If you go to your local big bookstore and count the books about a language and do that every few months you will find they are a great metric on langauges (and other computer buzword trends).
If you go count the books on C, Fortran or assember you will find a small number that is about the same size as it was last month as well as 15 years ago. Others like C++, Java, C# as well as Ada, Pascal, Modula2 before them all went through stages from none, to lots and then back to very low numbers. At this point Java is going down and C# is on the rise. C++ took a huge hit when Java came onto the block.
Re:Space Defense Initiative (SDI)
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 1
Do a web serach on "c-130x laser" and you'll find the new and imporved "Puff the magic dragon" complete with laser. This laser may not be space loftable but its small enough to fit in the spare space of a C130 gunship.
And they were fools for figuring that they could oversell bandwidth at 100:1 ratios. From what I've seen, if your selling broadband, people start complainging loudly at the 37:1 point.
List price downunder is AU$499 at Toys R Us. Thats about US$250. XBox with toys was in teh AU$700 range if you wanted enough stuff to use it. PS2 was right in the middle but you can buy a PS2 today and you can't get a game cube.
The N64 in its day had the coolest bad assed graphics chip ever (the SGIs of the day used lots of chips to do the same work).
What happened? Did developers ever use it? Were the 3d libraries ever tweaked to used the custom programming? Based on the success of some of the emulators, I would say no. The hardware is still faster than most of the graphics chips in PCs today (gamers boxes excepted) but a few year old PC can run the games without any trouble.
If you create your game engine so it only runs on one bit of hardware then it costs way too much to convert it to another platform. That will cost the developer money and it seems easier to work on other aspects of the game where more common tools can be used.
Unless you sell to places that aren't using the US$ since all international prices tend to be quoted that way. The result is an increased rounding since almost all forex rates are based on the US$.
For example if you want to buy one of my products from Australia. We agree on a price. When you bank goes to convert it to AU$, the CD$ will get converted to a US$ account, that money will be transfered here into a US$ account where it will then get converted into the Aussie Peasos. There are two stages where a transfer fee gets added and two places where rounding is going to hit. Since the US$ is going up compared to just about every other money, there are serveral chances for others to take a cut of the increasing transaction costs.
This is why Tiawan, Singapore, Panama and most of Africa simply use the US$ as their international currency. Maybe the E$ will change that.
Some things (books, CDs & movies) have been known to be sold under a system called "parity pricing" where the price is converted to a number of average hours worked and then converted to local currency. This assumes that you can produce the goods at a local cost and that royalties aren't a major cost of the product.
Elm worked fine in 1987 and damn it, it works fine now. Other than a small timezone problem for one hour about 0000 GMT Y2K, its been bug free for 15 years.
Since the CIA keeps having problems that the coast gard keeps messing up their "drugs for guns" program, I wonder how many they will buy just to keep ahead of their competition.
I've got a sony headphones. I picked them up for about US$100 at the airport in Narita (Tokyo). In the airplane, they allow you to hear the movie at the lowest setting. In a quiet room they produce a constant buzz. The $1500 Bose aviation headsets also do the same thing but they have nice ear cups that help knock off about 30 db.
For example in Australia they auctioned off a number of 6Mhz and 7Mhz channels (some 500Mhz worth or so). Each 6Mhz channel will provide lowend ADLS service for about 6000 customers if you have enough other channels to keep the signals from steping on each other. Many of these are Near Line of Sight" which means you have to have line of site to use but interferance is non-line of sight. To cover a city of 4 million, you would about 400 cells and there is no way to arrange them to keep them from interfering with each other while still allowing enough power to be useful.
I can't even get one of the 4 alternate carriers here to pull a bit of fiber a few hundred meters from their manholes for a business. We have Optus, MCI/WorldCom/UUnet, Primus and UE Com. They all provide data services in a downtown area called the CBD which is a 64 block grid (1.25x.5 miles). Two don't provide services outside of the CBD and the power company (UEcom) only provides limited service near their lines. I don't think I'll ever see alternate copper to the house.
For thouse playing the speculation game at home... Australia's largest cable TV network is a joint venture between Fox (yep--the Simpsons people) and Telstra (the 50+% goverment owned teleco). Another group called Optus decided to run cable TV and got a system where they can run phones on it too. The problem is everywhere you can get Optus, you can also get Telstra/Foxtel and the Optus rollout has been halted since they aren't getting enough new customers. Now Foxtel/Optus/Telstra just signed a deal that I think is step 1 of Telstra asorbing Optus.
If I could get a wire from someone else, I could knock $2k/mo off my phone bill. Its nice that Telstra is one of the most expensive phone compaines in the world.
In most states PUCs are about ensuring that the compaines don't over-extend themselves and go broke. They are not there to protect the customers (other than the ability to get service).
Are there any states that have great PUCs from the point of view of the consumer?
At a recent comedy show, one of the acts had a one of the new Karaoke mics. This thing hooked directly to the PA system and the TV. It appears the device would display a few scenic pictures with typical power point style cuts between them. On the background they had two lines of text for the songs and it would highlight the words about the same time they should be sung. Once a song was finished, a score was shown which was always very high and appeard to have nothing to do with the talent of the singer. Aparently the device does allow new songs to be downloaded and it cost about US$500. If you want to comedy Karaoke, just remember its time to move on to something else when people start leaving the room.
If you do a google search on low cost sequencing you will find several places that will provide sequencing services. I'm not sure exactly what services they provide nor how much work is need to prep the sample or how many pairs they decode at one go.
My question is how long will it be before someone could walk into a univeristy med lab, get a sample taken, prep it, send that off to a sequencing lab and get back a CD with a sizable chunck of their DNA for under $1000?
Buildings of that size can get wind loads from several differt directions at once. A good strom should be able to provide 200 kt gusts to the top of the WTC.
In many parts of the world where suicide is honorable, society has rules where the family gets punished if someone kills themself and others in a non-honorable way.
But that's doesn't change the fact that Al Qaeda actually did it.
I don't think we know that. We do know that many people who had been involved with Al Qaeda where invovled. So far not enough to the top people in the group have been located to question them. There is the posability that it is another group that got some training from Al Qaeda in Afganastan. Keep in mind that the CIA trained lots of people in guerilla warfare there over the past 15 years so it seems like it would be a good place to get traning in exchange for money and no one would ask any questions.
if you read this you will see in the training manaul that one of the things to do if you get caught is blame someone blameable including someone that may have been in jail or dead.
Bigger is better to a point. I find that with a large color monitor (or LCD) and my glasses I get a very anoying spherical aberrations which cause the colors to appear as if they weren't converging on the edges of the screen. I used to deal with this problem with a very large Blit like terminal (letter sized, black/green, high res, designed by Pike & crew). Now I have a 1024x768 15" LCD.
I've found the best thing to keep my eyes sharp is long drives in the country where I can focus a long way away or flying around in small planes.
LyX looks good but for some reaons I'm still editing.tex files in vi for the effect I'm looking for. Improvement since 1986=0%.
Gnumeric vs excel? I've got a fast CPU and lots of memory. I've got a 60 month spread sheet with 100 rows. Why aren't calculations instant? Running the same sheet in the dos version of visi-calc and any change is instant. why should a a computer that is 10000x faster than an XT be 10x slower?
The plastic tooling will cost about $20k. 5 years ago all phones left the ericson factory in lynchburg VA for under $100 per unit. Since then every fab in China can build it much cheaper. Drop the chip direct on the circut board and you cut out 50% of the costs (like casio learned how many decades ago?)
since the major markup is still on the teleco charges, it can be done under $30 and it could be done for less with enough upfront R&D.
Remember silcon is sold by the acre--complexity is irrelevant with large numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that the goverments already spent the money they were going to get (but it never showed up)
The sham compaines also never provided the services so the taxpayers got ripped off again.
If you go to your local big bookstore and count the books about a language and do that every few months you will find they are a great metric on langauges (and other computer buzword trends).
If you go count the books on C, Fortran or assember you will find a small number that is about the same size as it was last month as well as 15 years ago. Others like C++, Java, C# as well as Ada, Pascal, Modula2 before them all went through stages from none, to lots and then back to very low numbers. At this point Java is going down and C# is on the rise. C++ took a huge hit when Java came onto the block.
Do a web serach on "c-130x laser" and you'll find the new and imporved "Puff the magic dragon" complete with laser. This laser may not be space loftable but its small enough to fit in the spare space of a C130 gunship.
$1500/mo will buy a full T1 (I used to pay $300).
$4000/mo will buy an DS3 (45mb).
$33000/mo will buy 45mb of trans pacific data.
Once your at the peering points its close to free if you give as much as you take. On big links the worst case should be about $2/gigbyte.
And they were fools for figuring that they could oversell bandwidth at 100:1 ratios. From what I've seen, if your selling broadband, people start complainging loudly at the 37:1 point.
Damn they got expensive when they added that 4th weel just because a few hundred people cleaned the jean pool with the three wheelers.
List price downunder is AU$499 at Toys R Us.
Thats about US$250.
XBox with toys was in teh AU$700 range if you wanted enough stuff to use it.
PS2 was right in the middle but you can buy a PS2 today and you can't get a game cube.
So how much does it matter?
The N64 in its day had the coolest bad assed graphics chip ever (the SGIs of the day used lots of chips to do the same work).
What happened? Did developers ever use it? Were the 3d libraries ever tweaked to used the custom programming? Based on the success of some of the emulators, I would say no. The hardware is still faster than most of the graphics chips in PCs today (gamers boxes excepted) but a few year old PC can run the games without any trouble.
If you create your game engine so it only runs on one bit of hardware then it costs way too much to convert it to another platform. That will cost the developer money and it seems easier to work on other aspects of the game where more common tools can be used.
Unless you sell to places that aren't using the US$ since all international prices tend to be quoted that way. The result is an increased rounding since almost all forex rates are based on the US$.
For example if you want to buy one of my products from Australia. We agree on a price. When you bank goes to convert it to AU$, the CD$ will get converted to a US$ account, that money will be transfered here into a US$ account where it will then get converted into the Aussie Peasos. There are two stages where a transfer fee gets added and two places where rounding is going to hit. Since the US$ is going up compared to just about every other money, there are serveral chances for others to take a cut of the increasing transaction costs.
This is why Tiawan, Singapore, Panama and most of Africa simply use the US$ as their international currency. Maybe the E$ will change that.
Some things (books, CDs & movies) have been known to be sold under a system called "parity pricing" where the price is converted to a number of average hours worked and then converted to local currency. This assumes that you can produce the goods at a local cost and that royalties aren't a major cost of the product.
Elm worked fine in 1987 and damn it, it works fine now. Other than a small timezone problem for one hour about 0000 GMT Y2K, its been bug free for 15 years.
Since the CIA keeps having problems that the coast gard keeps messing up their "drugs for guns" program, I wonder how many they will buy just to keep ahead of their competition.
I've got a sony headphones. I picked them up for about US$100 at the airport in Narita (Tokyo). In the airplane, they allow you to hear the movie at the lowest setting. In a quiet room they produce a constant buzz. The $1500 Bose aviation headsets also do the same thing but they have nice ear cups that help knock off about 30 db.
Wireless isn't going to cut it.
For example in Australia they auctioned off a number of 6Mhz and 7Mhz channels (some 500Mhz worth or so). Each 6Mhz channel will provide lowend ADLS service for about 6000 customers if you have enough other channels to keep the signals from steping on each other. Many of these are Near Line of Sight" which means you have to have line of site to use but interferance is non-line of sight. To cover a city of 4 million, you would about 400 cells and there is no way to arrange them to keep them from interfering with each other while still allowing enough power to be useful.
I can't even get one of the 4 alternate carriers here to pull a bit of fiber a few hundred meters from their manholes for a business. We have Optus, MCI/WorldCom/UUnet, Primus and UE Com. They all provide data services in a downtown area called the CBD which is a 64 block grid (1.25x.5 miles). Two don't provide services outside of the CBD and the power company (UEcom) only provides limited service near their lines. I don't think I'll ever see alternate copper to the house.
For thouse playing the speculation game at home...
Australia's largest cable TV network is a joint venture between Fox (yep--the Simpsons people) and Telstra (the 50+% goverment owned teleco). Another group called Optus decided to run cable TV and got a system where they can run phones on it too. The problem is everywhere you can get Optus, you can also get Telstra/Foxtel and the Optus rollout has been halted since they aren't getting enough new customers. Now Foxtel/Optus/Telstra just signed a deal that I think is step 1 of Telstra asorbing Optus.
If I could get a wire from someone else, I could knock $2k/mo off my phone bill. Its nice that Telstra is one of the most expensive phone compaines in the world.
In most states PUCs are about ensuring that the compaines don't over-extend themselves and go broke. They are not there to protect the customers (other than the ability to get service).
Are there any states that have great PUCs from the point of view of the consumer?
At a recent comedy show, one of the acts had a one of the new Karaoke mics. This thing hooked directly to the PA system and the TV. It appears the device would display a few scenic pictures with typical power point style cuts between them. On the background they had two lines of text for the songs and it would highlight the words about the same time they should be sung. Once a song was finished, a score was shown which was always very high and appeard to have nothing to do with the talent of the singer. Aparently the device does allow new songs to be downloaded and it cost about US$500. If you want to comedy Karaoke, just remember its time to move on to something else when people start leaving the room.
If you do a google search on low cost sequencing you will find several places that will provide sequencing services. I'm not sure exactly what services they provide nor how much work is need to prep the sample or how many pairs they decode at one go.
My question is how long will it be before someone could walk into a univeristy med lab, get a sample taken, prep it, send that off to a sequencing lab and get back a CD with a sizable chunck of their DNA for under $1000?
Buildings of that size can get wind loads from several differt directions at once. A good strom should be able to provide 200 kt gusts to the top of the WTC.
In many parts of the world where suicide is honorable, society has rules where the family gets punished if someone kills themself and others in a non-honorable way.
But that's doesn't change the fact that Al Qaeda actually did it.
I don't think we know that. We do know that many people who had been involved with Al Qaeda where invovled. So far not enough to the top people in the group have been located to question them. There is the posability that it is another group that got some training from Al Qaeda in Afganastan. Keep in mind that the CIA trained lots of people in guerilla warfare there over the past 15 years so it seems like it would be a good place to get traning in exchange for money and no one would ask any questions.
if you read this you will see in the training manaul that one of the things to do if you get caught is blame someone blameable including someone that may have been in jail or dead.
Bigger is better to a point.
I find that with a large color monitor (or LCD) and my glasses I get a very anoying spherical aberrations which cause the colors to appear as if they weren't converging on the edges of the screen. I used to deal with this problem with a very large Blit like terminal (letter sized, black/green, high res, designed by Pike & crew). Now I have a 1024x768 15" LCD.
I've found the best thing to keep my eyes sharp is long drives in the country where I can focus a long way away or flying around in small planes.
ISP's are selective about who they cut off. Right now AT&T is allowing spamers to use its networks but will cut most of them off.
ISPs tend to not cut off groups that are precived as having a large legal representation.
I still stand by breaking an ISP agreement as not being illegal.
violations of license agreements are usualy not illegal.
LyX looks good but for some reaons I'm still editing .tex files in vi for the effect I'm looking for. Improvement since 1986=0%.
Gnumeric vs excel? I've got a fast CPU and lots of memory. I've got a 60 month spread sheet with 100 rows. Why aren't calculations instant? Running the same sheet in the dos version of visi-calc and any change is instant. why should a a computer that is 10000x faster than an XT be 10x slower?
no but they did the network security audits!
The plastic tooling will cost about $20k. 5 years ago all phones left the ericson factory in lynchburg VA for under $100 per unit. Since then every fab in China can build it much cheaper. Drop the chip direct on the circut board and you cut out 50% of the costs (like casio learned how many decades ago?)
since the major markup is still on the teleco charges, it can be done under $30 and it could be done for less with enough upfront R&D.
Remember silcon is sold by the acre--complexity is irrelevant with large numbers.