU), but that alone won't fix things. Switching the entire OS (with a compatability box for old apps) may not help either as it will kill the investment programmers have made in learning the current OS, and will mean existing code will have to be ported to the new OS before it can get any benifits. Thwy have to face a similar hurdle Apple faced going from the 680x0 to PowerPC, and also the hurdle Appl faces going to OSX, or Microsoft has repeatldly bumped into trying to get people to switch to NT or Win2K.
So what's cheaper... buying new rechargeable batteries after a couple years, or buying new Alkalines every 2
weeks for 2 years?
You don't get to replace the batteries in a lot of the devices that have built in rechargables. Handspring is currently/.'ed so I can't check. However the palm V and Vx for example don't let you change the batt. The custom rechargables are also pretty expensave (I assume because the market is small and there arn't many comperiters). For example a new battery for the Canon PowerShot 100 is about $60, while four AA rechargables are about $3. The four AAA's in my Visor were also about $3 (plus $30 for the charger).
So it is really more like "buy AAA's every month or a new Palm in two years". Of corse in two years you will probbably want a new Palm, but it would be nice if the old one had some resale value!
Given a choice I would like NiMH AAA that recharge when the unit is in the cradle. That would be more convenient then using NiMHs in the current Visor/Palm, and would be a lot cheaper in the long run then custin batts. I don't know why it isn't done, the legal issue can't be too bad because Semmins does that on the GigaSet phones (well NiCADs, but still if you put Alkalines in it they will explode or leak...)
Also is seem to remember reading about Steve Mann having a highspeed camera attached to his wearable. Supposedly it allowed him to read the writing on the tires of passing cars.
All you need for that is a fast shutter (and a wide open lens, or lots and lots of light). A $300 film camera can do that, and $500 or $1000 digitals ought to be able to do that (the $500 if it happens to pick a fast shutter speed, the $1000 if you set to shutter priority and pick a fast shutter).
In an auction, those who have the most money can gain control of precious spectrum, but not necessarily put it to the best use. Arraycomm (www.arraycomm.com) claims it can deliver 40 times as much bandwidth for a given band of spectrum as 3rd generation products.
Assuming arraycomm is willing to sell their technology for something under about 40 times the cost of the bandwidth, I don't see why the winners of the bandwidth auction wouldn't also buy arraycomm's technology. Unless of corse arraycomm's technology turns out to be a sham. Or works, but is extreamly costly to deply. Or works in the lab, but is screwed by some real life effects (multipath reflection, flying birds, tastyness of equiptment to crawly things). Or someone else doesn't come up with something better.
If the ability to serve 20 milion households is worth $2b, the ability to serve 400 million is surely worth much more.
What happens if there's a fault in that "new" 8 meg that's being used? Do they just do a regular chipset
version, like intel's 486sx with the disabled co-proc?
It is pretty common for large regular structures like cache's to have a little extra that can be used if some of the memory is bad. I don't know if that is the case here, but it may be. It is also possiable that they can just map out part of it (so there might be a 7M version).
If not, then faults in this 8 meg space, is going to cost
them more money because of the added complexity.
Even if so it will cost extra. There is extra time on the tester, and tester time isn't cheap. Also if it is better (or though to be better) there will be more buyers which can result in a higher price...or in research and devlopment intensave products lower prices, so who knows:-)
I'm sure it took longer to design as well. So the 8M of RAM isn't free, but it should be a lot cheaper then it normally would be, or at least more profitable to them.
Oh, I didn't mean to pick on the SA because it sucks a watt. I actually thought it sucked more like half that. I was trying to say that replacing the crosue with another CPU in a 10W box will only give you at best a 8W box (assuming the Crosue sucks 2W, and the new CPU zero).
So to suck dramitically less we either have to go the Palm Pilot route and drop the hard drive, most of the ram, and lots of other stuff...or find a way to get all that other stuff to sip power rather then gulp it.
Typical ARM processors power consumption is much more like a few milliWatts ! Hundreds times less than the Crusoe.
They tend to run slower as well, I picked the StrongARM because it was in the same ballpark (even if it's integer performance is likely to be halfish the Crouse, and the FP will be abysmal because it has no FPU). The Xscale would have been better, but I didn't think of it at the time.
Good technology for embedded, ultraportatives, and even wearables.
Yep, as long as you don't need x86 compatability it is better then the Crosue. Then again something almost allways beats the x86 if you don't need x86 compatability (well it has price/performace going for it in some price and performace bands, but I'm wondering offtopic...).
Re:Small display == good power consumption stats?
on
Crusoe: new benchmarks
·
· Score: 2
Somehow, testing this processor in a system with a tiny display doesn't seem like a very good way to compare it to a realistic real world notebook
No, but they could have compared it to Intel version of the picture book.
(Sure, some people may buy this, but the display seems too small for many real world applications.)
The only time the display was really just inconvenently too small was when a dialog "knew" it would have enough height, but my display was too short. Bloody pain. Happened failry offen in Windows, but pretty much never in BSD. The X apps mostly had scroll bars, or did something else when denied the height. When not I could at least drag the window up and down with ease, Windows made it really hard to do that.
It is a pity Sony didn't support BSD (or Linux) on that system, it was much more usable.
Keep in mind that ultra portable machines using low-power consumption RISC processors and components achieve a 1W- rate.
What machines would these be? While the StrongARM uses less power then the Crosue, most of that 10W isn't the CPU. I don't think we will get a 1W laptop until hard drives are replaced by something that sucks less power, DRAM gets replaced by MRAM, and most importantly we can make the big power sucking LCD backlight go away, or at least make it much smaller (like an eyeglasses backlight....).
Until then our power sippers will be palm pilot like displays with no backlight most of the time, very little RAM, and no hard drive...
The difference is that bills in Congress aren't numbered that way. A legitimate bill in the house would be numbered HR-something and a legitimate bill in the Senate would be numbered S-something.
If someone started talking to me about IETF RCS1532, or PCS1532 I would assume they are not an expert and got the name wrong (possably including the numbers).
I don't see why congressmen think the public is any smarter. Especally when they keep passing laws the remove our need to think for ourselves.
Hey! I have a Pro-Audio Spectrum card too! Except it also has built in SCSI. If that card works with Athlons i'll believe anything will work. That card has given me more problems than anything! It's EVIL i tell you! hehe
Mine also had the SCSI "controler", it was really a byte-banged SCSI, no smarts on the card. At least I think that is how it worked, but it had a real SCSI connector. I don't think I ever used the SCSI at all. At one point I had thought of using it to test "IP over SCSI", but then someone published a 1Apr RFC about it, and I lost intrest in pionering the hack:-)
FreeBSD did recognise the SCSI "controler" (well, prior to 4.0 it did). Hmmmm, I should have uncrated my old Atari ST drive (it is a 20M SCSI drive with a SCSI to ATSI converter) before it was de-supported... ah well, there is still the 1G drive on my Sun 4/110....
I think the reason people get the impression that AMD chips are not top of the line, is because of the poor compatability with other components.
Intresting. I havn't heard about this issue. When my old (duel) PPro motherbord died, I bought a K7, and a K7 motherbord, and PC100 memory (ECC, because I'm that way), and an ATX mobo and PC Power And Cooling power supply (because it is quiet, and the same brand I've been buying for years, and was one of the few things that AMD did say there were compatability problems with). I took all the cards and drives from the old system and moved them to the new system.
They all worked. Including my generic NCR SCSI. Including my oddball ISA sound card. Including my cheap as crap ISA video card. Both of which I had bought for the PC I first built in 1992! I did get rid of the ISA sound card a few weeks later (FreeBSD funally stopped supporting it a decade after the makers went bankrupt, and I didn't feel like fixing the driver myself). I got rid of the graphics card too (so I could be ISA free -- it is my home server, and runs with no monitor most of the time, so the crappy graphics were just fine). Both were replaces with "store brand" PCI cards costing about $30 each.
Zero compatability problems.
Have you personally seen any compatability problems? Did the failed part work in another machine?
Hopefully DELL, Compaq and and company will release "Interprise Level" servers featuring 8 way AMD chipsets.
I hope so too. But I have little hope of Compaq doing it. After all they have the multi-way chipset (40+ CPUs) for the Alpha which would take little or no tweaking to work with the K7 "just" a BIOS, which shouldn't be hard for the first compony to reverse engener the IBM PC BIOS....
P.S. now that I think back on it, the ISA video ard may not have been from '92, it may have been newer then that. But the sound card was that old (ProAudio Spectrum bought at a Microprose employe discount not all that long before the compony that made 'em vanished, nice card though)
What shouldn't be charged for on the net is distance. That concept is obsolete even for
the phone companies (it's just that they are required by law (and telecom law is the most byzantine and
insane of all industry regulations) to charge you for distance, even if you travel entirely in, say BEll Atlantic's
network).
What makes you think a "long distance" packet doesn't really cost more money to send then a "short distance" one? If you send a packet up your ADSL line to someone down the block (who is signe up with the ISP) the packet will go up your ADSL line, maybe across a DSLAM, into some manner of router, maybe to another router in the same hub across a relitavly cheap gigabit ethernet (or maybe just 100Mbit).
If you send the same packet from VA to NJ you also involve one or more long haul links which have a large monthly cost. Sure you use a tiny bit of it, but if you packet it part of the peak demand, then it is part of what causes the next round of expansion (if it is off peak then it is essensally free).
If you send the packet from VA to Europe there are even more expensave links involved. (very very costly undersea links...expensave links in countries where the PTT has a monopoly, or effectave monopoly on data lines...)
If you cross from one ISP to another you have the cost of the links, and you have the cost of whatever polotics needed to be run through to get peering, or dollars to be a "wholesale reseller", and monthly rent on more space in the middle of some telco facility, and...
I don't think it is a good idea to charge for long-distance Internet traffic, but the idea that distance is free is just wrong. I think the cost of even finding the cost for IP packets would excede the cost of the packet, let alone the cost of recording it! Even if it didn't nobody would want to pay.
But there's also stories that they modified the initial values of DES in such a way as to weaken them.
There have been lots of stories like that. However there is the fact that DES-with-NSA changes is resistant to diffrentional cryptoanalsis, and DES-without-NSA-changes falls to a DA attack much faster then brute force keysearches.
So if the NSA weakened DES they accidentally also strengthened it. More likely they "just" strengthened it. It does show that they (use to) have at least a 15 year lead. Probbably shortened a bit by now, but who knows?
They're stuck using other people's fabs so they definitely are behind the ball there (both in
cost/profitability/yield and silicon performance - they have to use standard processes they can't tweak too
much).
If the choose to use just IBM's fabs, they can tweak their design as much as they like. In face they can use copper interconnects, and all manner of things a start-up fab plant would just have to licence at prohibitavly high rates anyway.
They may have access to better production fabs then AMD owns. The big downside is if they can't get enough productiong capicity from IBM (a success disaster), or if they can't find any place else to go after their existing contract runs out (far enough in the future that it is a non-problem for a while).
On the other hand all it takes is another small startup to get an async logic x86 clone to market - for those
who don't know asynchronous logic has held a promise or lower power, faster design for years
Low noise too. Very helpful in DSP work (at least when the signals you want to process are in danger of being interfered with by the clock signal, or more importnantly the billion gates that are all ready to cycle with the clock). The comercialised Amulet has gotten a few wins in pagers (replacing the old CPU and some of the analog processing). Maybe it will hit cell phones next....
Async CPUs are in effect clockless - everything internal is self timed, nets only switch when they need to
saving power and, in effect self-clock-chipping:-)
Actually much harder to "over clock" because every data line has an associsted "data ready" line (unless they use C-logic -- I forget how that works, but it uses two lines to transmit a bit and ready at the same time, but each line is both status and data). The ready lines are designed to take longer to change state then the data lines, and those are the things you would have to shorten (in all their milions) to "over clock". Of corse just making the CPUI colder and ramping the voltage a bit will make it "magically" run faster. So you still have that.
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They don't need built in ethernet. They have the USB port. I got some (ARK?) 10Mb ethernet with 3 port hubs for about $40 that work in my i-opener.
What they did need was a way to tap into the DSL (or other broadband) dollar stream, and to make the software work with a USB enet that they sold/gave away (assuming a real contract got signed).
I think less then 25% of the people with i-openerws would have DSL, so paying $40 each for them would be better then $10 on each i-opener. Actually less then $40, because they don't need the built in hub.
They had the hardware side Ok. It was the bisness side (as usual) that they failed on.
The right to vote does not apply because the enumerated right itself states the age limit (via some random web page):
Nothing is in there denying the right to bear arms to persons of a specific age, so I imagine it was a ruling by a court somewhere which may or may not be a proper one. Or maybe even an oridance not yet chalange in court.
Nothing in "We the people" says "We the people over 18 years of age", nor
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that Browne as Prisident would try to mandate state policy. He is pretty dead set against it. But the Libertarian Party has candiates for 1500 to 2000 state and local positions as well. In fact they have 343 in office now. I was making a statment about them.
I thought the other phone componies were forced to connect to the Bell System, or prevented from starting service in new towns (with the exception of GTE for some reason). But my recall on this is somewhat murky. Does anyone out there know? I poked around on the history channel's pages, but no dice.
That was up in B'more - almost local to me. I think EEtimes had the original article. Comcast couldn't put her in jail. They had to ask the goverment to do it for them. And I don't think the goverment would have (if she had any reciepts). It was still a very unplesent situation, and Comcast acted poorly. But monopolies can't put you in jail. Only the goverment can. They will sometimes use it at the behest of monopolies, sometimes for large campaign contributors, sometimes for totally innane reasons, sometimes for good reasons.
That isn't the definition of monopoly, controling more then some percentage of the market is a monopoly. They probbably had one in mainfram class machines, depending on what percentage you argue for, and what counts as a mainframe. Amdahl, Burougs, and others notwithstanding IBM pretty much owned the mainframe world (literally -- you only leased their machines...).
The monopoly was actually created by the goverment. The Bell compony conviced the goverment that a single phone compony was a must, having one phone compony hooking up doctors, and another for lawyers, and another set in the next town over was loony. Of corse they downplayed that the diffrent phone componies were in the act of hooking together (so had allready).
We got a usable phone system out of it. Faster I think then otherwise possiable. But we got a goverment mandiated monopoly out of it.
Or to say it Browne's way "frist the goverment broke our legs by creating a phone monopoly, then to prove how we couldn't live with out them they gave us cruches later by breaking up the Bell System -- arn't they a great bunch of guys?"
Are they? Monopolies tend not to make more monoplies (but who granted the cable compony monoplies?). Monopolies don't imprison people for doing things they don't like (but goverments will send you to jail for smoking the wrong kind of plant, or impound your car because you decided to pay by cash rather then check).
I don't like monoplies. I fear goverments.
Not allways. The goverment may have haul'ed Microsoft to court and declared them guilty, but their market share appears to be eroding on it's own. IBM was never declared a monopoly by the goverment, but it imploded on it's own (well with help from Microsoft).
In both cases there may have been help from public perception brough on by goverment's investigation, but the goverment didn't directly do anything.
Browne doesn't beleve in passing (or promoting) laws that violate the constution. So he may hate the electoral system, but were he elected he would not be able to alter it. It isn't a presendital power. So I'm guessing he doesn't want to waste time talking about what he won't change when there are so many things he will (given the chance).
He talks about it on his web site somewhere. I don't agree with his answer, but I agree with his positions more then the other candiates, so (baring the unexpected) I'll be voting for him.
Why? Once reduced to it's constutional limits the federal goverment won't really need much money at all. It won't provide much in the way of services, but that's OK, we mostly don't use them now. Those that we do will be provided by someone else, probbably cheeper too.
The state goverments are more of a problem. The provide a lot more useful services. That means it would be much harder to live through a transition from public provided services to private provided services at the local level.
He talks about it on his web pages. The short answer is private charity, which manges to do more for the poor now then the goverment does, and could do even more if people who cared actually had spare money to donate, and who would have to do even less for the working poor as theur pay checks wopuld go twice as far.
Good. Go visit his web pages. See if you still agree after you read in depth. Visit the Libertarian Party as well for more background.
You won't agree with 100% of his choices. I don't. But it is wonderful to find someonw where you agree with more then 20% of the choices!
Damm, knew I should have cut n' pasted....
Auto-pilot on a comercial jet can be fairly fucked up as long as it will turn off when the trained pilot or copilot grabs control to save the plane. The comercial planes also only use the auto-pilot in the relitavly safe part of the trip, the non-take-off/landing part.
If you want to do the same on a single-person flight craft, then they have to have the same kind of training. If you want to skip that training then the auto-pilot has to be far better then current auto-pilots. It isn't complex, pick one.
Yeah, some people are. Others are lising off real problems, ones that might spark someone else's good idea, or at least make us realise that putting our life's savings into an air-car-start-up may not be such a hot idea.
I didn't even say "it can't be done". In fact I came right out and said NASA has pretty bug-free code in a place or too. It is expensave and slow to write. I fully intended people to gather that maybe an air-car auto-pilot could actually be pretty damm bug free, but it will take a while to write, and cost real money. That ain't never.
Point: it doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to be close. Point: the shuttle's code is close. Please connect the dots. Did you get hard but not impossable?
I did. I wrote some code to visualise dependencies from a make file, shot a roll of color film (if I'm lucky it'll have three good pictures), and most of my first roll of Tmax ASA3200 black n' white film (I'm looking for a lot of visable grain), no idea if any of those shots are good. Oh, and I got back my last few rolls of film, including some three and a half OK shots of my dog jumping a fence.
No flying though. Not today.
Did you get to do anything productave?
Yeah, the thing may well fly. That isn't what the pilots are saying is impractal (in the next 10 years). If it works doctors may fly to patents, or paramedics. After a lot of training. Infentry may fly over minefileds, again after training (maybe somewhat less because someone might decide to risk it rather then letting them get shot cleaing a mine field under fire). But who will you not see flying? The guy who drives 45 in the fast lane. The guy who doesn't check his tires every few days. In fact almost anyone that wouln't pay a big chunk of cash and go through a longish training program with the risk of failing the test at the end and not being allowed to fly.
At least until we get some pretty damm bug free auto-flight/landing/takeoff code, and you know how little bug free code is out there... (NASA comes pretty damm close on the shuttle code, but it is very expensave and slow code to have written, and doesn't to as much real-time machine vision and control system work as this would...)
It had really really really good hardware acceleration compaired to the none that the DragonBall has. It also had much more effectave memory because the 512K/1M/2M/8M in the Palm/Visor includes all the storage that would have been a stack of floppies or a hard drive on the Amiga.
Besides your Amiga may well have sucked for the task "look through 8M of data for the string 'wing' - decoding any and all file formats as needed" which is exactly what the Palm find button does (assuming you have a 8M palm), and was one of the cheif "excuses" given by Hawkings to limit the memory.
If Mot had they might have lost in the pager market (where the DragonBall also sells, see the black berry), or the programable remote market (Phillips Pronto and the Mirantz work-alike), or...
The DragonBall has a fine 32 bit model ('tho maybe only 24 bits get off the chip). It has a limited immediate offset, but so do a lot of CPUs. Including the 80386. Including the SPARC. It isn't segmentation, it just means you can only do "LOAD (A2+32000), D2", and not "LOAD (A2+64000), D2", you would need "ADD #64000, D2; LOAD (A2), D2" (trashing A2, which you may need to copy to another register or something...). (P.S. sorry if I don't quite rember the 68000 asm syntax, it is has been about 10 years since I wrote any!)
I don't know of any 386 derivataves that are as cheap as the DeagonBall, consume as little power, and have the LCD controler, memory controler, chipselects, and pretty much everything else built into it. Plus the 68000 is nicer to hand code for.
Besides the thing the Palms could use but don't have is an MMU. Sure it can't page in from a disk, but it could keep the flaky copy of "Pocket Crack Monkey" from trashing my phone list! Or allow things to page into and out of FLASH letting power off mode be a real power off...
PalmOS and the Palm hardware (and Visor hardware) has lots of short term thinking in it. I think that is part of why it was the only succesful PDA. I don't think it will serve them as well in the long run, but if they hadn't done it they wouldn't even have gotten this far.
The hardware limitations are easier to forgive, how could they have hit their price point with a CPU with a MMU? Or high clock rate? If they had put in more memory what would have happened to battery life? And how could the feeble CPU search it all? The software ones are harder to forgive (esp things like LoadLib and CloseLib that have no good reason not to do ref counting in the OS).
Will Palm manage to switch to a longer term mode? Who knows, I hope they can. Switching to faster CPUs will help (it is hard to justify making resulition independent programs when they will draw t-o-o-s-l-o-w on a 16Mhz CPU), but that alone won't fix things. Switching the entire OS (with a compatability box for old apps) may not help either as it will kill the investment programmers have made in learning the current OS, and will mean existing code will have to be ported to the new OS before it can get any benifits. Thwy have to face a similar hurdle Apple faced going from the 680x0 to PowerPC, and also the hurdle Appl faces going to OSX, or Microsoft has repeatldly bumped into trying to get people to switch to NT or Win2K.
You don't get to replace the batteries in a lot of the devices that have built in rechargables. Handspring is currently /.'ed so I can't check. However the palm V and Vx for example don't let you change the batt. The custom rechargables are also pretty expensave (I assume because the market is small and there arn't many comperiters). For example a new battery for the Canon PowerShot 100 is about $60, while four AA rechargables are about $3. The four AAA's in my Visor were also about $3 (plus $30 for the charger).
So it is really more like "buy AAA's every month or a new Palm in two years". Of corse in two years you will probbably want a new Palm, but it would be nice if the old one had some resale value!
Given a choice I would like NiMH AAA that recharge when the unit is in the cradle. That would be more convenient then using NiMHs in the current Visor/Palm, and would be a lot cheaper in the long run then custin batts. I don't know why it isn't done, the legal issue can't be too bad because Semmins does that on the GigaSet phones (well NiCADs, but still if you put Alkalines in it they will explode or leak...)
All you need for that is a fast shutter (and a wide open lens, or lots and lots of light). A $300 film camera can do that, and $500 or $1000 digitals ought to be able to do that (the $500 if it happens to pick a fast shutter speed, the $1000 if you set to shutter priority and pick a fast shutter).
Assuming arraycomm is willing to sell their technology for something under about 40 times the cost of the bandwidth, I don't see why the winners of the bandwidth auction wouldn't also buy arraycomm's technology. Unless of corse arraycomm's technology turns out to be a sham. Or works, but is extreamly costly to deply. Or works in the lab, but is screwed by some real life effects (multipath reflection, flying birds, tastyness of equiptment to crawly things). Or someone else doesn't come up with something better.
If the ability to serve 20 milion households is worth $2b, the ability to serve 400 million is surely worth much more.
It is pretty common for large regular structures like cache's to have a little extra that can be used if some of the memory is bad. I don't know if that is the case here, but it may be. It is also possiable that they can just map out part of it (so there might be a 7M version).
Even if so it will cost extra. There is extra time on the tester, and tester time isn't cheap. Also if it is better (or though to be better) there will be more buyers which can result in a higher price...or in research and devlopment intensave products lower prices, so who knows :-)
I'm sure it took longer to design as well. So the 8M of RAM isn't free, but it should be a lot cheaper then it normally would be, or at least more profitable to them.
Oh, I didn't mean to pick on the SA because it sucks a watt. I actually thought it sucked more like half that. I was trying to say that replacing the crosue with another CPU in a 10W box will only give you at best a 8W box (assuming the Crosue sucks 2W, and the new CPU zero).
So to suck dramitically less we either have to go the Palm Pilot route and drop the hard drive, most of the ram, and lots of other stuff...or find a way to get all that other stuff to sip power rather then gulp it.
They tend to run slower as well, I picked the StrongARM because it was in the same ballpark (even if it's integer performance is likely to be halfish the Crouse, and the FP will be abysmal because it has no FPU). The Xscale would have been better, but I didn't think of it at the time.
Yep, as long as you don't need x86 compatability it is better then the Crosue. Then again something almost allways beats the x86 if you don't need x86 compatability (well it has price/performace going for it in some price and performace bands, but I'm wondering offtopic...).
No, but they could have compared it to Intel version of the picture book.
The only time the display was really just inconvenently too small was when a dialog "knew" it would have enough height, but my display was too short. Bloody pain. Happened failry offen in Windows, but pretty much never in BSD. The X apps mostly had scroll bars, or did something else when denied the height. When not I could at least drag the window up and down with ease, Windows made it really hard to do that.
It is a pity Sony didn't support BSD (or Linux) on that system, it was much more usable.
What machines would these be? While the StrongARM uses less power then the Crosue, most of that 10W isn't the CPU. I don't think we will get a 1W laptop until hard drives are replaced by something that sucks less power, DRAM gets replaced by MRAM, and most importantly we can make the big power sucking LCD backlight go away, or at least make it much smaller (like an eyeglasses backlight....).
Until then our power sippers will be palm pilot like displays with no backlight most of the time, very little RAM, and no hard drive...
If someone started talking to me about IETF RCS1532, or PCS1532 I would assume they are not an expert and got the name wrong (possably including the numbers).
I don't see why congressmen think the public is any smarter. Especally when they keep passing laws the remove our need to think for ourselves.
Mine also had the SCSI "controler", it was really a byte-banged SCSI, no smarts on the card. At least I think that is how it worked, but it had a real SCSI connector. I don't think I ever used the SCSI at all. At one point I had thought of using it to test "IP over SCSI", but then someone published a 1Apr RFC about it, and I lost intrest in pionering the hack :-)
FreeBSD did recognise the SCSI "controler" (well, prior to 4.0 it did). Hmmmm, I should have uncrated my old Atari ST drive (it is a 20M SCSI drive with a SCSI to ATSI converter) before it was de-supported... ah well, there is still the 1G drive on my Sun 4/110....
Intresting. I havn't heard about this issue. When my old (duel) PPro motherbord died, I bought a K7, and a K7 motherbord, and PC100 memory (ECC, because I'm that way), and an ATX mobo and PC Power And Cooling power supply (because it is quiet, and the same brand I've been buying for years, and was one of the few things that AMD did say there were compatability problems with). I took all the cards and drives from the old system and moved them to the new system.
They all worked. Including my generic NCR SCSI. Including my oddball ISA sound card. Including my cheap as crap ISA video card. Both of which I had bought for the PC I first built in 1992! I did get rid of the ISA sound card a few weeks later (FreeBSD funally stopped supporting it a decade after the makers went bankrupt, and I didn't feel like fixing the driver myself). I got rid of the graphics card too (so I could be ISA free -- it is my home server, and runs with no monitor most of the time, so the crappy graphics were just fine). Both were replaces with "store brand" PCI cards costing about $30 each.
Zero compatability problems.
Have you personally seen any compatability problems? Did the failed part work in another machine?
I hope so too. But I have little hope of Compaq doing it. After all they have the multi-way chipset (40+ CPUs) for the Alpha which would take little or no tweaking to work with the K7 "just" a BIOS, which shouldn't be hard for the first compony to reverse engener the IBM PC BIOS....
P.S. now that I think back on it, the ISA video ard may not have been from '92, it may have been newer then that. But the sound card was that old (ProAudio Spectrum bought at a Microprose employe discount not all that long before the compony that made 'em vanished, nice card though)
What makes you think a "long distance" packet doesn't really cost more money to send then a "short distance" one? If you send a packet up your ADSL line to someone down the block (who is signe up with the ISP) the packet will go up your ADSL line, maybe across a DSLAM, into some manner of router, maybe to another router in the same hub across a relitavly cheap gigabit ethernet (or maybe just 100Mbit).
If you send the same packet from VA to NJ you also involve one or more long haul links which have a large monthly cost. Sure you use a tiny bit of it, but if you packet it part of the peak demand, then it is part of what causes the next round of expansion (if it is off peak then it is essensally free).
If you send the packet from VA to Europe there are even more expensave links involved. (very very costly undersea links...expensave links in countries where the PTT has a monopoly, or effectave monopoly on data lines...)
If you cross from one ISP to another you have the cost of the links, and you have the cost of whatever polotics needed to be run through to get peering, or dollars to be a "wholesale reseller", and monthly rent on more space in the middle of some telco facility, and...
I don't think it is a good idea to charge for long-distance Internet traffic, but the idea that distance is free is just wrong. I think the cost of even finding the cost for IP packets would excede the cost of the packet, let alone the cost of recording it! Even if it didn't nobody would want to pay.
There have been lots of stories like that. However there is the fact that DES-with-NSA changes is resistant to diffrentional cryptoanalsis, and DES-without-NSA-changes falls to a DA attack much faster then brute force keysearches.
So if the NSA weakened DES they accidentally also strengthened it. More likely they "just" strengthened it. It does show that they (use to) have at least a 15 year lead. Probbably shortened a bit by now, but who knows?
You can do aftermarket trades (and get aftermarketquotes). See island.com for example.
If the choose to use just IBM's fabs, they can tweak their design as much as they like. In face they can use copper interconnects, and all manner of things a start-up fab plant would just have to licence at prohibitavly high rates anyway.
They may have access to better production fabs then AMD owns. The big downside is if they can't get enough productiong capicity from IBM (a success disaster), or if they can't find any place else to go after their existing contract runs out (far enough in the future that it is a non-problem for a while).
Low noise too. Very helpful in DSP work (at least when the signals you want to process are in danger of being interfered with by the clock signal, or more importnantly the billion gates that are all ready to cycle with the clock). The comercialised Amulet has gotten a few wins in pagers (replacing the old CPU and some of the analog processing). Maybe it will hit cell phones next....
Actually much harder to "over clock" because every data line has an associsted "data ready" line (unless they use C-logic -- I forget how that works, but it uses two lines to transmit a bit and ready at the same time, but each line is both status and data). The ready lines are designed to take longer to change state then the data lines, and those are the things you would have to shorten (in all their milions) to "over clock". Of corse just making the CPUI colder and ramping the voltage a bit will make it "magically" run faster. So you still have that.