The problem with tall buildings is that they do have a certain amount of flexibility, which allows them to sway in an earthquake. The worst case scenario is when the building sways at the same frequency as the earthquake. Then the amplitude gets higher and higher until the building falls down. You're better off having an intelligent vibration dampening system by having a computer automatically move a large weight around near the middle of the building.
Oh yes, that happens with the Saturday soccer results in the UK.
Twenty years ago, the match results used to come in using real teletypes across the UK, and so they had a TV camera placed right above the teletype machine, with the output line being subtitled on the screen. This was a simple and efficient solution.
But then, the switch to electronic transmission and computer display was made, and so instead of doing something new, they still pretend to have a 75 baud connection. Rather ironic, when the entire match is being broadcast by satellite.
Now if someone would do the same thing with computers/technology.
What really used to annoy me, was that bizarre chirping noise, that every single computer *had* to have (everything from a hand calculator to a supercomputer).
... I always imagined a light sabre would have a button controlling the colour of the light-sabre (red, yellow, green, blue, purple, white and colour-cycle).
SE house prices are mind-boggling. Everyone is having to compete against city stockbrokers earning 100K/year, renovators (usually builders themselves) who buy up run-down houses, redecorate them and sell them on for a profit, and the buy-to-let market who buy a handful of properties, rent them out and live off the earnings.
Just for a regular three bedroom family home (concrete base, wooden frame, brick skin), is going to cost around 500K pounds), and that's not even with a decent sized backyard.
And in the North of England, you could buy a whole suburb for that money, as a single terraced two-up/two-down sells for 3K pounds each. But ther e isn't anyone who wants to live there.
The SE is so crowded now, that there are even laws banning people removing sticks and twigs from public parks, or even collecting pebbles from the beaches because the cumulative effect of having the local population doing these things was to strip away the entire ecosystem.
Ontario - Oakville - Attic apartment with aluminum roof tiling and sundeck with table. 35 degrees C indoors in Summer, 20 degrees in Winter.
I'm in the UK just now, and the property market is just over the top - even the traditional "professional couple" first-time buyer housing is 150k pounds (300K US dollars) for a two bedroom flat. Silicon Valley prices!
Reminds me of the poll tax protest car-stickers/badges: "Can't pay - Won't Pay!". And the retirees are fed up of their property taxes constantly going up.
The students have to take out loans now - most end up with debts of 10K pounds or more. Top-up fees of 3K per year are also being introduced. Although there were plans to scrap that and have a "pot" where everyone would be given a grant, and require to pay the money back once they found a job.
The student population of Liverpool is estimated to be 50,000 Manchester also has a student population of 65,000. So you can guess that the student population brings in millions of pounds to the area.
Changing the subject, minimum wage of £5/hr sounds pretty goood!
But you have to include the cost of living. I could rent a flat in Ontario for 750 Canadian dollars (property tax, electricity and water included).
In the UK, the monthly rent for a good two bedroom flat in Edinburgh is around 450 pounds, Liverpool is 650 pounds, and Brighton 850 pounds. Council tax is 1000 pounds/year, Electricity is 1000 pounds/year, and food is 40 pounds/week. And landlords typically require two months rent in advance. And a car will cost another 3000 pounds/year.
To rent your own place in the South, you would need at least 20K/year. If you were to share a flat with another person, you could just about break even. A minimum wage job, would only bring in 10K/year at 40 hours/week (most of which are part-time anyway).
There are many stories of people taking jobs in the London area, and leaving again once they find that they are actually loosing money by staying there.
Lots of people in the UK really don't like the idea of living in the south east, especially London.
That's very true - what I really should have said was that newcomers to the country prefer to stay where there are established communities, and people who already have taken a government job and bought a house, don't want to lose their investment.
And so many people are now downshifting out of London.
So who's going to the pub and nightclubs? Drinking is an expensive habit. There must be enough money coming from somewhere to make these businesses viable.
Mainly students and casual workers (we refer to them neds, scallies, chavs) - the government wants 50% of all school-leavers to continue onto university. Asylum seekers work as bartenders for minimum wage (5 pounds/hour).
At the time, there was a shortage of affordable housing in areas like Liverpool and Manchester. Other housing stock was in need of renovation. The workers who were laid off could have been retrained as brickies, plumbers (who are more engineers as they have to repair/install electric showers), electricians, and joiners.
Ironically, a plumber in the UK can now earn over £100K/year, more than double that of a software architect.
I'm curious about that -- how do you think it could have been avoided?
Mrs T. was keen to cut away the dead wood (the declining shipbuilding industries) in order to give tax breaks to the South East. Not a bad thing by itself, but the money saved would have been better invested in retraining and education for the communities in the North of England. At the time of these cutbacks, the local people were crying out for financial assistance in regenerating their cities, but Mrs T. wouldn't help - She was only interested in tax-breaks for the City. As a result the Militant faction of Labour gained power. This led to Mrs T. imposing rate-capping on the various Labour city councils. Both sides (Militant Labour and the Conservatives) realized that this was going to be the class war of the decade and were determined to fight to the bitter end.
The collateral damage of this war, was that the middle classes left the inner cities a generation ago, moved down South and have never returned. It was only a decade later with financial aid from the EEC that the North of England is slowly regenerating. But the only new business that are setting up are service jobs: supermarkets, pubs, nightclubs and maybe the odd software company,.which usually gets bought out.
Instead, the communities in the North of England have continued emigration, with everyone who could, having moved down to the South of England, which itself is now becoming overcrowded and overpriced (So overcrowded, that they even building flats and houses on the communal piece of grass in the squares (three streets facing each other).
The current Labour government is trying to fix this "North-South divide" by dispersing asylum seekers and moving government jobs away from the South of England, but everyone wants to stay where the wealth is.
First, they collect your search information. Next they collected your email. Now they collect your destination. You put it all together, that is quite a bit of information.
What is next?
They buy out www.archive.org and collect the evolution of your web site. It's going to be rather ironic to have google caching archive.org, and archive.org archiving google.
Then they buy out your ISP and collect the IP's that visit your web page (Of course, if your ISP has an online statistics page, they can already do this).
The Long John Silver Restaurant chain will be willing to offer free shrimp for a second time if this finds any fresh water. Of a man's appetite can dream.
So, what you're saying is that Blake's 7 is really about how life is right now?:)
I did think of commenting how the current problems of today would be the dystopia of immigration, overcrowding, lack of job security, no pensions/social security, fear of terrorism, the post-democratic era, obsession with biometric data, but all that was covered in Orwell's 1984 (facecrime etc..), but I couldn't think of anything for utopia (maybe cures for genetic diseases).
Seriously, the police in riots and "politically troublesome" situations have more than a passing resemblance to the Federation guard uniforms.
Tomorrow's World (A science review program) covered a story on what the riot police would wear (black waterproof/fireproof uniform with reflective lettering/stripes, helmet with visor, radio, transparent shield, and extendible baton, along with tear gas launchers. It really freaked everyone out to see these actually used in the Wapping riots.
It is interesting how other aspects of Blake's 7 are also starting to appear. The Liberator's "auto-repair circuits" parallel modern efforts to build self-repairing systems.
Not forgetting the Tarial Cells which were supposed to power every computer from Zen to Orac. Hopefully Sony/IBM's Cell processor will work.
If this sci-fi series was depressing, it was because everyone during this time (in the late 1970's/early 1980's) was depressed about the future. Everyone knew that advancing technology (in particular computers and genetics) was going to have a greater part of their lives, but didn't know how. So there was this fear that the world was going to become a worse place. There was even a genuine belief that a single 100,000 transistor chips would put hundreds of people out of work (The print workers went on strike because their jobs were going to be replaced by electronic publication, secretaries would become unemployed due to workprocessors and E-mail systems - see The Coming of the Chip).
The uniforms of the federation guards were based on the predictions of what the riot police of the future would look like (helmets, visors, gasmasks). Servolan's never-ending dependence on databases and sensors, reflected the fear of centralised databases.
The stories based on isolated research station on remote star-systems reflected the secrecy of the various research institutes in the UK.
I dunno, I work in a factory with no daylight, and long night-shifts, but peopel don't go out to eat, they just eat in the canteen like they always do.
You have a canteen - so you have somewhere to eat. The reason food is so important to Americans (or rather Silicon Valley) is very few companies have good (if any) on-site canteens.
Most of the office blocks were built on the assumption that everyone would take a 10 minute drive and eat elsewhere. Which was a good idea until the area developed economically, and the 10 minute drive became a 30 minute drive, so employees end up spending more time driving that eating.
As the original article described, the large companies with the best cafe's/eateries/canteens are the most popular to work for. Especially since there are so many nationalities (Mexican, Chinese, Indian, European) that have to be pleased. I think Americans just like eating too much. They like eating large, hot greasy meals, so sandwiches/fruit doesn't cut it, they need to go to the local restaurant for a giant meal.
Actually, given the choice at a large canteen, staff would choose healthy meals (fruits, salads, wheat based pasta), but without that choice they would be forced to eat wherever was available, and this usually meant those places with the large, hot, greasy meals (which were usually the cheapest).
There's no incentive for a restaurant to improve the nutritional quality of their meals if they are always fully booked.
Computing while high is a relatively recent development that only became possible with the invention of the computer mouse. You can't innovate without concentration.
The most innovative developments have alway occurred when people were free of deadlines and were doing what they truly felt motivated to do.
If you've hit a brick wall in terms of development, it's always good to be able to take several steps backward, see everything in a new perspective and find a new way of putting things together. Under the pressure of deadlines, that isn't possible.
Because either way, you are going to have to define new process structures to represent each auxiliary processor units as well as the PowerPC CPU and recompile the kernel. For such real-time processing you want to keep the data structures to the absolute minimum and not have any 'fluff' left over from previous CPU architectures. Writing a kernel from scratch is the best way to achieve this.
Slashdot Mirror
Better: In Corporate America, Nintendo 64 rumblepacks YOU!
The problem with tall buildings is that they do have a certain amount of flexibility, which allows them to sway in an earthquake. The worst case scenario is when the building sways at the same frequency as the earthquake. Then the amplitude gets higher and higher until the building falls down. You're better off having an intelligent vibration dampening system by having a computer automatically move a large weight around near the middle of the building.
The hotel I stayed at in Liverpool, had quite a few workers from Eastern Europe.
When I was in the South of England, the guy working at the 24 hour drug store was from Afghanistan and didn't speak much English.
Oh yes, that happens with the Saturday soccer results in the UK.
Twenty years ago, the match results used to come in using real teletypes across the UK, and so they had a TV camera placed right above the teletype machine, with the output line being subtitled on the screen. This was a simple and efficient solution.
But then, the switch to electronic transmission and computer display was made, and so instead of doing something new, they still pretend to have a 75 baud connection. Rather ironic, when the entire match is being broadcast by satellite.
And the contents of the script?
/dev/null
cat
Now if someone would do the same thing with computers/technology.
What really used to annoy me, was that bizarre chirping noise, that every single computer *had* to have (everything from a hand calculator to a supercomputer).
... I always imagined a light sabre would have a button controlling the colour of the light-sabre (red, yellow, green, blue, purple, white and colour-cycle).
SE house prices are mind-boggling. Everyone is having to compete against city stockbrokers earning 100K/year, renovators (usually builders themselves) who buy up run-down houses, redecorate them and sell them on for a profit, and the buy-to-let market who buy a handful of properties, rent them out and live off the earnings.
Just for a regular three bedroom family home (concrete base, wooden frame, brick skin), is going to cost around 500K pounds), and that's not even with a decent sized backyard.
And in the North of England, you could buy a whole suburb for that money, as a single terraced two-up/two-down sells for 3K pounds each. But ther e isn't anyone who wants to live there.
The SE is so crowded now, that there are even laws banning people removing sticks and twigs from public parks, or even collecting pebbles from the beaches because the cumulative effect of having the local population doing these things was to strip away the entire ecosystem.
Ontario - Oakville - Attic apartment with aluminum roof tiling and sundeck with table. 35 degrees C indoors in Summer, 20 degrees in Winter.
I'm in the UK just now, and the property market is just over the top - even the traditional "professional couple" first-time buyer housing is 150k pounds (300K US dollars) for a two bedroom flat. Silicon Valley prices!
Reminds me of the poll tax protest car-stickers/badges: "Can't pay - Won't Pay!".
And the retirees are fed up of their property taxes constantly going up.
The students have to take out loans now - most end up with debts of 10K pounds or more. Top-up fees of 3K per year are also being introduced. Although there were plans to scrap that and have a "pot" where everyone would be given a grant, and require to pay the money back once they found a job.
The student population of Liverpool is estimated to be 50,000 Manchester also has a student population of 65,000. So you can guess that the student population brings in millions of pounds to the area.
Changing the subject, minimum wage of £5/hr sounds pretty goood!
But you have to include the cost of living. I could rent a flat in Ontario for 750 Canadian dollars (property tax, electricity and water included).
In the UK, the monthly rent for a good two bedroom flat in Edinburgh is around 450 pounds, Liverpool is 650 pounds, and Brighton 850 pounds. Council tax is 1000 pounds/year, Electricity is 1000 pounds/year, and food is 40 pounds/week. And landlords typically require two months rent in advance. And a car will cost another 3000 pounds/year.
To rent your own place in the South, you would need at least 20K/year. If you were to share a flat with another person, you could just about break even. A minimum wage job, would only bring in 10K/year at 40 hours/week (most of which are part-time anyway).
There are many stories of people taking jobs in the London area, and leaving again once they find that they are actually loosing money by staying there.
Lots of people in the UK really don't like the idea of living in the south east, especially London.
That's very true - what I really should have said was that newcomers to the country prefer to stay where there are established communities, and people who already have taken a government job and bought a house, don't want to lose their investment.
And so many people are now downshifting out of London.
So who's going to the pub and nightclubs? Drinking is an expensive habit. There must be enough money coming from somewhere to make these businesses viable.
Mainly students and casual workers (we refer to them neds, scallies, chavs) - the government wants 50% of all school-leavers to continue onto university. Asylum seekers work as bartenders for minimum wage (5 pounds/hour).
At the time, there was a shortage of affordable housing in areas like Liverpool and Manchester. Other housing stock was in need of renovation.
The workers who were laid off could have been retrained as brickies, plumbers (who are more engineers as they have to repair/install electric showers), electricians, and joiners.
Ironically, a plumber in the UK can now earn over £100K/year, more than double that of a software architect.
Here's the first http://slashdot.org/">archived slashdot page from 1997.
To post a comment, any user just had to enter their name, E-mail and website.
I'm curious about that -- how do you think it could have been avoided?
Mrs T. was keen to cut away the dead wood (the declining shipbuilding industries) in order to give tax breaks to the South East. Not a bad thing by itself, but the money saved would have been better invested in retraining and education for the communities in the North of England. At the time of these cutbacks, the local people were crying out for financial assistance in regenerating their cities, but Mrs T. wouldn't help - She was only interested in tax-breaks for the City. As a result the Militant faction of Labour gained power. This led to Mrs T. imposing rate-capping on the various Labour city councils. Both sides (Militant Labour and the Conservatives) realized that this was going to be the class war of the decade and were determined to fight to the bitter end.
The collateral damage of this war, was that the middle classes left the inner cities a generation ago, moved down South and have never returned. It was only a decade later with financial aid from the EEC that the North of England is slowly regenerating. But the only new business that are setting up are service jobs: supermarkets, pubs, nightclubs and maybe the odd software company,.which usually gets bought out.
Instead, the communities in the North of England have continued emigration, with everyone who could, having moved down to the South of England, which itself is now becoming overcrowded and overpriced (So overcrowded, that they even building flats and houses on the communal piece of grass in the squares (three streets facing each other).
The current Labour government is trying to fix this "North-South divide" by dispersing asylum seekers and moving government jobs away from the South of England, but everyone wants to stay where the wealth is.
... the search engine will support ASCII art image searches.
I am lost for words to say...
First, they collect your search information. Next they collected your email. Now they collect your destination. You put it all together, that is quite a bit of information.
What is next?
They buy out www.archive.org and collect the evolution of your web site. It's going to be rather ironic to have google caching archive.org, and archive.org archiving google.
Then they buy out your ISP and collect the IP's that visit your web page (Of course, if your ISP has an online statistics page, they can already do this).
Humbug.
The Long John Silver Restaurant chain will be willing to offer free shrimp for a second time if this finds any fresh water. Of a man's appetite can dream.
"Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!"
So, what you're saying is that Blake's 7 is really about how life is right now? :)
I did think of commenting how the current problems of today would be the dystopia of immigration, overcrowding, lack of job security, no pensions/social security, fear of terrorism, the post-democratic era, obsession with biometric data, but all that was covered in Orwell's 1984 (facecrime etc..), but I couldn't think of anything for utopia (maybe cures for genetic diseases).
Seriously, the police in riots and "politically troublesome" situations have more than a passing resemblance to the Federation guard uniforms.
Tomorrow's World (A science review program) covered a story on what the riot police would wear (black waterproof/fireproof uniform with reflective lettering/stripes, helmet with visor, radio, transparent shield, and extendible baton, along with tear gas launchers. It really freaked everyone out to see these actually used in the Wapping riots.
It is interesting how other aspects of Blake's 7 are also starting to appear. The Liberator's "auto-repair circuits" parallel modern efforts to build self-repairing systems.
Not forgetting the Tarial Cells which were supposed to power every computer from Zen to Orac. Hopefully Sony/IBM's Cell processor will work.
Terry Nation's "Blake's 7",
If this sci-fi series was depressing, it was because everyone during this time (in the late 1970's/early 1980's) was depressed about the future. Everyone knew that advancing technology (in particular computers and genetics) was going to have a greater part of their lives, but didn't know how. So there was this fear that the world was going to become a worse place. There was even a genuine belief that a single 100,000 transistor chips would put hundreds of people out of work (The print workers went on strike because their jobs were going to be replaced by electronic publication, secretaries would become unemployed due to workprocessors and E-mail systems - see The Coming of the Chip).
The uniforms of the federation guards were based on the predictions of what the riot police of the future would look like (helmets, visors, gasmasks). Servolan's never-ending dependence on databases and sensors, reflected the fear of centralised databases.
The stories based on isolated research station on remote star-systems reflected the secrecy of the various research institutes in the UK.
I dunno, I work in a factory with no daylight, and long night-shifts, but peopel don't go out to eat, they just eat in the canteen like they always do.
You have a canteen - so you have somewhere to eat. The reason food is so important to Americans (or rather Silicon Valley) is very few companies have good (if any) on-site canteens.
Most of the office blocks were built on the assumption that everyone would take a 10 minute drive and eat elsewhere. Which was a good idea until the area developed economically, and the 10 minute drive became a 30 minute drive, so employees end up spending more time driving that eating.
As the original article described, the large companies with the best cafe's/eateries/canteens are the most popular to work for. Especially since there are so many nationalities (Mexican, Chinese, Indian, European) that have to be pleased.
I think Americans just like eating too much. They like eating large, hot greasy meals, so sandwiches/fruit doesn't cut it, they need to go to the local restaurant for a giant meal.
Actually, given the choice at a large canteen, staff would choose healthy meals (fruits, salads, wheat based pasta), but without that choice they would be forced to eat wherever was available, and this usually meant those places with the large, hot, greasy meals (which were usually the cheapest).
There's no incentive for a restaurant to improve the nutritional quality of their meals if they are always fully booked.
Computing while high is a relatively recent development that only became possible with the invention of the computer mouse. You can't innovate without concentration.
The most innovative developments have alway occurred when people were free of deadlines and were doing what they truly felt motivated to do.
If you've hit a brick wall in terms of development, it's always good to be able to take several steps backward, see everything in a new perspective and find a new way of putting things together. Under the pressure of deadlines, that isn't possible.
Because either way, you are going to have to define new process structures to represent each auxiliary processor units as well as the PowerPC CPU and recompile the kernel. For such real-time processing you want to keep the data structures to the absolute minimum and not have any 'fluff' left over from previous CPU architectures. Writing a kernel from scratch is the best way to achieve this.
Much like theTAOS OS did.