That was a bit different. IBM designed the PC ignoring industry-standard microcomputer busses that existed at the time. In doing so, they created a de facto standard for the PC-clones that came along in the next few years.
The amazing thing about Worldcom and Enron is that they cheated, lied, and stole, yet they still went bankrupt.
How do the honest companies ever stay in business, much less turn a profit?
The cynical part of me says that the remaining companies aren't necessarily more honest, they're just better at avoiding getting caught.
Or just plain luckier. Or maybe they place more bribes at the right places.
The not so cynical side of me says "thank God I'm not in that industry" but who knows where the axe is going to fall next?
In the early 1990's, a company in Vancouver BC
proposed a monthly distribution of Usenet via
CD. This sparked extensive discussions in the
newsgroups (at the time almost exclusively dominated by academic people, of course) with a lot of resentment that some company was going to be making money by selling *their* posts. (Do a Google groups search for "usenet on CD" to see some of these. They also mention Walnut Creek.)
In any event the massive number of binary posts (porn, movies, warez, etc) on usenet in the past few years would make the "full" archive of the past few years number in the tens of thousands of CD's. A "full" usenet feed passed up the bandwidth of a T1 about 1998 IIRC.
Some individuals archive individual usenet groups, or the group is gatewayed back and forth to a mailing list that is archived. This IMHO is more appropriately managable for research.
The
announcement of Google Groups with a 20 year archive acknowledges several sources for the broad timeframe of the archive (as well as the donors to the preceding Dejanews archive); you might want to check out their specific work.
Seeing as how the tools are in Perl... you might try
rearranging them until they're acceptable to CPAN first.
This probably involves making them more module-like and less command-line like. This may be a fundamental change for you and your tools.
(It looks like most/many of them would be single lines in Perl... hard to call that a "module").
By announcing.NET as vaporware, Microsoft prevented any other vendors from doing anything similar. Not only that, but because ".NET" was going to be The Next Big Thing, they prevented other software houses from making any sales of existing working software while everyone waited for.NET to come along.
This is hardly a new strategy for Microsoft. And in the.NET case they succeeded on a collosal scale.
My idea is even simpler: build inflatable tent cities and randomly put them up in the general vicinity of real cities. This is a trivial extension of the inflatable decoy tanks used in WWII. From the air, you wouldn't be able to tell which of the five seemingly identical Washington DC's or NYC's was the real one.
My textbook example of this is comparing gnu 'pwd' with commercial Unice's 'pwd'.
I can get most commercial Unix's to core dump by running 'pwd' in the right circumstance. Yes, that's right. A command that takes no arguments and reads nothing from standard input core dumps in the correct circumstance. The circumstance is usually just being in a directory whose path name is several hundred thousand characters long, but some will crash if you set the environment variables right and it looks at them for something having to do with POSIX compliance. I don't know what POSIX compliance should have to do with pwd but then again I'm just a dummy.
OTOH I have never been able to get GNU 'pwd' to dump core.
What does this mean in the big picture? That after many man-years of intensive effort you can write a robust piece of code that takes no input or command-line arguments:-)
I put this huge-ass battery in my tiny UPS. How do I prove to myself that it still works right?
Answering that question is difficult. I realize that you probably got a good deal on your new battery, but you could've gotten a good deal on a correctly-sized replacement battery too and avoided the problem.
You also write:
Indeed the power here is quite stable and we get
very few outages per year.
The big battery *will* help with longer outages, assuming it (ever) gets fully charged and your UPS will stay up that long without overheating. Lots of UPS's are pretty sadly designed for only intermittent use.
Alan Cox -- and he's in the U.K. and can't be held liable for U.S. export laws
While that's pure common sense, we're dealing with legalities and attorney generals who pride themselves on applying our laws to those devious foreigners. Alan Cox may be paranoid about coming to the US but he has good reasons.
Rename Windows to "OpenWindows", rename Word to "OpenWord", and rename Office to "OpenOffice". Done. Now all their software is good for use in Brazil.
Implied:-) for those who forgot about all the "Open-this" and "Open-that" software being tossed about in the early-to-mid-90's that really had nothing open about it at all.
The page-turning robots are unique because they do little (or no?) damage to the book to get them digitized.
The more traditional way to preserve the contents of the old books is to destroy them in the process. Actually cutting the page out of the book lets you get a much higher quality scan because the page is then really truly flat.
(Yes, there are correction techniques for turning scans of non-flat pages into flat "projections"
but they aren't nearly
as good as just ripping the page out and scanning it.)
I host a dozen or so websites on a little mini-ITX
server I bought last fall for $200. Two of the sites have been slashdotted in that time, and the server cruised right through them maxing out at a few percent CPU consumption. (Static pages, of
course!)
I disagree. Saxon is a very down-to-earth, how-to-calculate-it-and-get-the-result book. It's sort of a "Schaum's Outline" of workable problems
and the recipes to solve them. Everything revolves around getting the math out of the way and getting to observable quantities. Where
math is done, it's of a very pedestrian kind,
and there's nothing fancy in there - he even
goes to great pains to explain delta functions and their integrals.
For those with satellite dishes, NTV is available through AMC2 (formerly
referred to as GE2), Transponder 9C at 85 degrees West longitude, vertical polarization, with a frequency of 3880 Mhz, and audio of 6.8 Mhz. This is a full transponder service and is operational 24 hours a day. Mission audio is also available during crew working hours -- 1:30 a.m. - 4:30
p.m. Central Time (06:30 - 21:30 GMT) daily -- on GE-2, Transponder 13,
with a frequency of 3960 Mhz.
In the 1970's most of the NOAA weather satellite
broadcasts were unencrypted SSTV-like VHF transmissions, but I honestly don't know how
much this has changed. It may be the same - all
the TV channels obviously get satellite weather pictures in near-real-time.
All you need is a Fisher-Price Pixelcam. Cheap, durable, etc. Only problem is that it isn't technically digital (it records on regular audio cassettes...)
Cablevision
reportedly having the fastest connections, averaging 800kbps, or 13kbps above the industry average
So, the fastest is a whopping One point six percent faster than average.
DSL providers showed huge swings in performance. AT&T WorldNet averaged
762kbps, 63 percent faster than the industry average of 467kbps. SBC came in second with 584kbps, EarthLink in third with 369kbps and Qwest in fourth with 240kbps.
Those variations couldn't have anything to do with the fact that all three of those companies are selling different speeds of service? No, it has all to do with quality, not what is advertised!
Seriously, I think that whoever wrote that article had a serious case of USA-Today-itis, the urge to chart and compare things without any relevance.
I remember when a fellow grad student showed me Mosaic and pronounced it the next big thing. I knew better, of course, in that Gopher had far more real information available and would never be replaced by this www stuff.
and I really do mean ANY problems or legal concerns that one artist, or any other type of creator, to distribute,
sell, lend, etc their own creation that they own.
The problem isn't legal, it's strong-arm tactics.
The problem is that the RIAA strong-armed E-bay into stopping artists from selling their own works on CD-R. In most any other industry this would be
clearly anti-competitive; the RIAA isn't making a
dime on the sale so they want to shut these sales down. And they *did* shut sales down through that
(E-bay) channel.
Are you even on the IRS's Radar? Is it a hobby?
on
Tax Tips For Small Folks?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Are you even on the IRS's Radar? i.e. did any businesses send you 1099's at the end of the year? Did you send out any 1099's?
There is a level of activity below which the IRS will classify your attempt at a business as a "hobby". Having negative income is a prerequisite for this classification. See the IRS publication 535 for details.
Only partly legacy-free
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Obviously "legacy-free" or "completely legacy-free" mean different things to different people. In the IW article it seems that "legacy-free" means that the following "legacy"
items are still in place:
legacy 80x86 CPU remains in place
legacy IDE controller registers (themselves based on earlier Western Digital MFM and ESDI
controllers) are still in place (although the cable might be serial ATA)
legacy BIOS emulation layer to allow DOS-type OS's and utilities run on legacy-free machines
Don't get me wrong, this is one of many possible steps in the right direction. But none of these steps are particularly new or innovative. Heck, look at the way EISA 80x86 config utilities could run on DEC Alphas that didn't have an 80x86 in them, *that* was innovative (although again in a
legacy-compatible way).
Rejection of all the "minority" software suites is not freedom, it's fascism.
I myself have preferences and biases a-plenty. But the last thing I'll ever do is try to enforce them onto others. (And it just so happens that most of my preferences and biases are against the "leading free packages and distros". Vixie-cron? Ughhh!)
And with regards to Andreiana's admonishments about participating in open-source
development: it's a lot easier to get started being the big fish in a small pond rather than the other way around. His article only looks at the big ponds, unfortunately; IMHO a lot of the interesting stuff can only be found in small ponds. Mozilla is a very, very big pond!
You are, of course, 100% right historically-speaking. Hard drives and tape drives used to use "NRZ" or "Non-Return-to-Zero" recording, where ones were recorded with a magnetic flux change and a zero without a flux change. The problem was actually much more severe with 7-track 556 BPI tape recordings, where the weight imbalance would cause the tape drive to actually jump up and down on the floor.
Once a year, (traditionally, the first day in
April) all disk and tape drives were rebalanced by
redistibruting ones and zeroes. The "bit buckets"
were also emptied on this hallowed day.
This isn't a problem anymore because all modern recording media use "MFM", "RLL", or "GCR" encoding methods, where ones and zeroes are automatically balanced.
One minor technical nit: "ones" actually weigh less than "zeroes". This led to the conclusion that the more data you put on your punched cards, the less they cost to mail:-)
Isn't Ferric Chloride (the stuff you buy in bottles at Radio Shack, or at least I did
when I was a kid) actually a salt? FeCl... looks like a salt to me!
Slashdot Mirror
That was a bit different. IBM designed the PC ignoring industry-standard microcomputer busses that existed at the time. In doing so, they created a de facto standard for the PC-clones that came along in the next few years.
How do the honest companies ever stay in business, much less turn a profit?
In any event the massive number of binary posts (porn, movies, warez, etc) on usenet in the past few years would make the "full" archive of the past few years number in the tens of thousands of CD's. A "full" usenet feed passed up the bandwidth of a T1 about 1998 IIRC.
Some individuals archive individual usenet groups, or the group is gatewayed back and forth to a mailing list that is archived. This IMHO is more appropriately managable for research.
The announcement of Google Groups with a 20 year archive acknowledges several sources for the broad timeframe of the archive (as well as the donors to the preceding Dejanews archive); you might want to check out their specific work.
This probably involves making them more module-like and less command-line like. This may be a fundamental change for you and your tools. (It looks like most/many of them would be single lines in Perl... hard to call that a "module").
Matt Groenig should apply for a patent on Bender's AI. AFAICT it's the most unethical AI I've yet seen represented...
This is hardly a new strategy for Microsoft. And in the .NET case they succeeded on a collosal scale.
My idea is even simpler: build inflatable tent cities and randomly put them up in the general vicinity of real cities. This is a trivial extension of the inflatable decoy tanks used in WWII. From the air, you wouldn't be able to tell which of the five seemingly identical Washington DC's or NYC's was the real one.
Can God create a hierarchical file system so deep that he cannot 'pwd' in it?
I can get most commercial Unix's to core dump by running 'pwd' in the right circumstance. Yes, that's right. A command that takes no arguments and reads nothing from standard input core dumps in the correct circumstance. The circumstance is usually just being in a directory whose path name is several hundred thousand characters long, but some will crash if you set the environment variables right and it looks at them for something having to do with POSIX compliance. I don't know what POSIX compliance should have to do with pwd but then again I'm just a dummy.
OTOH I have never been able to get GNU 'pwd' to dump core.
What does this mean in the big picture? That after many man-years of intensive effort you can write a robust piece of code that takes no input or command-line arguments :-)
Answering that question is difficult. I realize that you probably got a good deal on your new battery, but you could've gotten a good deal on a correctly-sized replacement battery too and avoided the problem.
You also write:
The big battery *will* help with longer outages, assuming it (ever) gets fully charged and your UPS will stay up that long without overheating. Lots of UPS's are pretty sadly designed for only intermittent use.
While that's pure common sense, we're dealing with legalities and attorney generals who pride themselves on applying our laws to those devious foreigners. Alan Cox may be paranoid about coming to the US but he has good reasons.
Implied :-) for those who forgot about all the "Open-this" and "Open-that" software being tossed about in the early-to-mid-90's that really had nothing open about it at all.
The more traditional way to preserve the contents of the old books is to destroy them in the process. Actually cutting the page out of the book lets you get a much higher quality scan because the page is then really truly flat. (Yes, there are correction techniques for turning scans of non-flat pages into flat "projections" but they aren't nearly as good as just ripping the page out and scanning it.)
See the uptime report here.
I disagree. Saxon is a very down-to-earth, how-to-calculate-it-and-get-the-result book. It's sort of a "Schaum's Outline" of workable problems and the recipes to solve them. Everything revolves around getting the math out of the way and getting to observable quantities. Where math is done, it's of a very pedestrian kind, and there's nothing fancy in there - he even goes to great pains to explain delta functions and their integrals.
In the 1970's most of the NOAA weather satellite broadcasts were unencrypted SSTV-like VHF transmissions, but I honestly don't know how much this has changed. It may be the same - all the TV channels obviously get satellite weather pictures in near-real-time.
All you need is a Fisher-Price Pixelcam. Cheap, durable, etc. Only problem is that it isn't technically digital (it records on regular audio cassettes...)
Those variations couldn't have anything to do with the fact that all three of those companies are selling different speeds of service? No, it has all to do with quality, not what is advertised!
Seriously, I think that whoever wrote that article had a serious case of USA-Today-itis, the urge to chart and compare things without any relevance.
I remember when a fellow grad student showed me Mosaic and pronounced it the next big thing. I knew better, of course, in that Gopher had far more real information available and would never be replaced by this www stuff.
The problem isn't legal, it's strong-arm tactics.
The problem is that the RIAA strong-armed E-bay into stopping artists from selling their own works on CD-R. In most any other industry this would be clearly anti-competitive; the RIAA isn't making a dime on the sale so they want to shut these sales down. And they *did* shut sales down through that (E-bay) channel.
There is a level of activity below which the IRS will classify your attempt at a business as a "hobby". Having negative income is a prerequisite for this classification. See the IRS publication 535 for details.
- legacy 80x86 CPU remains in place
- legacy IDE controller registers (themselves based on earlier Western Digital MFM and ESDI
controllers) are still in place (although the cable might be serial ATA)
- legacy BIOS emulation layer to allow DOS-type OS's and utilities run on legacy-free machines
Don't get me wrong, this is one of many possible steps in the right direction. But none of these steps are particularly new or innovative. Heck, look at the way EISA 80x86 config utilities could run on DEC Alphas that didn't have an 80x86 in them, *that* was innovative (although again in a legacy-compatible way).I myself have preferences and biases a-plenty. But the last thing I'll ever do is try to enforce them onto others. (And it just so happens that most of my preferences and biases are against the "leading free packages and distros". Vixie-cron? Ughhh!)
And with regards to Andreiana's admonishments about participating in open-source development: it's a lot easier to get started being the big fish in a small pond rather than the other way around. His article only looks at the big ponds, unfortunately; IMHO a lot of the interesting stuff can only be found in small ponds. Mozilla is a very, very big pond!
Once a year, (traditionally, the first day in April) all disk and tape drives were rebalanced by redistibruting ones and zeroes. The "bit buckets" were also emptied on this hallowed day.
This isn't a problem anymore because all modern recording media use "MFM", "RLL", or "GCR" encoding methods, where ones and zeroes are automatically balanced.
One minor technical nit: "ones" actually weigh less than "zeroes". This led to the conclusion that the more data you put on your punched cards, the less they cost to mail :-)
Isn't Ferric Chloride (the stuff you buy in bottles at Radio Shack, or at least I did when I was a kid) actually a salt? FeCl... looks like a salt to me!