How can you afford to drink two cans of that stuff a day -- it's like over $2 per can -- that's $28 a week just on V !!
Sure tastes nice though eh?
And, for the benefit of our overseas friends who haven't tried V, it must have something in it because when we say "a can" we mean a *tiny* little aluminum tube that holds just 250ml -- that's nearly 100ml less than a regular soda can. So, at $2 a pop, that works out to be more than two and a half times the price of Coca Cola!
And you thought Coke was making a fortune out of selling fizzy sweet water -- they've got *nothing* on Frucor Beverages (the manufacturers of V).
One of the very important issues I see neglected in many of the news reports relating to SCRAMjet-powered craft is the issue of getting the damned things up to a speed where the SCRAMjet can actually start working.
With a small unmanned craft the solution could be to use rocket boosters to get the vehicle up to around Mach 1 -- at which speed the SCRAMjet would be able to start producing sufficient thrust to continue the acceleration.
However, what do you do with a passenger craft filled with people. The acceleration to 0.9M is going to need to be done far more gently (or they'd spill their prawn cocktails and Bucks Fizz). Perhaps they plan to use conventional turbojet engines -- in which case you're now talking about a whole heap of additional weight (engines plus fuel) and drag that will penalise the hypersonic performance. and range.
Then there's the issue of landing...
Since the SCRAMjet will not provide any useful thrust at mid to low subsonic speeds, what safety margins are built in for aborted landings or other problems. Sure, the space shuttle can glide to a landing -- but it has a dedicated runway, clear airspace and only seven lives at risk.
Finally, one has to ask: just because we *can* build something, does that necessarily mean it's a sensible idea to do so?
Increasing the flight-speed of a craft is an expensive business in terms of energy consumption. To double the speed requires four times the power (all other aspects being equal) so to push a craft along at mach 5 would require 256 times as much thrust as it takes to push it along at mach 1.
Unless there's some clever magic involved, that means 256 times as much fuel being used to travel five times as fast -- making it 50 times *less* efficient in terms of miles to the gallon.
Now think about this for a minute.. would you pay 50 times as much as it presently costs to fly from one place to another if it meant saving a few hours?
The Concorde service died because it was too expensive and they only flew at Mach 2. How on earth then, could a hypersonic passenger service be economically viable?
And don't make the mistake of thinking that liquid hydrogen is going to be cheaper than Jet-A fuel, last time I checked it was almost identical.
A final note, even if this all panned out and India was able to introduce a hypersonic passenger jet service, would anyone use it? After all, just look at their railway safety record
Hey, why use complex genetic engineering to control your carp population when you can have a hell of a lot more fun using medieval technology like the NZers do?
I know quite a few people who, when they want a particular DVD title, simply rent it and rip it for their home collection.
Clearly this means that the price-point that these pirates are willing to pay is the price others pay for rental.
And, when you look at the fact that even the best movie isn't something you'll watch once a day, or even once a month for that matter, I don't see why there should be so much difference between the rental and retail price.
Personally I tend to buy my DVDs -- even though some of my favourites (Harold and Maude, A Clockwork Orange, etc) gain nothing from the DVD treatment (no special features, crappy grainy quality).
What I have done however, is capture a lot of movies from free-to-air TV broadcasts, edited out the ads, and burnt them to disk. This has given me a great collection of movie titles and I don't feel as if I've stolen anything -- any more than recording pop music from FM radio represents stealing music from the RIAA.
With a good clean signal, a movie recorded from a TV broadcast is "broadcast quality", and that's good enough for me.
You think that was tough, well let me tell you....
on
First Computers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This is a bit like a Monty Python skit isn't it -- but here goes...
My first computer was a Signetics 2650-powered system I built myself in late 1976/early 1977.
"What's a Signetics 2650?" I hear all you young fellers asking
It was a Philips (yes -- they actually had a brief fling in the CPU business way back in the late 1970s) chip that ran at an astonishing 1MHz
Initially this system had 512 bytes of RAM memory and a 1MB ROM cutely named "PIPBUG". For its day, this was actually a pretty powerful processor which offered a whole lot of really cool mini-computer-like instructions such as serial I/O (110 baud), advanced memory addressing support (post/pre-increment, absolute, indirect, indexed, etc).
I also built a glass TTY (terminal) to communicate with this "computer". The TTY was ultra-cool because it had 16 lines of 32 characters (all upper case of course) and a *real* QWERTY keyboard. Yes, I was the envy of all my peers who were still flipping toggle switches and peering at LEDs hooked across the address/data lines.
One of my first software projects was an assembler for 2650 code -- hand coded and hand assembled. It was about half-way through this project that I realized 512 bytes of RAM wasn't going to be enough -- so I splashed out on 4 of the amazing new 2114 static RAM chips that had just been released. Wow -- these offered 1/2Kbyte of static RAM on a single chip (1K x 4bit) so now I had 2Kbytes of RAM and I was sure that nobody would ever need more than 2Kbytes of RAM:-)
I managed to get the assembler into a little over 1KByte and then realized that I needed some long-term storage -- just in case the power went off. Keying in a thousand hand-coded bytes of assembler as hex characters on a QWERTY keyboard was not fun.
More late nights and long hours resulted in an NRZ tape system based on a cheap cassette deck. Once again I was the envy of all around -- since they were still using crappy and unreliable audio cassette decks with FSK modulation. My NRZ system was very reliable and had the potential to run as high as 1200bps -- woo hoo!
I was also probably one of the world's first over-clockers and managed to get the 2650 running at an astonishing 1.8MHz out of this chip that was only spec'd to 1.25MHz. This was great because it meant that the normally sloth-like 10 characters per second interface between the TTY and the processor then lept to an astonishing 18 characters per second - that's less than two seconds per line of characters!!
Despite its very limited capabilities and unbelievable crudeness, I probably had more fun with that computer than with any other I've owned or used since.
I can recall spending many, many hours hunched over that keyboard and screen, and all the non-geeks who dropped by to see if I was still alive were astonished by little marvels such as the text-based games I'd recoded for it.
Who remembers:
Towers of Hanoi Number Guessing Wumpus etc, etc.
Before retiring the hardware I also wrote a simple BASIC interpreter that fitted inside the now massive 4Kbytes of RAM I'd upgraded to.
And, to give Philips/Signetics credit where it's due, when I eventually moved on to the 8080 processor I was gobsmacked by the crudeness of its instruction set in comparison.
And these days kids start bitching on boxing day because they've already clocked the latest PS2 or Xbox game -- ah, they don't know what they've missed:-)
Surely all that DRM will do is allow the really good pirates (those who are willing to go to whatever lengths are necessary to bypass the DRM) to make much higher profits?
Hell, if DRM stops end-users from backing up their music or whatever, surely they'll just ignore the geniune offerings andy by a pirated copy without the DRM.
I predict that the only people a universal DRM system will hurt are the law-abiding customers who should, thanks to their ethics, actually be rewarded, not penalized.
Meanwhile, those who make a living out of selling $1 per CD copies of popular music and movies will see their profits soar.
And your donation was much appreciated -- as have been the dozen or so others who have helped make things a little easier at this end.
I'm also truly humbled by the number of supportive emails I've received and I thank all those who have taken the time to send their words of support. I'll try to answer all of them -- since time is one of the few commodities I appear to have plenty of right now.
This jumped out at me right away as an appeal to pity/spin attempt/I don't know what. I question your true motivation for not accepting the money. 36k devided amongst the many school children in your nation surely would not go very far per student
That is indeed true - but then again, the small amount of tax-penalty I had not finished repaying would not go far either.
You must understand that New Zealand's public health system is so underfunded that many people are left suffering on waiting lists for surgery that could greatly improve their quality of life -- if not save that life. The government cries "poor" when nurses in this country ask for a reasonable living wage -- and that same government pretends to be surprised when so many of our trained medical staff emmigrate to the USA or other countries that pay three or four times as much.
Given that, at the time the grant was offered to me, my technology was at little more than the "good idea" stage and still represented a huge degree of risk, I could not see how it would be fair and reasonable to have the government gambling taxpyer funds on a "maybe" at the same time we were refusing dialysis treatments to elderly patients (thus ensuring their early demise) because of funding constraints.
I also don't see how it is embarrassing to any government if an individual builds a missile.
Once again you must appreciate that the NZ government is in an unusual situation.
We have a long-standing ban against nuclar equipped vessels entering our ports and, since the US fleet will neither "confirm nor deny" the presence of nuclear weapons on their ships, they are effectively barred from our harbours.
That has clearly put us off-side with the USA.
Then, earlier this year, our Prime Minister leveled a stinging insult against Bush during an interview with the media. This also didn't exactly rack us up any points.
Let's not forget also that we refused to send troops into the Iraq conflict -- further alienating us from the USA.
And, when news of the cruise missile project first broke, a US official was quoted on NZ TV as saying that they considered the project "unhelpful" -- I'm sure most readers can translate that from diplomacy-speak to the real intended meaning.
But now we have the spectre of the USA forging a free-trade agreement with our nearest neighbor (and largest competitor for our key export markets). Naturally our government doesn't want to find that the Aussies end up with preferential access to the massive US market so they're now bending over backwards to do whatever it takes to win favour again. One very simple way to earn a few brownie points is to scuttle the very project that the USA deemed to be "unhelpful".
It certain that if I had been allowed to go ahead with the testing and proven that the missile really worked as expected, this would have further upset the US government -- at a time the NZ government could least afford to do so.
They might be going persecuting him for talking to the Iranians rather than because they think his missile works, and they'd still refuse to comment for Security reasons
After being told by the government that it was okay to export military technology to Iran I immediately went to the Secret Service (SIS) to report this seemingly incredible fact. I never had any intention of dealing with anyone on the wrong side of the "War against Terror" and was gobsmacked that the government would allow such a transaction to take place.
As for the "trivial details", these are more to do with the launch-system than the missile itself and really are fairly trivial. It would take no more than two days work to complete the necessary work (the missile is already painted:-)
As for the veracity of the tax charges -- newly introduced sections the the NZ tax law make it very clear that the taxman must maximise the recovery of outstanding tax from a taxpayer.
Bankrupting me clearly violated that requirement -- since they already knew that I'd sold all my assets of value (house, car, etc) so as to meet my commitments to repay the debt. They also knew that the debt would be fully repaid within a few short months and that I'd never failed to meet a payment date.
By simply waiting a few months they would have gotten *all* of the money owed. By bankrupting me they effectively had to write off the balance of the debt. Tell me how that isn't a breach of clause 176.
Is it any wonder that I (and many others) aren't left to draw the obvious conclusion in respect to the real motives behind this move?
but then he gets permission to export his technology to Iran? I suppose it's debatable if Iran=Terrorism, but what he says and what he does doesn't match apparently
If you read my columns you'd have seen that I was gobsmacked that the NZ government would endorse the export of military technology to Iran, and as a result, I went straight to the NZ Secret Service for a second opinion. It's also worth noting that although they said "it wasn't a good idea" they didn't say I couldn't have -- and to this day, the advice I received from teh NZ government has not been rescinded.
I never had any intention of exporting (and never had) any of my work to countries that are considered a "sponsor of terrorism". The only reason I made the enquiry was because I was interested to find out the government's stance on such things.
Yea, I'm the guy -- and to answer a few of the points raised here already:
No, I was not making it easy(er) for terrorists to build a cruise missile. In fact people should read the project's FAQ for more information on why this project was started.
For those who haven't read it, the original article I wrote which produced a number of "put your money where your mouth is" responses can be found here
As for the suggestion that I'm just a scummy tax-dodger, the links to the relevant editions of my daily internet column will help put that matter into perspective. Suffice to say that I have repaid the tax I owed and have been left with a "penalty" bill that I have continued to repay (having paid another $20K towards this just weeks before the government made its move).
Perhaps the most dissapointing aspect from my own personal perspective is that I went out of my way to:
Decline a grant of $36K in taxpayer's money that was offered to assist with my jet-engine development work -- I figured that those waiting for medical treatment or expecting a decent education could use the money more than me.
Notify the Secret Service that I'd been contacted by an Iranian Aerospace/Missile company seeking to gain access to my jet engine designs in return for an "investment" (the figure quoted was US$100K).
Query the advice I was given by the export-licensing part of the NZ government which told me that if I wanted to export my technology to Iran there would be no problem and there was no restriction on such sales -- even though the technology had clear military applications.
No, I did not export anything to Iran and I never had any intention of doing so -- despite the governments insistance that it would be all right.
Once I became aware that the government were very serious about shutting this project down, I made sure that the missile was removed from my possession and is now elsewhere. I can also say in total honesty that I do not know where it is.
My tongue may be firmly in my cheek when I say this but -- would you turn over a missile to a government that endorses the export of military technology to Iran? If they were going to sell it in an attempt to service my tax penalties I shudder to think who they might flog it to:-)
Quite honestly, I suspect that the government thought I would not be able to build this missile and that when I made an official application to the Defense department for some space in which to perform the tests -- they suddenly realized that the whole situation could get even more embarrassing if it were proven that the damned thing worked.
Since they had openly admitted through the media that what I was doing was not illegal, their options for shutting the project down were very limited. I suspect they were all overjoyed when they found that I had not yet fully repaid my tax-penalties (although I was still regularly sending off cheques to service the debt). This, combined with the taxman's own agenda, gave them the perfect mechanism for solving what was rapidly becoming an embarrassing situation.
As you'll see in my daily column, the tax departments actions are clearly a breach of the tax laws which require the department to recover the maximum amount of any debt owed.
By bankrupting me they effectively chose to forego their right to collect the outstanding penalties and, since I had already sold most of my realizable assets (house, hobby-items, many tools, etc) to ensure my tax-repayments were kept up to date, there was no way they'd get a single penny from that bankruptcy action.
What's even worse is that in July I went to the USA and signed a heads-of-agreement with a US company who were going to commence manufacture of my X-Jet engine for use in UAVs and RPVs. This deal alone was worth a huge amount of money to the NZ taxman and wo
Yeah, but the current "democratic" political systems being used around the world are not democratic at all.
What's needed is a significant change that empowers *the people* to have the final say on attempted government abuse of rights and excesses.
Although this paper was written with a different political system to the US in mind (the Westminster system) it's still every bit as applicable to the USA.
Take a look and ask why citizens aren't demanding this "final say" in laws that are passed?
This scam hit New Zealand a few weeks back and left this commentator asking why don't the banks seem to care?
Even though Australian customers of the bank concerned had been hit months earlier, it deliberately chose not to pre-warn its NZ customers that such scams existed and didn't actually send out any notification of the scam until 36 hours after the first scam-mails started arriving in people's mailboxes.
As a result, the bank admits that over 300 of its customers were duped.
Couldn't they have included a note to warn customers of such scams in one of the glossy magazines they sent them just a few weeks previous?
Is it that the banks don't care or is it that they're just totally incompetent?
What a bugger -- my Windows box is still running Win98 so I can't install the DRM patch. I've got to tell you that I feel shattered by this and will be upgrading to Windows XP immediately -- after all, I wouldn't want to feel left out now would I?
Perhaps this explains why WMP9 isn't supported on anything before Win98SE and why you can't play the latest WMV files on WMP7 or below. It will download the relevant codec but then claims that it's not correctly signed so wont install it.
Perhaps the easiest way to explain this technology is that it's simply a type of transformer.
One coil creates a varying magnetic flux that induces a current in a matching coil -- and thus an electrical signal is passed through the ether.
Those who claim that it's no different to a radio link are almost right -- the only real difference is that with such a system there's no need to use a carrier wave (RF) -- the information can be dumped (raw) into the transmitting side of the coil and received by the other coil.
There's no rocket science here -- all that's happened is that some crowd has figured out that by using three coils instead of one, they can effectively adjust the direction of the strongest flux lobe to give the maximum transfer of energy.
Of course, the marketing droids would never simplify things by simply telling us it was a "clever transformer" because then they couldn't charge so much for it eh?:-)
Been there, had that done to me
on
The Innovators' Ball
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I have been similarly disadvantaged by the "sharp" practices of so-called "businessmen".
Back in 1999, I "was" 7am News, a web business that effectively established the viability of syndicating content on the Net.
I had to fight for my success along the way, fending off attempts by "big" old-school publishers who claimed that syndicating their headlines and links to their sites was a breach of copyright and who didn't understand the difference between republishing and hypertext linking.
After starting the venture in 1997, and investing 18 hours a day, 7 days a week for nearly three years, I'd built the business up to the point where 7am.com's server was dishing out the news over two million times a day and Nielsens/NetRatings ranked it ahead of the BBC's news website, Fox News, Wired.com and even Playboy.com:-)
By 2000, 7am.com was delivering its news content through a nework of nearly a quarter-million third-party websites and was valued at US$20m-US40m (wasn't everything in those days though?).
Back in 1998 I was offered $1 million for the business by a US-based company but chose not to sell because they wanted to simply strip it for inclusion into their own product.
By 1999 I was still working 18/7 but had the help of two part-time writers who were also producing news and the service had racked up an impressive record for breaking news on the web. (Believe it or not, 7am.com was actually the first website in the world to carry the pictures beamed back from the surface of Mars by the Pathfinder mission).
Anyway, I was eventually promised the earth by a group of investors who assured me that they were not interested in simply asset-stripping the business, but were actually planning to grow it in a way that would ensure it continued to be innovative and maintain its lead in the field of syndicated news content and independent reporting.
My goal was not to become a "get rich quick" dot-com millionaire (I knew that would be a "fad") but to set myself up with a good shareholding in a company with long-term profitability.
Well do I look stupid now?
I still have around 30% of the shares in 7am.com but through some very clever "manipulation" by the investors, and a total lack of vision and willingness to accept good advice, that shareholding is effectively worthless.
Not only did they not invest in the continued growth of the company, they also hired another company (in which they had a shareholding) to provide consulting and other services which were never delivered (but they were paid for).
It appears very much to me as if 7am.com became a company that was used to raise a bundle of cash that could then be shifted into another company that was really their darling-child. The conflict of interest wasn't disclosed until after the contracts were signed and the money paid.
What's worse, they completely ignored my advice in respect to how the company should be changing and growing to maintain its dominance of the market it had created.
As a result, 7am.com, which was once the world's most widely syndicated web-based news sercice, is now a no-name website that no longer even features on the Web rankings.
Its news content is no longer fresh, exciting and different. Its offerings are tired and old, there's no innovation, no energy, no value left.
Because it's been run into the ground, the investors have lent the company huge sums of money by way of "convertible notes."
This means that if the do manage to sell the company as a going-concern, they can convert those loans into shares and thus effectively dilute my shares to near-nothing. If however, they sell the company's assets, then they simply use the money to repay the notes (plus interest) -- effectively leaving nothing for the shareholders but an empty shell.
Whatever happens, it's not so much the loss of money and long-term income that hurts, it's the fact that a really terrific ser
One only has to compare Avril Lavigne's live performances (absolutely bloody awful) with her CDs (not much better but at least on-key) to realize how much tweaking some of these so-called "singers" need before they get anywhere near the right note.
Apart stating the obvious fact that.mov is a better container format than.avi (yes I know divx is a file format), why did you want QT Pro?
Because I wanted to be able to deliver my video content to Apple users in a format they are familiar and happy with.
My experience with QT has left a sour taste in my mouth for other reasons -- the built-in update system on QTPro never worked (the webpage it tried to access to simply didn't exist) and the two-stage loader system that appeared to require one to be online to install it was a pain when using an slow, unreliable dial-up connection.
And I'd wager that more computers had MPEG capability as a standard capability) than have QT capability.
Besides which, none of this addresses my main complaint is that I can't burn a DVD-compatible disk without transcoding QT into MPEGx format and that's a slow process that also introduces degradation of the image.
Since it's only a trailer, surely they'd be happy to allow people to download a file they can burn to SVCD/DVD-R/RW and lend to their mates who don't have PCs or fast Net connections?
Hell, I want an MPEG/2/4 or DivX download that I can burn to a SVCD or DVD and play on my big-screen TV without transcoding it.
This Quicktime stuff is crap. Ever since Apple stung me by releasing a new version just a couple of days after I ante'd up with the cash for a full-copy of Quicktime and left me with the option of paying again or having an old version on my hands I dumped it.
What's with the movie industry -- they seem to think that the only formats available are proprietary ones from Apple or Microsoft.
Many people (even the dumb ones) might spot an.exe file but I wonder how many fail to realise that.com isn't just a generic commercial TLD but also the extension of an MS executable?
You've got a legal vacuum for the most part, considering that most law enforcement authorities won't take action until a certain monetary dollar amount of damage has been done (with some notable exceptions such as child pornography).
Actually, the NZ government has described the spam problem as "too hard" from a legislative perspective.
Instead of working in the interests of its citizens to develop a set of laws that will penalize local spammers, the NZ government has now decided it will more or less just adopt any anti-spam laws produce in Australia.
Given the appalling track record Aussie legislators when it comes to regulating the Net I thing the cure might be worse than the complaint.
It looks as if NZ's politicians are just too busy enjoying their perks to actually do something positive about the problem.
In the meantime, if you show a picture of a naked couple having sex to an 8-year-old on a street corner you'll get arrested and thrown in the slammer. Send thousands of 8-year-olds the same picture via email while promoting your porno website via spam and you're in the clear.
NZ has 4 million uncounted sheep -- they're the ones who never seem to call the government to account when they fail to perform.
Slashdot Mirror
How can you afford to drink two cans of that stuff a day -- it's like over $2 per can -- that's $28 a week just on V !!
Sure tastes nice though eh?
And, for the benefit of our overseas friends who haven't tried V, it must have something in it because when we say "a can" we mean a *tiny* little aluminum tube that holds just 250ml -- that's nearly 100ml less than a regular soda can. So, at $2 a pop, that works out to be more than two and a half times the price of Coca Cola!
And you thought Coke was making a fortune out of selling fizzy sweet water -- they've got *nothing* on Frucor Beverages (the manufacturers of V).
The V website is at V.co.nz.
One of the very important issues I see neglected in many of the news reports relating to SCRAMjet-powered craft is the issue of getting the damned things up to a speed where the SCRAMjet can actually start working.
With a small unmanned craft the solution could be to use rocket boosters to get the vehicle up to around Mach 1 -- at which speed the SCRAMjet would be able to start producing sufficient thrust to continue the acceleration.
However, what do you do with a passenger craft filled with people. The acceleration to 0.9M is going to need to be done far more gently (or they'd spill their prawn cocktails and Bucks Fizz). Perhaps they plan to use conventional turbojet engines -- in which case you're now talking about a whole heap of additional weight (engines plus fuel) and drag that will penalise the hypersonic performance. and range.
Then there's the issue of landing...
Since the SCRAMjet will not provide any useful thrust at mid to low subsonic speeds, what safety margins are built in for aborted landings or other problems. Sure, the space shuttle can glide to a landing -- but it has a dedicated runway, clear airspace and only seven lives at risk.
Finally, one has to ask: just because we *can* build something, does that necessarily mean it's a sensible idea to do so?
Increasing the flight-speed of a craft is an expensive business in terms of energy consumption. To double the speed requires four times the power (all other aspects being equal) so to push a craft along at mach 5 would require 256 times as much thrust as it takes to push it along at mach 1.
Unless there's some clever magic involved, that means 256 times as much fuel being used to travel five times as fast -- making it 50 times *less* efficient in terms of miles to the gallon.
Now think about this for a minute.. would you pay 50 times as much as it presently costs to fly from one place to another if it meant saving a few hours?
The Concorde service died because it was too expensive and they only flew at Mach 2. How on earth then, could a hypersonic passenger service be economically viable?
And don't make the mistake of thinking that liquid hydrogen is going to be cheaper than Jet-A fuel, last time I checked it was almost identical.
A final note, even if this all panned out and India was able to introduce a hypersonic passenger jet service, would anyone use it? After all, just look at their railway safety record
Hey, why use complex genetic engineering to control your carp population when you can have a hell of a lot more fun using medieval technology like the NZers do?
I know quite a few people who, when they want a particular DVD title, simply rent it and rip it for their home collection.
Clearly this means that the price-point that these pirates are willing to pay is the price others pay for rental.
And, when you look at the fact that even the best movie isn't something you'll watch once a day, or even once a month for that matter, I don't see why there should be so much difference between the rental and retail price.
Personally I tend to buy my DVDs -- even though some of my favourites (Harold and Maude, A Clockwork Orange, etc) gain nothing from the DVD treatment (no special features, crappy grainy quality).
What I have done however, is capture a lot of movies from free-to-air TV broadcasts, edited out the ads, and burnt them to disk. This has given me a great collection of movie titles and I don't feel as if I've stolen anything -- any more than recording pop music from FM radio represents stealing music from the RIAA.
With a good clean signal, a movie recorded from a TV broadcast is "broadcast quality", and that's good enough for me.
This is a bit like a Monty Python skit isn't it -- but here goes...
:-)
:-)
My first computer was a Signetics 2650-powered system I built myself in late 1976/early 1977.
"What's a Signetics 2650?" I hear all you young fellers asking
It was a Philips (yes -- they actually had a brief fling in the CPU business way back in the late 1970s) chip that ran at an astonishing 1MHz
Initially this system had 512 bytes of RAM memory and a 1MB ROM cutely named "PIPBUG". For its day, this was actually a pretty powerful processor which offered a whole lot of really cool mini-computer-like instructions such as serial I/O (110 baud), advanced memory addressing support (post/pre-increment, absolute, indirect, indexed, etc).
I also built a glass TTY (terminal) to communicate with this "computer". The TTY was ultra-cool because it had 16 lines of 32 characters (all upper case of course) and a *real* QWERTY keyboard. Yes, I was the envy of all my peers who were still flipping toggle switches and peering at LEDs hooked across the address/data lines.
One of my first software projects was an assembler for 2650 code -- hand coded and hand assembled. It was about half-way through this project that I realized 512 bytes of RAM wasn't going to be enough -- so I splashed out on 4 of the amazing new 2114 static RAM chips that had just been released. Wow -- these offered 1/2Kbyte of static RAM on a single chip (1K x 4bit) so now I had 2Kbytes of RAM and I was sure that nobody would ever need more than 2Kbytes of RAM
I managed to get the assembler into a little over 1KByte and then realized that I needed some long-term storage -- just in case the power went off. Keying in a thousand hand-coded bytes of assembler as hex characters on a QWERTY keyboard was not fun.
More late nights and long hours resulted in an NRZ tape system based on a cheap cassette deck. Once again I was the envy of all around -- since they were still using crappy and unreliable audio cassette decks with FSK modulation. My NRZ system was very reliable and had the potential to run as high as 1200bps -- woo hoo!
I was also probably one of the world's first over-clockers and managed to get the 2650 running at an astonishing 1.8MHz out of this chip that was only spec'd to 1.25MHz. This was great because it meant that the normally sloth-like 10 characters per second interface between the TTY and the processor then lept to an astonishing 18 characters per second - that's less than two seconds per line of characters!!
Despite its very limited capabilities and unbelievable crudeness, I probably had more fun with that computer than with any other I've owned or used since.
I can recall spending many, many hours hunched over that keyboard and screen, and all the non-geeks who dropped by to see if I was still alive were astonished by little marvels such as the text-based games I'd recoded for it.
Who remembers:
Towers of Hanoi
Number Guessing
Wumpus
etc, etc.
Before retiring the hardware I also wrote a simple BASIC interpreter that fitted inside the now massive 4Kbytes of RAM I'd upgraded to.
And, to give Philips/Signetics credit where it's due, when I eventually moved on to the 8080 processor I was gobsmacked by the crudeness of its instruction set in comparison.
And these days kids start bitching on boxing day because they've already clocked the latest PS2 or Xbox game -- ah, they don't know what they've missed
Surely all that DRM will do is allow the really good pirates (those who are willing to go to whatever lengths are necessary to bypass the DRM) to make much higher profits?
Hell, if DRM stops end-users from backing up their music or whatever, surely they'll just ignore the geniune offerings andy by a pirated copy without the DRM.
I predict that the only people a universal DRM system will hurt are the law-abiding customers who should, thanks to their ethics, actually be rewarded, not penalized.
Meanwhile, those who make a living out of selling $1 per CD copies of popular music and movies will see their profits soar.
Is that *really* what the RIAA and MPAA want?
And your donation was much appreciated -- as have been the dozen or so others who have helped make things a little easier at this end.
I'm also truly humbled by the number of supportive emails I've received and I thank all those who have taken the time to send their words of support. I'll try to answer all of them -- since time is one of the few commodities I appear to have plenty of right now.
This jumped out at me right away as an appeal to pity/spin attempt/I don't know what. I question your true motivation for not accepting the money. 36k devided amongst the many school children in your nation surely would not go very far per student
That is indeed true - but then again, the small amount of tax-penalty I had not finished repaying would not go far either.
You must understand that New Zealand's public health system is so underfunded that many people are left suffering on waiting lists for surgery that could greatly improve their quality of life -- if not save that life. The government cries "poor" when nurses in this country ask for a reasonable living wage -- and that same government pretends to be surprised when so many of our trained medical staff emmigrate to the USA or other countries that pay three or four times as much.
Given that, at the time the grant was offered to me, my technology was at little more than the "good idea" stage and still represented a huge degree of risk, I could not see how it would be fair and reasonable to have the government gambling taxpyer funds on a "maybe" at the same time we were refusing dialysis treatments to elderly patients (thus ensuring their early demise) because of funding constraints.
I also don't see how it is embarrassing to any government if an individual builds a missile.
Once again you must appreciate that the NZ government is in an unusual situation.
We have a long-standing ban against nuclar equipped vessels entering our ports and, since the US fleet will neither "confirm nor deny" the presence of nuclear weapons on their ships, they are effectively barred from our harbours.
That has clearly put us off-side with the USA.
Then, earlier this year, our Prime Minister leveled a stinging insult against Bush during an interview with the media. This also didn't exactly rack us up any points.
Let's not forget also that we refused to send troops into the Iraq conflict -- further alienating us from the USA.
And, when news of the cruise missile project first broke, a US official was quoted on NZ TV as saying that they considered the project "unhelpful" -- I'm sure most readers can translate that from diplomacy-speak to the real intended meaning.
But now we have the spectre of the USA forging a free-trade agreement with our nearest neighbor (and largest competitor for our key export markets). Naturally our government doesn't want to find that the Aussies end up with preferential access to the massive US market so they're now bending over backwards to do whatever it takes to win favour again. One very simple way to earn a few brownie points is to scuttle the very project that the USA deemed to be "unhelpful".
It certain that if I had been allowed to go ahead with the testing and proven that the missile really worked as expected, this would have further upset the US government -- at a time the NZ government could least afford to do so.
They might be going persecuting him for talking to the Iranians rather than because they think his missile works, and they'd still refuse to comment for Security reasons
:-)
After being told by the government that it was okay to export military technology to Iran I immediately went to the Secret Service (SIS) to report this seemingly incredible fact. I never had any intention of dealing with anyone on the wrong side of the "War against Terror" and was gobsmacked that the government would allow such a transaction to take place.
As for the "trivial details", these are more to do with the launch-system than the missile itself and really are fairly trivial. It would take no more than two days work to complete the necessary work (the missile is already painted
As for the veracity of the tax charges -- newly introduced sections the the NZ tax law make it very clear that the taxman must maximise the recovery of outstanding tax from a taxpayer.
Bankrupting me clearly violated that requirement -- since they already knew that I'd sold all my assets of value (house, car, etc) so as to meet my commitments to repay the debt. They also knew that the debt would be fully repaid within a few short months and that I'd never failed to meet a payment date.
By simply waiting a few months they would have gotten *all* of the money owed. By bankrupting me they effectively had to write off the balance of the debt. Tell me how that isn't a breach of clause 176.
Is it any wonder that I (and many others) aren't left to draw the obvious conclusion in respect to the real motives behind this move?
but then he gets permission to export his
technology to Iran? I suppose it's debatable if
Iran=Terrorism, but what he says and what he does doesn't match apparently
If you read my columns you'd have seen that I was gobsmacked that the NZ government would endorse the export of military technology to Iran, and as a result, I went straight to the NZ Secret Service for a second opinion. It's also worth noting that although they said "it wasn't a good idea" they didn't say I couldn't have -- and to this day, the advice I received from teh NZ government has not been rescinded.
I never had any intention of exporting (and never had) any of my work to countries that are considered a "sponsor of terrorism". The only reason I made the enquiry was because I was interested to find out the government's stance on such things.
No, I was not making it easy(er) for terrorists to build a cruise missile. In fact people should read the project's FAQ for more information on why this project was started.
For those who haven't read it, the original article I wrote which produced a number of "put your money where your mouth is" responses can be found here
As for the suggestion that I'm just a scummy tax-dodger, the links to the relevant editions of my daily internet column will help put that matter into perspective. Suffice to say that I have repaid the tax I owed and have been left with a "penalty" bill that I have continued to repay (having paid another $20K towards this just weeks before the government made its move).
Perhaps the most dissapointing aspect from my own personal perspective is that I went out of my way to:
No, I did not export anything to Iran and I never had any intention of doing so -- despite the governments insistance that it would be all right.
Once I became aware that the government were very serious about shutting this project down, I made sure that the missile was removed from my possession and is now elsewhere. I can also say in total honesty that I do not know where it is.
My tongue may be firmly in my cheek when I say this but -- would you turn over a missile to a government that endorses the export of military technology to Iran? If they were going to sell it in an attempt to service my tax penalties I shudder to think who they might flog it to :-)
Quite honestly, I suspect that the government thought I would not be able to build this missile and that when I made an official application to the Defense department for some space in which to perform the tests -- they suddenly realized that the whole situation could get even more embarrassing if it were proven that the damned thing worked.
Since they had openly admitted through the media that what I was doing was not illegal, their options for shutting the project down were very limited. I suspect they were all overjoyed when they found that I had not yet fully repaid my tax-penalties (although I was still regularly sending off cheques to service the debt). This, combined with the taxman's own agenda, gave them the perfect mechanism for solving what was rapidly becoming an embarrassing situation.
As you'll see in my daily column, the tax departments actions are clearly a breach of the tax laws which require the department to recover the maximum amount of any debt owed.
By bankrupting me they effectively chose to forego their right to collect the outstanding penalties and, since I had already sold most of my realizable assets (house, hobby-items, many tools, etc) to ensure my tax-repayments were kept up to date, there was no way they'd get a single penny from that bankruptcy action.
What's even worse is that in July I went to the USA and signed a heads-of-agreement with a US company who were going to commence manufacture of my X-Jet engine for use in UAVs and RPVs. This deal alone was worth a huge amount of money to the NZ taxman and wo
Yeah, but the current "democratic" political systems being used around the world are not democratic at all.
What's needed is a significant change that empowers *the people* to have the final say on attempted government abuse of rights and excesses.
Although this paper was written with a different political system to the US in mind (the Westminster system) it's still every bit as applicable to the USA.
Take a look and ask why citizens aren't demanding this "final say" in laws that are passed?
Recoverable Proxy.
This scam hit New Zealand a few weeks back and left this commentator asking why don't the banks seem to care?
Even though Australian customers of the bank concerned had been hit months earlier, it deliberately chose not to pre-warn its NZ customers that such scams existed and didn't actually send out any notification of the scam until 36 hours after the first scam-mails started arriving in people's mailboxes.
As a result, the bank admits that over 300 of its customers were duped.
Couldn't they have included a note to warn customers of such scams in one of the glossy magazines they sent them just a few weeks previous?
Is it that the banks don't care or is it that they're just totally incompetent?
Hey, my HP21C still keeps me out of trouble and I never did think much of the lunar lander game on the TI52.
Oops... am I showing my age?
What a bugger -- my Windows box is still running Win98 so I can't install the DRM patch. I've got to tell you that I feel shattered by this and will be upgrading to Windows XP immediately -- after all, I wouldn't want to feel left out now would I?
Perhaps this explains why WMP9 isn't supported on anything before Win98SE and why you can't play the latest WMV files on WMP7 or below. It will download the relevant codec but then claims that it's not correctly signed so wont install it.
Thank God for MP3 and MPEG that's all I say!
Perhaps the easiest way to explain this technology is that it's simply a type of transformer.
:-)
One coil creates a varying magnetic flux that induces a current in a matching coil -- and thus an electrical signal is passed through the ether.
Those who claim that it's no different to a radio link are almost right -- the only real difference is that with such a system there's no need to use a carrier wave (RF) -- the information can be dumped (raw) into the transmitting side of the coil and received by the other coil.
There's no rocket science here -- all that's happened is that some crowd has figured out that by using three coils instead of one, they can effectively adjust the direction of the strongest flux lobe to give the maximum transfer of energy.
Of course, the marketing droids would never simplify things by simply telling us it was a "clever transformer" because then they couldn't charge so much for it eh?
The worst kind of porn is pee to pee
Yuck!
I have been similarly disadvantaged by the "sharp" practices of so-called "businessmen".
:-)
Back in 1999, I "was" 7am News, a web business that effectively established the viability of syndicating content on the Net.
I had to fight for my success along the way, fending off attempts by "big" old-school publishers who claimed that syndicating their headlines and links to their sites was a breach of copyright and who didn't understand the difference between republishing and hypertext linking.
After starting the venture in 1997, and investing 18 hours a day, 7 days a week for nearly three years, I'd built the business up to the point where 7am.com's server was dishing out the news over two million times a day and Nielsens/NetRatings ranked it ahead of the BBC's news website, Fox News, Wired.com and even Playboy.com
By 2000, 7am.com was delivering its news content through a nework of nearly a quarter-million third-party websites and was valued at US$20m-US40m (wasn't everything in those days though?).
Back in 1998 I was offered $1 million for the business by a US-based company but chose not to sell because they wanted to simply strip it for inclusion into their own product.
By 1999 I was still working 18/7 but had the help of two part-time writers who were also producing news and the service had racked up an impressive record for breaking news on the web. (Believe it or not, 7am.com was actually the first website in the world to carry the pictures beamed back from the surface of Mars by the Pathfinder mission).
Anyway, I was eventually promised the earth by a group of investors who assured me that they were not interested in simply asset-stripping the business, but were actually planning to grow it in a way that would ensure it continued to be innovative and maintain its lead in the field of syndicated news content and independent reporting.
My goal was not to become a "get rich quick" dot-com millionaire (I knew that would be a "fad") but to set myself up with a good shareholding in a company with long-term profitability.
Well do I look stupid now?
I still have around 30% of the shares in 7am.com but through some very clever "manipulation" by the investors, and a total lack of vision and willingness to accept good advice, that shareholding is effectively worthless.
Not only did they not invest in the continued growth of the company, they also hired another company (in which they had a shareholding) to provide consulting and other services which were never delivered (but they were paid for).
It appears very much to me as if 7am.com became a company that was used to raise a bundle of cash that could then be shifted into another company that was really their darling-child. The conflict of interest wasn't disclosed until after the contracts were signed and the money paid.
What's worse, they completely ignored my advice in respect to how the company should be changing and growing to maintain its dominance of the market it had created.
As a result, 7am.com, which was once the world's most widely syndicated web-based news sercice, is now a no-name website that no longer even features on the Web rankings.
Its news content is no longer fresh, exciting and different. Its offerings are tired and old, there's no innovation, no energy, no value left.
Because it's been run into the ground, the investors have lent the company huge sums of money by way of "convertible notes."
This means that if the do manage to sell the company as a going-concern, they can convert those loans into shares and thus effectively dilute my shares to near-nothing. If however, they sell the company's assets, then they simply use the money to repay the notes (plus interest) -- effectively leaving nothing for the shareholders but an empty shell.
Whatever happens, it's not so much the loss of money and long-term income that hurts, it's the fact that a really terrific ser
But your honor, a worm ate my homework... honest!
One only has to compare Avril Lavigne's live performances (absolutely bloody awful) with her CDs (not much better but at least on-key) to realize how much tweaking some of these so-called "singers" need before they get anywhere near the right note.
Apart stating the obvious fact that .mov is a better container format than .avi (yes I know divx is a file format), why did you want QT Pro?
Because I wanted to be able to deliver my video content to Apple users in a format they are familiar and happy with.
My experience with QT has left a sour taste in my mouth for other reasons -- the built-in update system on QTPro never worked (the webpage it tried to access to simply didn't exist) and the two-stage loader system that appeared to require one to be online to install it was a pain when using an slow, unreliable dial-up connection.
And I'd wager that more computers had MPEG capability as a standard capability) than have QT capability.
Besides which, none of this addresses my main complaint is that I can't burn a DVD-compatible disk without transcoding QT into MPEGx format and that's a slow process that also introduces degradation of the image.
Since it's only a trailer, surely they'd be happy to allow people to download a file they can burn to SVCD/DVD-R/RW and lend to their mates who don't have PCs or fast Net connections?
Hell, I want an MPEG/2/4 or DivX download that I can burn to a SVCD or DVD and play on my big-screen TV without transcoding it.
This Quicktime stuff is crap. Ever since Apple stung me by releasing a new version just a couple of days after I ante'd up with the cash for a full-copy of Quicktime and left me with the option of paying again or having an old version on my hands I dumped it.
What's with the movie industry -- they seem to think that the only formats available are proprietary ones from Apple or Microsoft.
Many people (even the dumb ones) might spot an .exe file but I wonder how many fail to realise that .com isn't just a generic commercial TLD but also the extension of an MS executable?
Attachment: Yahoo.com 74K
You've got a legal vacuum for the most part, considering that most law enforcement authorities won't take action until a certain monetary dollar amount of damage has been done (with some notable exceptions such as child pornography).
Actually, the NZ government has described the spam problem as "too hard" from a legislative perspective.
Instead of working in the interests of its citizens to develop a set of laws that will penalize local spammers, the NZ government has now decided it will more or less just adopt any anti-spam laws produce in Australia.
Given the appalling track record Aussie legislators when it comes to regulating the Net I thing the cure might be worse than the complaint.
It looks as if NZ's politicians are just too busy enjoying their perks to actually do something positive about the problem.
In the meantime, if you show a picture of a naked couple having sex to an 8-year-old on a street corner you'll get arrested and thrown in the slammer. Send thousands of 8-year-olds the same picture via email while promoting your porno website via spam and you're in the clear.
NZ has 4 million uncounted sheep -- they're the ones who never seem to call the government to account when they fail to perform.
This isn't really new -- check out this story I wrote for CNet/ZDNet over a year ago.