So are you saying the chem department should be teaching alchemy? It has lots of useful skills that aren't taught to modern chemsts even though most of the current glassware and chem 101 type skills came directly from alchemy (things like flame tests for gases, mixing rules, boiling procedures)...
Sometimes the world moves on and a university should at least be near the advanced state of the art to the point where new students know where to when they are requireed to work on it. Just look at the posts here that compare RS232 to USB. Its clear that a large number of people here just don't understand.
Universitues get bogged down in stupid areas are refuse to move. How many of the PHD research topics are much different than the ones ten years ago? With IT, it gets to the point that much of the cutting edge 10 years ago can be home built today.
XLM parsing (just like the TeX language) has a problem that when there are problems in the input files, the situation diverges into two different caes, one requires an infinite memory and the other infinite time to deal gracefully with errors.
None of this would have ever been needed had CS been tuaght properly. There are other concepts to describe how files are to be organized. Some of the systems date from the 1950's. BNF (which seems to work very well for programmers to describe file formats to other programmers) dates from the early 1960's. What was needed is a BNF type grammar that is machine readable.
Would XLM have ever taken off if the web used something sane and not a hacked version of a nasty text formatting system from decades ago?
How much hardware support is there for the usb end? Most of the USB chips I've looked into seem to do have one CPU as a traditional MCU and another preprogrammed with a USB stack.
Does anyone else wonder why Motorola dumped the 6809 in favor of offshoots of an earlier design?
I've got a 4 line vacuum fluorescent display that was intended for a cash register display. I've got a ethernet to serial device and a program that puts useful info on the display. One of these would be useful if it was powered over the ethernet and only cost $25.
BSA Hotline: Hello, would you like to report piracy? Mr X: Yes, I know some people that don't seem to have thier software licneses. BSA Hotline: Can you tell us who's software is involved? Mr X: Microsoft, Adobe and others... BSA Hotline: They sound like our members. We will arrange for an audit at once. Where are they? Mr X: They were last seen at large airbase in central Saudi Arabia BSA Hotline: You mean Dhahran? Mr X: No, near Riyadh BSA Hotline: Sorry. [BSA hotline guy downs a shot] [moments latter -- A troop of Marines are pinned down at a very forward position. Their "embedded" photo journalist is trying to get a good shot for the station back home...] BSA Dude: We are here to audit your software, can you show me the licneses? PhotoJ: What? Can't you see I'm kind of busy right now? BSA Dude: We have a warrant. PhotoJ: How did you get that here? BSA Dude: Do you have the orignals with you? CD's, software boxes, receipts, licneses? PhotoJ: They are all back at the office, can't you see theres a war here? BSA Dude: I can see you don't want to cooperate [BSA dude walks away for a bit of privacy and pulls out his cell/sat phone] BSA Dude: Looks like we got one red handed... [Pan to a pair of F15's at 75,000 ft, 100 miles away] F15 Jocky: TopDog 7, Roger that, bogie is an unauthorized radio source AWACS op: Topdog 7 and 8 are authorized to neutralize... [back where the action is] BSA Dude: [still on the sat phone] I think we should make an example of this one [boom]
So how does this differ to something like Motorola's Canopy? The difference appears that the base station radios may be used for other things (like voice). The Canopy stuff supports bit rates of about 4.3mbit per sector and delivers on that. A Canopy base station equipment costs about $8500 and that covers an area of about 2mi diameter in a fully deployed system but a single access point is about $1000.
There is a book called MITalk (MIT Talk) that involves the efforts of using some major hardware to do this years ago. They were using a Vax (780?) just for one part of the processing and a few other big computers to do the rest. This lead to the DecTalker (aka the voice of Stephen Hawkings)
It seems to me that with modern DSP's cranking along with much more calculations per second than a VAX could ever hope for, and one of the best theoretical mathematicians ever having a reliance on the technology, that things should have improved substantially since the MITtalk book came out but I have yet to hear any real world examples.
Since its a TIRIS device, any TIRIS reader will read it and quite a few non-TI readers will as well.
The device is simply a token. If a different oil company wants to build a reader for it, all they have to do is buy one off the shelf and then have you walk in once with your speed pass and your credit card details and they can link the two together. You don't need Mobil's permission to do that.
The mag stripe ticket readers in Tokyo use small mag strip tickets that are less than 2 inches by one inch and one side is completely covered with magnetic coating. You can put them in the reader in any orientation and they work. They are very fast and seem to be imune to most of the things that trip up othe other readers.
According to this link your right as of about July of last year. Before that it was a legally a non-profit and had some of the best benefits of any company. I know women who worked for them just to get their maternity benefits. I guess you checked out all 80,000 links in google with non-profit and MasterCard? I bet that took some time.
When I lived in St Louis, I would get calls from Columbia Missouri. St Louis is in SWBell teritroy and Columbia is in GTE land. The wholesale call intrastate call rate is much higher than the wholesale rate to many overseas countries. You can buy committed overseas connections for as little as $28/mo per 64k voice channel if your willing to commit $20k/mo in call costs and if your willing to deal with the conditions that your on someone else's backup fiber.
There are some very big non-profit compaines out there. One that comes to mind is MasterCard whith their close to a trillion dollars a year cash flow.
They are a non-profit because when they were set up, it was clear that they were pushing a number of regulation issues. The founders thought it would help get things approved if it was a non-profit. So can Bank of America still call me offering me a MasterCard, since MasterCard is non-profit?
Novel exists today because they got an early DOD/DISA contract to hook all kinds of nasty old machines to the "Internet". They were the only people selling an interface to things like an IBM 3081 and they only built them after you paid for the R&D and some of the interfaces costs more than the orginal price of the machines and were talking real heavy iron main frames here.
In 1993 I was looking at the low level packets on whatever the AFNet was called that week. It took TCP/IP packets and put them on an x.25 network (using a custom software on a cisco AGS+) and then the X.25 packets were put in IPX packets and handed off to the custom expensive gear.
But it lowers the % of taxpayers an increases the % of non-taxpayers and poor consumers. The result is good if your selling bread but bad if your selling the more durable goods.
One of the rumors is that the F15-I (sold to Israel) doesn't have the hardware to arm nukes enabled but the Israelis reversed engineered their own solution once they took delivery of the planes. The problem with this rumor is that the US is very careful about the hardware to arm nukes and it isn't likly to work with the Israelis nukes anyway.
Nothing in IS09000 requires running the latest code. Infact if your procedures are up to standards, there are lots of good reasons in ISo9000 policies not to run the latest code. I see "ISO9000 regulations" as a buzword bingo keyword that is almost always used to justify some policy that isn't clearly thought out.
Most of the massive technology improvments in the US were when its population was less than 200 million and its econmic growth was from interanl reasons to expand, not exteranl ones. All the increased population brings is a larger base for pyramid schemes (such as Social Security) to work with. It also brings more crime, more anti-social behavior and a whole host of other issues.
I've proposed a fix to the unix permissions for binding to low ports where you must be a member of the group to open the port. So you set your web server up in groups 80 and 443 and you set your smtp program up on group 25. They don't need root to open their ports then and no one else can open the port either. Simple fix and won't break anything that can't be fixed by editing/etc/group and a few chgrp commands.
The fix for this in linux 2.2 was adding about 20 characters to one line in one file.
Because I trust UPS's so much, we had a bypass switch wired in and it switched the power to the computer room between the UPS and the phase we use to charge the UPS abttery bank. The problem is that the guys who did the job also decied it would a good idea to switch the neutral as well. There is an airconditioner on the other phase. When the switch was turned, the netral went away so it was sort of floating between the three phases. Since this is in an area of Australia where the 240 Volts comes out of the wall a bit closer to 260V, that means that there should have been about 470 V accross some of our older sparc stations. At the end of the day we lost several pc power supplies, a varsistor in an A/C and none of the sparc power supplies. The sparcs are still running a few years latter.
Yep, the new security guys love to refind whats already out there. In this case, most likly out there in google groups' archive.
One thing they forgot about was the enter key mapping which can be loads of fun as well as the function key mapping. Most of the v100ish things will allow you to reprogram the enter key to any 4 character sequence (4 nulls is fun) but many of the people who copied the spec, didn't bother with the 4 character limit.
Years ago in England, several problems were solved by offering to pay a "King's Ransom" to solve the problem. One of the problems was finding where you were on the globe (Londgitude) using a clock.
I'm wondering what would happen if the US goverment said "We will give 1 billion US$ to the person that either 1) devlops a cure for Cancer 2) a cure for Aids 3) some other issue"
It could get very interesting if the money was given to the person solving the proble directly.
The current lot of banks can't hardly keep up with any other tech, how can they pull off this?
Last week ANZ (one of the 4 big banks) sent me a new card since the last one has "issue" with its chip. Its issue is you can ask the dam thing "is 0000 my pin" and keep going till it says "yes". I wonder if the new one is better. At least they sent me a free USB card reader too. Not bad for an account I use only to pay the rent.
How are the other banks going to do this. Right now they can't even dor CVV or CVC2 (or whatever it called). Not one of them can. Ever pay a bill on Telstra net banking? 666 worked fine. I figured maybe it just happend to hash the same way and tried others. Still it works fine.
Any bank that can't do address verificaion because of privacy issues, won't be able to do eyeball scans for the same reasons.
I suspect teh only reason this has gotten this far at all is the banks call get 150% deduction on R&D. With their current profit margins as high as they are, they have to do something to cut their taxes and throwing money at collr R&D projects makes them look good to the investors and helps their tax situation.
Is much as I like the Aussie banks (sort of the same way way comedians like pres Bush), I don't see any of them getting far with this.
These comments aren't exactly about laser printers so it may seem a bit OT.
IBM and HP make a very large % of their income from printer consumbales and they will do anything to hold on to that market. However things are about to change.
The reciept printer game is big busienss for a few compaines and they spend more on R&D than the guys doing the office printers. They have never made money selling ribbions and paper so they only make their money selling the printer. It turns out they want to sell color reciept printers but there they can't do it for less than about $.01 per reciept using any of the off the shelf parts. The result is a few of them have come up with a way of using generic inks with injets to keep the price down. From what I've heard, most of the compaines with this tech are already to go but they are waiting for the current economic slump to end before they invest in the production but as soon as one goes, they all go. If any of them turn a profit, they will invest in the home printer market.
Remember Epson started out making reciept priners and then sold their MX-80 for about 1/4 of the price of the lowest cost Centronics printer of its day.
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So are you saying the chem department should be teaching alchemy? It has lots of useful skills that aren't taught to modern chemsts even though most of the current glassware and chem 101 type skills came directly from alchemy (things like flame tests for gases, mixing rules, boiling procedures)...
Sometimes the world moves on and a university should at least be near the advanced state of the art to the point where new students know where to when they are requireed to work on it. Just look at the posts here that compare RS232 to USB. Its clear that a large number of people here just don't understand.
Universitues get bogged down in stupid areas are refuse to move. How many of the PHD research topics are much different than the ones ten years ago? With IT, it gets to the point that much of the cutting edge 10 years ago can be home built today.
XLM parsing (just like the TeX language) has a problem that when there are problems in the input files, the situation diverges into two different caes, one requires an infinite memory and the other infinite time to deal gracefully with errors.
None of this would have ever been needed had CS been tuaght properly. There are other concepts to describe how files are to be organized. Some of the systems date from the 1950's. BNF (which seems to work very well for programmers to describe file formats to other programmers) dates from the early 1960's. What was needed is a BNF type grammar that is machine readable.
Would XLM have ever taken off if the web used something sane and not a hacked version of a nasty text formatting system from decades ago?
How much hardware support is there for the usb end? Most of the USB chips I've looked into seem to do have one CPU as a traditional MCU and another preprogrammed with a USB stack.
Does anyone else wonder why Motorola dumped the 6809 in favor of offshoots of an earlier design?
I've got a 4 line vacuum fluorescent display that was intended for a cash register display. I've got a ethernet to serial device and a program that puts useful info on the display. One of these would be useful if it was powered over the ethernet and only cost $25.
BSA Hotline: Hello, would you like to report piracy?
Mr X: Yes, I know some people that don't seem to have thier software licneses.
BSA Hotline: Can you tell us who's software is involved?
Mr X: Microsoft, Adobe and others...
BSA Hotline: They sound like our members. We will arrange for an audit at once. Where are they?
Mr X: They were last seen at large airbase in central Saudi Arabia
BSA Hotline: You mean Dhahran?
Mr X: No, near Riyadh
BSA Hotline: Sorry. [BSA hotline guy downs a shot]
[moments latter -- A troop of Marines are pinned down at a very forward position. Their "embedded" photo journalist is trying to get a good shot for the station back home...]
BSA Dude: We are here to audit your software, can you show me the licneses?
PhotoJ: What? Can't you see I'm kind of busy right now?
BSA Dude: We have a warrant.
PhotoJ: How did you get that here?
BSA Dude: Do you have the orignals with you? CD's, software boxes, receipts, licneses?
PhotoJ: They are all back at the office, can't you see theres a war here?
BSA Dude: I can see you don't want to cooperate
[BSA dude walks away for a bit of privacy and pulls out his cell/sat phone]
BSA Dude: Looks like we got one red handed...
[Pan to a pair of F15's at 75,000 ft, 100 miles away]
F15 Jocky: TopDog 7, Roger that, bogie is an unauthorized radio source
AWACS op: Topdog 7 and 8 are authorized to neutralize...
[back where the action is]
BSA Dude: [still on the sat phone] I think we should make an example of this one
[boom]
So how does this differ to something like Motorola's Canopy? The difference appears that the base station radios may be used for other things (like voice). The Canopy stuff supports bit rates of about 4.3mbit per sector and delivers on that. A Canopy base station equipment costs about $8500 and that covers an area of about 2mi diameter in a fully deployed system but a single access point is about $1000.
There is a book called MITalk (MIT Talk) that involves the efforts of using some major hardware to do this years ago. They were using a Vax (780?) just for one part of the processing and a few other big computers to do the rest. This lead to the DecTalker (aka the voice of Stephen Hawkings)
It seems to me that with modern DSP's cranking along with much more calculations per second than a VAX could ever hope for, and one of the best theoretical mathematicians ever having a reliance on the technology, that things should have improved substantially since the MITtalk book came out but I have yet to hear any real world examples.
Since its a TIRIS device, any TIRIS reader will read it and quite a few non-TI readers will as well.
The device is simply a token. If a different oil company wants to build a reader for it, all they have to do is buy one off the shelf and then have you walk in once with your speed pass and your credit card details and they can link the two together. You don't need Mobil's permission to do that.
The mag stripe ticket readers in Tokyo use small mag strip tickets that are less than 2 inches by one inch and one side is completely covered with magnetic coating. You can put them in the reader in any orientation and they work. They are very fast and seem to be imune to most of the things that trip up othe other readers.
According to this link your right as of about July of last year. Before that it was a legally a non-profit and had some of the best benefits of any company. I know women who worked for them just to get their maternity benefits. I guess you checked out all 80,000 links in google with non-profit and MasterCard? I bet that took some time.
When I lived in St Louis, I would get calls from Columbia Missouri. St Louis is in SWBell teritroy and Columbia is in GTE land. The wholesale call intrastate call rate is much higher than the wholesale rate to many overseas countries. You can buy committed overseas connections for as little as $28/mo per 64k voice channel if your willing to commit $20k/mo in call costs and if your willing to deal with the conditions that your on someone else's backup fiber.
There are some very big non-profit compaines out there. One that comes to mind is MasterCard whith their close to a trillion dollars a year cash flow.
They are a non-profit because when they were set up, it was clear that they were pushing a number of regulation issues. The founders thought it would help get things approved if it was a non-profit. So can Bank of America still call me offering me a MasterCard, since MasterCard is non-profit?
Novel exists today because they got an early DOD/DISA contract to hook all kinds of nasty old machines to the "Internet". They were the only people selling an interface to things like an IBM 3081 and they only built them after you paid for the R&D and some of the interfaces costs more than the orginal price of the machines and were talking real heavy iron main frames here.
In 1993 I was looking at the low level packets on whatever the AFNet was called that week. It took TCP/IP packets and put them on an x.25 network (using a custom software on a cisco AGS+) and then the X.25 packets were put in IPX packets and handed off to the custom expensive gear.
But it lowers the % of taxpayers an increases the % of non-taxpayers and poor consumers. The result is good if your selling bread but bad if your selling the more durable goods.
At AU$.12/mb that would cost ....18 million $ on bandwidth costs alone. I think someones numbers must be off.
The boot block on my rio 300 has worn out and it hasn't been written to 10,000 times yet. It can happen.
One of the rumors is that the F15-I (sold to Israel) doesn't have the hardware to arm nukes enabled but the Israelis reversed engineered their own solution once they took delivery of the planes. The problem with this rumor is that the US is very careful about the hardware to arm nukes and it isn't likly to work with the Israelis nukes anyway.
Nothing in IS09000 requires running the latest code. Infact if your procedures are up to standards, there are lots of good reasons in ISo9000 policies not to run the latest code. I see "ISO9000 regulations" as a buzword bingo keyword that is almost always used to justify some policy that isn't clearly thought out.
Most of the massive technology improvments in the US were when its population was less than 200 million and its econmic growth was from interanl reasons to expand, not exteranl ones. All the increased population brings is a larger base for pyramid schemes (such as Social Security) to work with. It also brings more crime, more anti-social behavior and a whole host of other issues.
I've proposed a fix to the unix permissions for binding to low ports where you must be a member of the group to open the port. So you set your web server up in groups 80 and 443 and you set your smtp program up on group 25. They don't need root to open their ports then and no one else can open the port either. Simple fix and won't break anything that can't be fixed by editing /etc/group and a few chgrp commands.
The fix for this in linux 2.2 was adding about 20 characters to one line in one file.
Because I trust UPS's so much, we had a bypass switch wired in and it switched the power to the computer room between the UPS and the phase we use to charge the UPS abttery bank. The problem is that the guys who did the job also decied it would a good idea to switch the neutral as well. There is an airconditioner on the other phase. When the switch was turned, the netral went away so it was sort of floating between the three phases. Since this is in an area of Australia where the 240 Volts comes out of the wall a bit closer to 260V, that means that there should have been about 470 V accross some of our older sparc stations. At the end of the day we lost several pc power supplies, a varsistor in an A/C and none of the sparc power supplies. The sparcs are still running a few years latter.
Yep, the new security guys love to refind whats already out there. In this case, most likly out there in google groups' archive.
One thing they forgot about was the enter key mapping which can be loads of fun as well as the function key mapping. Most of the v100ish things will allow you to reprogram the enter key to any 4 character sequence (4 nulls is fun) but many of the people who copied the spec, didn't bother with the 4 character limit.
Years ago in England, several problems were solved by offering to pay a "King's Ransom" to solve the problem. One of the problems was finding where you were on the globe (Londgitude) using a clock.
I'm wondering what would happen if the US goverment said "We will give 1 billion US$ to the person that either 1) devlops a cure for Cancer 2) a cure for Aids 3) some other issue"
It could get very interesting if the money was given to the person solving the proble directly.
The current lot of banks can't hardly keep up with any other tech, how can they pull off this?
Last week ANZ (one of the 4 big banks) sent me a new card since the last one has "issue" with its chip. Its issue is you can ask the dam thing "is 0000 my pin" and keep going till it says "yes". I wonder if the new one is better. At least they sent me a free USB card reader too. Not bad for an account I use only to pay the rent.
How are the other banks going to do this. Right now they can't even dor CVV or CVC2 (or whatever it called). Not one of them can. Ever pay a bill on Telstra net banking? 666 worked fine. I figured maybe it just happend to hash the same way and tried others. Still it works fine.
Any bank that can't do address verificaion because of privacy issues, won't be able to do eyeball scans for the same reasons.
I suspect teh only reason this has gotten this far at all is the banks call get 150% deduction on R&D. With their current profit margins as high as they are, they have to do something to cut their taxes and throwing money at collr R&D projects makes them look good to the investors and helps their tax situation.
Is much as I like the Aussie banks (sort of the same way way comedians like pres Bush), I don't see any of them getting far with this.
These comments aren't exactly about laser printers so it may seem a bit OT.
IBM and HP make a very large % of their income from printer consumbales and they will do anything to hold on to that market. However things are about to change.
The reciept printer game is big busienss for a few compaines and they spend more on R&D than the guys doing the office printers. They have never made money selling ribbions and paper so they only make their money selling the printer. It turns out they want to sell color reciept printers but there they can't do it for less than about $.01 per reciept using any of the off the shelf parts. The result is a few of them have come up with a way of using generic inks with injets to keep the price down. From what I've heard, most of the compaines with this tech are already to go but they are waiting for the current economic slump to end before they invest in the production but as soon as one goes, they all go. If any of them turn a profit, they will invest in the home printer market.
Remember Epson started out making reciept priners and then sold their MX-80 for about 1/4 of the price of the lowest cost Centronics printer of its day.