I don't know if that's such a good idea. SLA's are not designed for long periods of heavy discharge, even if they are being recharged by some "overunity" device. It could ruin the batteries.
Supposedly the machine never really discharges the batteries... If it's supposed to be able to transit the continent on one charge, A recharge every day or two would probably not be a whole lot worse than starting your car (gas) car on a cold winter morning.
I would be remis if I didn't say, however, that a blown axle just before the batteries were supposed to have given out is just a bit too convenient. When I look at the site, I see lots of hand-waving gobldigook -- and precious little theory or fact. This 'convenient' non-electrical failure doesn't do much to make me feel better. I'd have felt much better if it had happened after, say, 150% of the predicted distance instead of than 75%.
It looks like the Sci-Fi channel has been taken over by the bean counters.
If you want to *really* get their attention, you need to (as Crieghton would say) "Hit them where it hurts -- Their spreadsheets".
If the Sci-Fi channel is killing off all of the really good shows, then cut them off -- even if it means cutting back on your cable subscription. Let them know that -- with the Sci-Fi Channel killing Farscape, you're fed up with shit cable, and this is your best way of letting them know that.
And do it in the next week -- before they destroy Moira.
How is Microsoft preventing companies from porting their apps to Linux?
Sometimes it's obvious things, like buying a company and killing off non-MS development. Sometimes it's contractual -- offering some sort of 'favor' in return for an exclusivity contract.
Sometimes it's blackmail -- like the way that they withheld strategic information from IBM over their insistence on developing OS/2 or treatened Intel over research for OS-agnostic changes to the '386 instruction set.
Sometimes it's structural, like the way that they wilfully (and illegally) polluted Java to make OS-independent programming more difficult.
...microprocessors that monitor what you are doing during assembly and will warn you if you are doing something wrong or dangerous."
This reminds me of the scene in the old Star Wars series where C3PO has been dismantled and is sitting on chewy's back, complaining about having his head on backwards and all the dangerous blaster fire that's sure to get them killed.
I have two 8" floppy drives,.... How much is it worth to you?
Single sided drives or double sided?? Single or double density.. (double sided, double density 8" drives: Just over 1Meg of storage on a single floppy -- Worth a couple of wet dreams (back in 1980).
Yep.. A palm 100/105 is 'only' ~$100, and you can get some pretty decent calculator programs -- Including programmable ones (i.e. you can redesign the calculator to suit your preferences). I'm pretty sure that they've got at least one programmer's calculator in the stack (of available calculator programs).
And if you don't like what's available, you can always roll your own (you are a programmer, aren't you?).
The 8086 is a horrid CPU arch. -- the unfortunate thing is that
that's precisely why it's so popular.
Back in the late '70s, we had 8 bit microcomputers
(Z80, 8085, 6502 (risc without the registers),
6800, 6809 (ah, the 6809... Now
THERE was a nice 8bit CPU!)) All these machines
were pretty similar. 16 bit address spaces and
8 bit registers (sometimes combinable into
16 bit registers for some operations)
One of the more popular CPUs was the Intel 8080.
Zillog cloned (and improved on it) with the Z80
and Intel's answer to that was the 8085. Those
3 CPUs were used for the CPM operating system.
The 6502 was the other popular chip (family)-- used in the
Apple II, and Comodore 64 families (among others).
Motorola's 6800 series were a bit less common,
but the 6809 was used in the Radio Shack Color
Computer. The 6809 was pretty late in the
8-bit CPU era, and was (IMHO) one of the
nicest 8-bit CPUs out there.. It had
hardware multiply (8x8 ->16 bits) 2 index
registers, and a nice, clean instruction
set.. and it allowed easy coding of
completely relocatable code with 16 and 8 bit
relative address references -- including jumps.
(but I digress).
When it came time to create a 16bit computer,
the different manufacturers went different ways.
Motorola, Zillog and National Semiconductors all
decided to essentially redesign their CPUs from
scratch.
My experience was with the Motorola 68000.
It was pretty much a cross between the PDP-11 and
the IBM/370 processors. It had 16 32-bit registers
split between 8 General Purpose registers and 8
address registers (one of which was the stack).
Although the original 68000 'only' had a 16Meg address
space, it was only because they only brought out
24 of the 32 available address bits (although there
was a version of the 68000 with all 32 bits available).
All in all, a reasonably nice processor to program for.
It was a 16 bit processor with one foot firmly
planted in the 32 bit world.
Intel, on the other hand, decided to build a machine
that was backwards compatible with the 8085.
The 8086 had a base 16 bit address space with a
bunch of 16 bit index registers that shifted the 64K
address space in increments of 16 bytes. It also had two
(relatively) general-purpose address registers a
stack and the program counter. It was source code
compatible with the old 8085 instruction set (all you had
to do was set all the index registers the same,
and you had a pretty good rendition of an old 8-bit
processor. It was a 16 bit processor with one foot
firmly planted in the 8 bit world.
In truth, what the 8086 did was it formalized the
kludgy practice of 'bank switching' which was used
by 8-bit hardware designers to get beyond the 64K RAM
limit. The Index registers made address math into
almost a crap-shoot, because there were 4096 ways
to address any given byte (combinations of index
registers and 16 bit offsets), and you had to decide
between address spacees -- small (all index registers
the same) was the easiest, but limited you to 64K for each
of code, data and stack).
Medium allowed you more space, but nothing could be larger than 64K.
Large gave you the full 1Megabyte address space -- and 'unlimited'
object sizes within that constraint, but you then had to deal with the horrid addressing
scheme. Everytime you accessed any data, you'd have to separately
load/calculate the index and address data).
So why would such a horridly designed CPU take over the world??
As one friend of mine used to say "It had 3 things going for it.. I B and M.
As a market driven company (much like Microsoft is now),
IBM saw the microcomputer revolution coming, and wanted control of it -- but it had a problem..
Most of the new 16 bit processors were 32 bit machines in waiting --
With 32 bit address spaces, lots of 32-bit registers and the ability to do 32 bit math.
Their basic designs weren't that far from the power and ease of IBMs
multi-million dollar system/370 CPUs. As such, they were a pretty
clear threat to their bread-and-butter mainframe market.
One exception to this was the Intel 8086. With an intrinsic
1Meg address space (Who'd ever need more than 640K anyways?),
a couple of 16 bit registers
and a hard time dealing with structures larger than 64K, the
8086 -- while able to claim the '16-bit' processor name,
was such a hobbled design, that it would never be a real
threat to IBM's mainframe architectures. Thus the Intel
CPU was chosen for the IBM Personal Computer.
Not in spite of the fact that it was a brain-dead
processor design -- but because of it.
A few days ago I post a good story abount how the new terrorist database system keeps crashing, and get rejected:
2002-08-23 20:52:48 Terrorist database often crashes (articles,news) (rejected)
But somehow, this makes it onto slashdot...
Like anybody in the know actually expected the terrorist database to be stable? It's a political playtoy! It might work one day but, in the meantime, everybody still has the database that they're used to using.
At least this article has people thinking and talking. Methods of testing bandwidth are the kinds of things that have true geeks sitting up at night thinking.
Microsoft is very close to making auto-update a condition of running their software. They haven't gone entirely to ``leasing agreements only'' but they're very close.
Actually, they have gone to a leasing-only agreement. They just haven't named it such yet. You can only use the software until they 'offer' you a replacement. You MUST accept (and pay for) the new software.
According to what you've quoted, they've locked you into recurring payments. You just don't know what they're going to charge, yet.
Microsoft reserves the right [of]
offering you a replacement or modified version of the SOFTWARE... and to charge for such
your continued use of the SOFTWARE is conditioned on your acceptance of such replacement
[and] your use of all prior versions of the SOFTWARE is terminated.
It doesn't matter if the replacement software is buggy, shuts down your company's business or simply doesn't fit on the disk. You must pay them. You must use the new version.
According to this license, the software is clearly not yours. It's Microsoft's plaything -- and if you accept the license, so are you.
harumph! I didn't intend it as flamebait. I think that calling it a flame would have been more accurate. I really do think that it's time for us to take off the kid gloves when it comes to dealing with, and describing, Microsofts slack-ass attitude towards security.
Put some heat under Bill Gates' royal butt. Perhaps that will cause some movement.
The RAND proposal seems to be a clear departure from the previous style and approach of the entire body. With such a radical change in direction, I would normally expect a body to take steps to ensure an expanded ability of the public to respond.
What was the rationale of the W3C in chosing this issue for switching to a process which allows less (rather than more) opportunity for public response?
RAND proponents alude to the commonality of RAND setups for hardware standards. Given that hardware distribution requires the output of physical product which then requires outlay of cash by the creator, this means that some form of cash transfer is always necessary for hardware producers.
With software, however, there is no need for the creator to do anything other than make their product available. Software is nothing other than the passing of knowledge. Knowledge is inherently free (as in beer). Imposition of software patent fees thus forces a fee structure on a process that previously had no such inherent requirement.
How does the W3C reconcile the difference in the inherent natures of hardware and software in it's rationalization?
Linux installs don't seem to be as stupid as Microsoft. Even though the Linux is generally described by Microsoft geeks as a server system, the default setup for Redhat 7.1 Linux does NOT have the kinds of things enabled that would allow the Nimda virus to run. You have to explicitly tell it that you're going to be running a web server.
Even presuming that Apache was as horridly insecure as IIS is, a user would actually know that (s)he was running a web server. Then you have things like Microsoft quietly replacing unstuffit on the Mac with their own version which has an extremely glaring security hole of automatically executing binhex binaries.
Microsoft has shown every sign of not giving a rat's ass about security. From what I'm hearing, patches that might have protected users from Nimda were uninstalled by later Microsoft patches(!).. then you have that Microsoft execuive who was pooh-poohing people (re) downloading the patch as being "unnecessary".
Yeah.. but Microsoft's line is that it's all the users' fault. That sort of attitude is consistent with a being psychopath, if the company were a person. If Microsoft is unwilling to take responsiblity for it's lax attitude towards security, people are going to continue to get goat-sexed by their software. Given that they refuse to give general users access to their source code, it shouldn't be the user's responsibility to test every patch to see if it undoes a previous security fix.
Microsoft demands that users place themselves at the mercy of Microsoft, then blames the user when due dilligence results in software being installed that's horribly insecure -- even after religiously installing every general and/or security patch as Microsoft releases them. That's why I prefer to do my real work on Linux boxes.
At least with Linux, people have the ability to chech the changes that are being made by a patch. It only takes a couple of people to find the problems in a patch.. then they can pass the information on to the rest of the user community. With Microsoft's normal licensing limitations, those people who do have access to the source code still can't tell people that Microsoft has shafted them (once again).
They mention timing traps, so I'm presuming that participants have an opportunity to get themselves up to speed. I cannot see being able to average 80MPH (130KM/H) from a dead start over 200 metres. If that was the case, I'm sure you'd see a mention of the rider's peak speed (wich would possibly over 200KM/H).
Have you ever stuck your face out the window of a car at 60 MPH? Now, add 15 MPH and think about trying to pedal a bicycle while breathing in that sort of wind. It's not that you need much of a filter.. You just need somethin that will keep breating easy and comfortable.
The maximum speed that I've measured for myself was 45 MPH on a flat road (although that was, as I remember it, 3rd of 4th gear on a 5 speed). Nontheless, there's a massive difference between that and the new record. --
(FYI: I've got biking in my blood. My uncle on my mom's side, and my cousin on my dad's side were both national cyclists for Trinidad. Although I love cycling, I've never done it competetively.. and for what it's worth, I'm also Canadian).
Slashdot Mirror
Supposedly the machine never really discharges the batteries... If it's supposed to be able to transit the continent on one charge, A recharge every day or two would probably not be a whole lot worse than starting your car (gas) car on a cold winter morning.
I would be remis if I didn't say, however, that a blown axle just before the batteries were supposed to have given out is just a bit too convenient. When I look at the site, I see lots of hand-waving gobldigook -- and precious little theory or fact. This 'convenient' non-electrical failure doesn't do much to make me feel better. I'd have felt much better if it had happened after, say, 150% of the predicted distance instead of than 75%.
If you want to *really* get their attention, you need to (as Crieghton would say) "Hit them where it hurts -- Their spreadsheets".
If the Sci-Fi channel is killing off all of the really good shows, then cut them off -- even if it means cutting back on your cable subscription. Let them know that -- with the Sci-Fi Channel killing Farscape, you're fed up with shit cable, and this is your best way of letting them know that.
And do it in the next week -- before they destroy Moira.
Sometimes it's obvious things, like buying a company and killing off non-MS development. Sometimes it's contractual -- offering some sort of 'favor' in return for an exclusivity contract. Sometimes it's blackmail -- like the way that they withheld strategic information from IBM over their insistence on developing OS/2 or treatened Intel over research for OS-agnostic changes to the '386 instruction set.
Sometimes it's structural, like the way that they wilfully (and illegally) polluted Java to make OS-independent programming more difficult.
This reminds me of the scene in the old Star Wars series where C3PO has been dismantled and is sitting on chewy's back, complaining about having his head on backwards and all the dangerous blaster fire that's sure to get them killed.
( oh shit. wrong article!) No wonder nobody seemed to have made the obvious reference.
What's going on??
Oh, my. Oh my! You've got my head on backwards!
And put that blaster down. You're going to hurt somebody with it!
Single sided drives or double sided?? Single or double density.. (double sided, double density 8" drives: Just over 1Meg of storage on a single floppy -- Worth a couple of wet dreams (back in 1980).
And if you don't like what's available, you can always roll your own (you are a programmer, aren't you?).
Back in the late '70s, we had 8 bit microcomputers (Z80, 8085, 6502 (risc without the registers), 6800, 6809 (ah, the 6809... Now THERE was a nice 8bit CPU!)) All these machines were pretty similar. 16 bit address spaces and 8 bit registers (sometimes combinable into 16 bit registers for some operations)
One of the more popular CPUs was the Intel 8080. Zillog cloned (and improved on it) with the Z80 and Intel's answer to that was the 8085. Those 3 CPUs were used for the CPM operating system.
The 6502 was the other popular chip (family)-- used in the Apple II, and Comodore 64 families (among others).
Motorola's 6800 series were a bit less common, but the 6809 was used in the Radio Shack Color Computer. The 6809 was pretty late in the 8-bit CPU era, and was (IMHO) one of the nicest 8-bit CPUs out there.. It had hardware multiply (8x8 ->16 bits) 2 index registers, and a nice, clean instruction set.. and it allowed easy coding of completely relocatable code with 16 and 8 bit relative address references -- including jumps. (but I digress).
When it came time to create a 16bit computer, the different manufacturers went different ways. Motorola, Zillog and National Semiconductors all decided to essentially redesign their CPUs from scratch.
My experience was with the Motorola 68000. It was pretty much a cross between the PDP-11 and the IBM/370 processors. It had 16 32-bit registers split between 8 General Purpose registers and 8 address registers (one of which was the stack). Although the original 68000 'only' had a 16Meg address space, it was only because they only brought out 24 of the 32 available address bits (although there was a version of the 68000 with all 32 bits available). All in all, a reasonably nice processor to program for. It was a 16 bit processor with one foot firmly planted in the 32 bit world.
Intel, on the other hand, decided to build a machine that was backwards compatible with the 8085. The 8086 had a base 16 bit address space with a bunch of 16 bit index registers that shifted the 64K address space in increments of 16 bytes. It also had two (relatively) general-purpose address registers a stack and the program counter. It was source code compatible with the old 8085 instruction set (all you had to do was set all the index registers the same, and you had a pretty good rendition of an old 8-bit processor. It was a 16 bit processor with one foot firmly planted in the 8 bit world.
In truth, what the 8086 did was it formalized the kludgy practice of 'bank switching' which was used by 8-bit hardware designers to get beyond the 64K RAM limit. The Index registers made address math into almost a crap-shoot, because there were 4096 ways to address any given byte (combinations of index registers and 16 bit offsets), and you had to decide between address spacees -- small (all index registers the same) was the easiest, but limited you to 64K for each of code, data and stack). Medium allowed you more space, but nothing could be larger than 64K. Large gave you the full 1Megabyte address space -- and 'unlimited' object sizes within that constraint, but you then had to deal with the horrid addressing scheme. Everytime you accessed any data, you'd have to separately load/calculate the index and address data).
So why would such a horridly designed CPU take over the world?? As one friend of mine used to say "It had 3 things going for it .. I B and M.
As a market driven company (much like Microsoft is now), IBM saw the microcomputer revolution coming, and wanted control of it -- but it had a problem.. Most of the new 16 bit processors were 32 bit machines in waiting -- With 32 bit address spaces, lots of 32-bit registers and the ability to do 32 bit math. Their basic designs weren't that far from the power and ease of IBMs multi-million dollar system/370 CPUs. As such, they were a pretty clear threat to their bread-and-butter mainframe market.
One exception to this was the Intel 8086. With an intrinsic 1Meg address space (Who'd ever need more than 640K anyways?), a couple of 16 bit registers and a hard time dealing with structures larger than 64K, the 8086 -- while able to claim the '16-bit' processor name, was such a hobbled design, that it would never be a real threat to IBM's mainframe architectures. Thus the Intel CPU was chosen for the IBM Personal Computer.
Not in spite of the fact that it was a brain-dead processor design -- but because of it.
Intel -- Just short of Intelligent.
2002-08-23 20:52:48 Terrorist database often crashes (articles,news) (rejected)
But somehow, this makes it onto slashdot...
Like anybody in the know actually expected the terrorist database to be stable? It's a political playtoy! It might work one day but, in the meantime, everybody still has the database that they're used to using.
At least this article has people thinking and talking. Methods of testing bandwidth are the kinds of things that have true geeks sitting up at night thinking.
Actually, they have gone to a leasing-only agreement. They just haven't named it such yet. You can only use the software until they 'offer' you a replacement. You MUST accept (and pay for) the new software.
According to what you've quoted, they've locked you into recurring payments. You just don't know what they're going to charge, yet.
- Microsoft reserves the right [of]
- offering you a replacement or modified version of the SOFTWARE
... and to charge for such
- your continued use of the SOFTWARE is conditioned on your acceptance of such replacement
- [and] your use of all prior versions of the SOFTWARE is terminated.
It doesn't matter if the replacement software is buggy, shuts down your company's business or simply doesn't fit on the disk. You must pay them. You must use the new version.According to this license, the software is clearly not yours. It's Microsoft's plaything -- and if you accept the license, so are you.
Great: Let's me see you use Mozilla without using Microsoft's TCP stack... You're pretty much SOL, here.
You obviously don't have access to our technology.
Put some heat under Bill Gates' royal butt. Perhaps that will cause some movement.
What was the rationale of the W3C in chosing this issue for switching to a process which allows less (rather than more) opportunity for public response?
With software, however, there is no need for the creator to do anything other than make their product available. Software is nothing other than the passing of knowledge. Knowledge is inherently free (as in beer). Imposition of software patent fees thus forces a fee structure on a process that previously had no such inherent requirement.
How does the W3C reconcile the difference in the inherent natures of hardware and software in it's rationalization?
Even presuming that Apache was as horridly insecure as IIS is, a user would actually know that (s)he was running a web server. Then you have things like Microsoft quietly replacing unstuffit on the Mac with their own version which has an extremely glaring security hole of automatically executing binhex binaries.
Microsoft has shown every sign of not giving a rat's ass about security. From what I'm hearing, patches that might have protected users from Nimda were uninstalled by later Microsoft patches(!).. then you have that Microsoft execuive who was pooh-poohing people (re) downloading the patch as being "unnecessary".
Yeah.. but Microsoft's line is that it's all the users' fault.
That sort of attitude is consistent with a being psychopath, if the company were a person. If Microsoft is unwilling to take responsiblity for it's lax attitude towards security, people are going to continue to get goat-sexed by their software. Given that they refuse to give general users access to their source code, it shouldn't be the user's responsibility to test every patch to see if it undoes a previous security fix.
Microsoft demands that users place themselves at the mercy of Microsoft, then blames the user when due dilligence results in software being installed that's horribly insecure -- even after religiously installing every general and/or security patch as Microsoft releases them. That's why I prefer to do my real work on Linux boxes.
At least with Linux, people have the ability to chech the changes that are being made by a patch. It only takes a couple of people to find the problems in a patch.. then they can pass the information on to the rest of the user community. With Microsoft's normal licensing limitations, those people who do have access to the source code still can't tell people that Microsoft has shafted them (once again).
They mention timing traps, so I'm presuming that participants have an opportunity to get themselves up to speed. I cannot see being able to average 80MPH (130KM/H) from a dead start over 200 metres. If that was the case, I'm sure you'd see a mention of the rider's peak speed (wich would possibly over 200KM/H).
Have you ever stuck your face out the window of a car at 60 MPH? Now, add 15 MPH and think about trying to pedal a bicycle while breathing in that sort of wind. It's not that you need much of a filter.. You just need somethin that will keep breating easy and comfortable.
(FYI: I've got biking in my blood. My uncle on my mom's side, and my cousin on my dad's side were both national cyclists for Trinidad. Although I love cycling, I've never done it competetively.. and for what it's worth, I'm also Canadian).
Please ignore the previous message.
Unit 35 dispatched. ETA 90 minutes.