Really, what language you use in those first few programming classes is a secondary concern. You don't take those classes to learn the language (although that is a side effect), you take those classes to learn the fundimentals of programming, which apply to almost all computer languages (BASIC not withstanding). Once you learn the fundimentals, learning whatever language you need, be it C, C++, Python, Perl, Java, Lisp (not as much, functional programming languages are generally different enough from procedural languages that they require another class to use correctly).
I say, use whatever they are teaching, and if you don't like it then pick up another language. It's a lot easier to learn a programming language than it is to learn how to program.
My only concern is trying to shove too much syntax down the throat of first year students. Full blown OO languages tend to require a bit more typing than something like C for the trivial projects that students do, which may turn off some people (I know in my high school, the Pascal class lost 3/4 of it's slow typers on the second day. Worse, in high school almost everybody types slow.)
I guess you might want to avoid "bad habit" languages as well, like BASIC and possibly Perl. I'd also shy away from anything that the average windows user hasn't heard of like Scheme, Python, Modula II, Ada, or APL. You probabally want to chose something with good free or cheap compilers as well. Ada95 may be a nice language, but your school won't be able to afford the licenses for the compilers under Windows.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
If I'm getting 500mph, why in the world would I even care about seeing hydrogen at the pumps? A (small by todays standards) 10 gallon tank would give you a 5000 mile range. That's treating fillups the same way we treat oil changes today. I don't know about you, but I'm not to worried about what exactly is at the pump if my fuel costs (at $2 a gallon for gas, I assume you buy the nice stuff) for the entire life of your vehicle (100,000 miles, probably a little low, but remember you have to average out people totalling their vehicle right out the lot and letting it rust, etc..) are $400. I can see dealers advertising free fillups for the life of your car with these. Heck, the gas station as we know it might disappear (or be cut back at least) as most people might just get a fillup with the oil change or whatever general maintence you need.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Strangely enough, studies have shown than little girls will watch boy's cartoons, but boys won't watch girl's cartoons. Hence, those ads probabally WERE targeted at the little girls watching boys cartoons demographic. This is also why "She-ra" was summoned from the pits of hell, but that's a different story.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Hmm. I thought that was a little weird myself. If you somehow interface those prostetics/cybernetics to the nervous system well enough to type like he did, why not stick a USB port or a little wireless transmitter in your hand and skip the finger-splitting step altogether. Those fingers have to be murder to maintain, a simple direct connection seems faster and more efficent.
Then again, it did look cool.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Maybe I'm nuts, but was this article complete fluff or what? They seem to be saying that the cell phone transmitters can be used to work like radar, execpt that they have recievers scattered across the landscape instead of back at the source. I don't see the advantage here.
Besides, if it is merely a matter that the current stealth technology doesn't do a very good job of absorbing or directionally reflecting cell phone radiation, then you can bet the next generation (and the upgrades on the current generation) will. I think this story is just sensationalism. Besides, wasn't Doppler radar supposed to render stealth useless too? I don't remember hearing much about that other than a short blurb on the evening news back in '95. Somehow I doubt this is the end for stealth technology.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
If CmdrTaco hadn't put that disclaimer there, you can bet that the first 100 posts (there would be 500 in the first 15 minutes alone) would consist of people alternativly calling CmdrTaco an idiot for believing this sort of thing, and asking why in the world this was on Slashdot. I think that little paragraph really shot up the signal to noise ratio for this discussion (right now the s/n ratio is much higher than I thought it would be, and it looks like most people are taking the time to read the article!).
In other words, pull the stick out of your ass and enjoy the little diversion. Maybe in a few months Slashdot will interview Jack Chick or Archie Plutonium or someone other net.kook.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
If RIAA isn't planning on suing anybody, then why did they insist on changing the paper back in April, and why is Usenix so terrified about litigaction? Is it just because that press release only applies to Dr. Felton, and RIAA may still sue anybody else who tries to read (or attend a workshop on) the document under the DMCA? After all, that paper and the ideas contained within it is a "circumvention device" and quite to own under the DMCA.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Flikx's motivations for creating the site are irrelvant. The site was created by him with no input from the university (other than some requests for censorship). U of U took his graphics and layout work (actually probably Slashcode layout for the most part).
The real kicker is the university grabbed Flikx's content simply because they owned the server. If I lent you my computer for you to write your dissertation on, does that mean I own your dissertation? If I let your borrow my pen and paper to write a letter does it mean I own the letter? If you put up a website on any ISP (which is what the University was acting as in this case, Flikx paid for the account with his tuition in the same way you would pay for ISP bills) does it mean the ISP owns everything you put up there? Technically, since the University has copyright on his work, the offsite backups he made are illegal and are grounds for a very hefty fine and inprisonment, and will be for 70 more years.
This is sensational but it illustrates how messed up the copyright system is currently. Technically, the university could claim copyright on any page you publish, take down the page, and the have you arrested for copying the page illegaly (for having the local working version on your computer).
Honestly, if he tries, I think he can get his copyright back in court, but the battle will be expensive and the university will probably still expell him and deny all attempts to transfer credits elsewhere. Isn't copyright law fun.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Of course he couldn't set up anything simliar to SOS. The school has claimed copyright on his work, which means he has no rights to use it unless they are explicity given (unlikly). If he set up anything similar to what he already did, there is a good chance the school will slap him with a copyright infringement charge in addition to whatever else they are apparently doing. I'm surprised he can't get transfer credit anywhere though, certainly there are schools the country that are more liberal and will take his transfer credits instead of making him start over from square one.
If the school had simply said that they wouldn't host his site anymore and make him take it somewhere else, I'd agree with you 100%, but since they took all of his ideas and content and placed them under copyright, then I have to disagree with you. For that matter, what's to prevent ANY isp you host with from taking over your material? I mean the reason the school took it was because they owned the servers (although his tuition paid for those servers), but your ISP owns it's own servers as well. The same logic would seem to apply. I don't know many ISP TOSes that explicity protect your content from this sort of thing (0 actually).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I believe B is the correct answer. Iridium was sold to another company that also happened to call itself Iridium I think. The whole situtation got a bit messy there for awhile, and everybody got tired of reading: Iridium is dead! Iridium is back! Iridium is dead! Iridium is back! Apparently somewhere along the way someone who actually knew what they were doing bought the satellites and infastructure and decided to try to make it work.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Well, each transmission has to go up to a satellite, be retransmitted (on a shared antenna with all of the other phones) to the satellite currently over the switch you're using, send down to the switch, modulated into a PPP connection that is sent to the ISP near the downlink, sent over the internet and then back again. Considering how all satellite transmissions are shared and how you have to bounce between satellites your packets end up sitting in queues quite a bit.
Those Geo solutions you are looking at require MUCH more transmit power and MUCH larger antennas. 40Mbps is going to require a directional antenna if you want to use it for uplink. Downlink is much easier, but you better belive you are going to pay through the nose for that bandwidth (unless it is part of some broadcast service like DirectTV that you don't actually have control over).
One more thing, Iridium is global, many other geo satellite services only offer coverage in North America and Europe. Omnitracs for instance has no coverage in Africa (Omnitracs was designed to track vehicle movement, FexEx uses it to keep track of it's trucks, and I think they may use it to send updates to the order tracking system since I've receved FedEx packages before and checked the website 3 minutes later to discover my package was already marked delivered).
By the way, there are very few cybercafes in the middle of the ocean, or in the Sahara, or even in the more desolate parts of Africa (Read: anything that is not a major city or anybody who is still fighting a blood feud with their neighbor after 100 years).
Hmm I'm not very good at reading Italian, just how much uplink bandwidth do you get with this free service? Who paid to put the satellite up there? It looks like one of those DSS style systems, which makes me think you might have to buy Satellite TV (not a bad deal actually) to use this thing. Of course it's another example of broadcast technologies that can be cheaper because of economies of scale, and most likely because they offer up the bandwidth the aren't using (yet) for free, so the more channels they add the crappier your service gets.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
The article is wrong, Iridium DID offer some data services (they were pretty much still in development when the company went bankrupt though) that were quite unimpressive. Basically, it was a small dongle that attached to the bottom of the phone with an RS232 port on it that you could hook to a laptop. The phone emulated a fairly bare bones 2400bps modem. Unfortunatly the connection was basically just sending data over the same channel it normally sent digitized voice traffic (which is why people used to sound so tinny on those phones, their voice was being encoded at 2400bps!) which left you with rather high latency (~1 second round trip ping times for instance). Because the handoff wasn't perfected yet with the data traffic (sound worked a lot better) you would frequntly be disconnected after 8-15 minutes or so. Honestly, it wasn't fast or reliable enough to run pine over, although it was OK for ftping a mail spool file and opening it locally. Any sort of realtime interactive game is out of the question, and really anything online other than quick email or light web browsing (we had a little program that would proxy the web for us and compress the pages down for transmission over the satellite).
There is some good news though. The service is a lot better if you get out of the city (driving down 81 I was able to keep the connection running for nearly 20 minutes once) and it does work EVERYWHERE. Finally, you do get better data rates with this than many (most) other commerically avilable satellite services (ComTech (~24 bytes a second, several second latency), OmniTracs (~7-8 bytes a second, several minute latency), and others).
Next time you need to check your email in the middle of Africa, you will thank your lucky stars that Iridium exists though, since your choices are the cheap-by-satellite-comms standards Iridium, or a much heavier much bulkier much much more expensive satellite solution.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
That's the burst speed your thinking of. The sustained data rate on an IDE drive is much lower than that. When you have to seek to 8 different spots on the disk constantly during your writes it will be even slower than that.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
They are forbidden to declare war against the US. Does that sound like sovereignty?
Wow, I didn't know you had to have permission from you opponent before you could declare war on them. Boy, international politics should be a lot easier: "I declare war on you"
"Sorry, you can't do that, I won't acknowledge it"
"But I really want to, PLEEEASE let me declare war on you"
"Sorry, maybe next year"
On a side note. (WARNING: Rant approaching!) Why do we Americans beat ourselves up constantly over the Indians. It's not like it was the first or last time in history a force with a superior military conquered an idiginous people. Why are we as Americans so hung up on this. Sins of the Father (or Great Grandfather in this case) don't carry down to the family, unless you are a society I guess.
Oh, and before all of the Europeans get high and mighty on us, just remember the Aztecs[1], Pagans, Ottomans, and many others. I don't want to read N posts saying "That's why everyone knows America Sucks" for the umteenth time.
[1] Technically we should blame the Central Americans for this, but I mostly blame the Spanish since they were pretty much wiping out the Aztecs as part of settling on the land instead of waiting until they needed to landgrab the entire country years later.
End Rant Mode
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Just because you can't read other langauges doesn't mean multi-language support is useless. Oh, and inputting Kanji on a keyboard is quite feasable, try using the Windows IME sometime (It's built into 2000).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Ah, I love reading Slashdot, it always has the best disinformation! Not two articles away from the big discussion on the Human Extinction Project to boot. What a great website!
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Please make the media for these drives cost at least twice as much as a hard drive of the same size, Oh, and never ever bring the price down so nobody will feel compelled to use it for anything.
When Zip first came out I tought "They are going to kill floppies" Of course floppy technology was pretty much on it's death bed already, but Zip drives looked to fill the void left by floppy drives, and IOmega was poised to make a fortune on the media once people started thinking of them as disposable and started buying 100 packs. Then I realized the parallel port interface most people used was slow, and IOmega never seemed willing to drop the media costs down to the
Maybe IOmega really stands for Incredibly Overpriced media electronics guarenteed awful.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Um, I count any unreadable CD as surprising. CD technology is pretty well understood, and somebody has to work had to make a CD that will fail in some percentage of CD-ROMs but not others. No, I'd say the onerious copyright mechanism is noteworthy and certainly something I hope other manufacturers don't start to repeat. Not only is that protection mostly worthless (I bet there was still 0-day Warez out for this game), but it just makes the entire experiance more hostile for the user.
Personally, nothing turns me off on a company faster than user-hostile or invasive practices, which is why I used to crack all of the copy protection on the software I bought (especially when it consisted of looking up work x on page x in the manual!), even though I never actually copied it for anyone else.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
One advantage that ReiserFS and XFS are supposed to hold over ext2fs and other ufs based filesystems is the directory lookup time on directories with moderate to moderatly large numbers of files (1 million to 10 million or so). Does anybody know of any benchmarks available on the net that can backup this claim? If you want to test it yourself, you can look into Postmark which is easy to compile and simulates a heavily loaded mail or news server.
Unfortunatly the primary site appears to be down (I just downloaded the file a couple of days ago!), but if it comes back the primary distribution site is:
http://www.netapp.com/ftp/postmark-1_13.c
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Actually the ISS is a good canidate for this technology. Just because someone is in orbit doesn't mean communication is easy. First off, the distances involved still add quite a bit of lag to the communction, second the window in which you can transmit before the ISS moves out of range of your antenna is quite small, so you have to really pack as much data as you can into that window, which is what this technology excells at.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
This is the same technology (SCPS gateways for instance) that is used to talk to some LEO satellites and the Space Shuttle, where you only have window of a few minutes to transmit whatever data you have.
Some of the technologies used in this are also applicable to any low bandwidth high latency connection. IP header compression is a prime example of this. Most people on Slashdot probably havn't considered the consequences of using IP over a link with a bandwidth measured in the low double digit bytes per second where return traffic may take several minutes to reach you, but people working with secure communications or low power long distance wireless links sure have.
One final thing I'm sure will interest many Slashdotters, the SCPS gateway runs on FreeBSD (and many other platforms as well, but it was developed under FreeBSD).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Read the article, the inventor here managed to keep the weight down to that of an Intellimouse (granted, the Intellimouse is easily the heavist mouse I've ever used). He didn't address my #2 concern (after the weight one of course): This looks a lot more fragile than your average mouse. Mice take quite of bit of punishment over their lifetime, and now this guy is attaching half of an ultralight keyboard to the nose of it and we are supposed to avoid banging it on every other thing littering our desks. Worse, he used a laptop keyboard, and laptop keyboards generally have terrible tactile feedback.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Selling one book costs us $5, we sell it for $4.50.
Now we sell a million of them and make a profit (when the integer holding your "profit" underflows perhaps?)
There are economic theories that allow you to reduce costs when working in volume, but if you sell everything below cost you will never turn a profit. See the previous post in this thread that goes into detail so gory it should be on The Stile Project.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, what language you use in those first few programming classes is a secondary concern. You don't take those classes to learn the language (although that is a side effect), you take those classes to learn the fundimentals of programming, which apply to almost all computer languages (BASIC not withstanding). Once you learn the fundimentals, learning whatever language you need, be it C, C++, Python, Perl, Java, Lisp (not as much, functional programming languages are generally different enough from procedural languages that they require another class to use correctly).
I say, use whatever they are teaching, and if you don't like it then pick up another language. It's a lot easier to learn a programming language than it is to learn how to program.
My only concern is trying to shove too much syntax down the throat of first year students. Full blown OO languages tend to require a bit more typing than something like C for the trivial projects that students do, which may turn off some people (I know in my high school, the Pascal class lost 3/4 of it's slow typers on the second day. Worse, in high school almost everybody types slow.)
I guess you might want to avoid "bad habit" languages as well, like BASIC and possibly Perl. I'd also shy away from anything that the average windows user hasn't heard of like Scheme, Python, Modula II, Ada, or APL. You probabally want to chose something with good free or cheap compilers as well. Ada95 may be a nice language, but your school won't be able to afford the licenses for the compilers under Windows.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
If I'm getting 500mph, why in the world would I even care about seeing hydrogen at the pumps? A (small by todays standards) 10 gallon tank would give you a 5000 mile range. That's treating fillups the same way we treat oil changes today. I don't know about you, but I'm not to worried about what exactly is at the pump if my fuel costs (at $2 a gallon for gas, I assume you buy the nice stuff) for the entire life of your vehicle (100,000 miles, probably a little low, but remember you have to average out people totalling their vehicle right out the lot and letting it rust, etc..) are $400. I can see dealers advertising free fillups for the life of your car with these. Heck, the gas station as we know it might disappear (or be cut back at least) as most people might just get a fillup with the oil change or whatever general maintence you need.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Strangely enough, studies have shown than little girls will watch boy's cartoons, but boys won't watch girl's cartoons. Hence, those ads probabally WERE targeted at the little girls watching boys cartoons demographic. This is also why "She-ra" was summoned from the pits of hell, but that's a different story.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Hmm. I thought that was a little weird myself. If you somehow interface those prostetics/cybernetics to the nervous system well enough to type like he did, why not stick a USB port or a little wireless transmitter in your hand and skip the finger-splitting step altogether. Those fingers have to be murder to maintain, a simple direct connection seems faster and more efficent.
Then again, it did look cool.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Maybe I'm nuts, but was this article complete fluff or what? They seem to be saying that the cell phone transmitters can be used to work like radar, execpt that they have recievers scattered across the landscape instead of back at the source. I don't see the advantage here.
Besides, if it is merely a matter that the current stealth technology doesn't do a very good job of absorbing or directionally reflecting cell phone radiation, then you can bet the next generation (and the upgrades on the current generation) will. I think this story is just sensationalism. Besides, wasn't Doppler radar supposed to render stealth useless too? I don't remember hearing much about that other than a short blurb on the evening news back in '95. Somehow I doubt this is the end for stealth technology.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Dude, that is soo 1897.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
If CmdrTaco hadn't put that disclaimer there, you can bet that the first 100 posts (there would be 500 in the first 15 minutes alone) would consist of people alternativly calling CmdrTaco an idiot for believing this sort of thing, and asking why in the world this was on Slashdot. I think that little paragraph really shot up the signal to noise ratio for this discussion (right now the s/n ratio is much higher than I thought it would be, and it looks like most people are taking the time to read the article!).
In other words, pull the stick out of your ass and enjoy the little diversion. Maybe in a few months Slashdot will interview Jack Chick or Archie Plutonium or someone other net.kook.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
If RIAA isn't planning on suing anybody, then why did they insist on changing the paper back in April, and why is Usenix so terrified about litigaction? Is it just because that press release only applies to Dr. Felton, and RIAA may still sue anybody else who tries to read (or attend a workshop on) the document under the DMCA? After all, that paper and the ideas contained within it is a "circumvention device" and quite to own under the DMCA.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Flikx's motivations for creating the site are irrelvant. The site was created by him with no input from the university (other than some requests for censorship). U of U took his graphics and layout work (actually probably Slashcode layout for the most part).
The real kicker is the university grabbed Flikx's content simply because they owned the server. If I lent you my computer for you to write your dissertation on, does that mean I own your dissertation? If I let your borrow my pen and paper to write a letter does it mean I own the letter? If you put up a website on any ISP (which is what the University was acting as in this case, Flikx paid for the account with his tuition in the same way you would pay for ISP bills) does it mean the ISP owns everything you put up there? Technically, since the University has copyright on his work, the offsite backups he made are illegal and are grounds for a very hefty fine and inprisonment, and will be for 70 more years.
This is sensational but it illustrates how messed up the copyright system is currently. Technically, the university could claim copyright on any page you publish, take down the page, and the have you arrested for copying the page illegaly (for having the local working version on your computer).
Honestly, if he tries, I think he can get his copyright back in court, but the battle will be expensive and the university will probably still expell him and deny all attempts to transfer credits elsewhere. Isn't copyright law fun.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Of course he couldn't set up anything simliar to SOS. The school has claimed copyright on his work, which means he has no rights to use it unless they are explicity given (unlikly). If he set up anything similar to what he already did, there is a good chance the school will slap him with a copyright infringement charge in addition to whatever else they are apparently doing. I'm surprised he can't get transfer credit anywhere though, certainly there are schools the country that are more liberal and will take his transfer credits instead of making him start over from square one.
If the school had simply said that they wouldn't host his site anymore and make him take it somewhere else, I'd agree with you 100%, but since they took all of his ideas and content and placed them under copyright, then I have to disagree with you. For that matter, what's to prevent ANY isp you host with from taking over your material? I mean the reason the school took it was because they owned the servers (although his tuition paid for those servers), but your ISP owns it's own servers as well. The same logic would seem to apply. I don't know many ISP TOSes that explicity protect your content from this sort of thing (0 actually).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I believe B is the correct answer. Iridium was sold to another company that also happened to call itself Iridium I think. The whole situtation got a bit messy there for awhile, and everybody got tired of reading: Iridium is dead! Iridium is back! Iridium is dead! Iridium is back! Apparently somewhere along the way someone who actually knew what they were doing bought the satellites and infastructure and decided to try to make it work.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Well, each transmission has to go up to a satellite, be retransmitted (on a shared antenna with all of the other phones) to the satellite currently over the switch you're using, send down to the switch, modulated into a PPP connection that is sent to the ISP near the downlink, sent over the internet and then back again. Considering how all satellite transmissions are shared and how you have to bounce between satellites your packets end up sitting in queues quite a bit.
Those Geo solutions you are looking at require MUCH more transmit power and MUCH larger antennas. 40Mbps is going to require a directional antenna if you want to use it for uplink. Downlink is much easier, but you better belive you are going to pay through the nose for that bandwidth (unless it is part of some broadcast service like DirectTV that you don't actually have control over).
One more thing, Iridium is global, many other geo satellite services only offer coverage in North America and Europe. Omnitracs for instance has no coverage in Africa (Omnitracs was designed to track vehicle movement, FexEx uses it to keep track of it's trucks, and I think they may use it to send updates to the order tracking system since I've receved FedEx packages before and checked the website 3 minutes later to discover my package was already marked delivered).
By the way, there are very few cybercafes in the middle of the ocean, or in the Sahara, or even in the more desolate parts of Africa (Read: anything that is not a major city or anybody who is still fighting a blood feud with their neighbor after 100 years).
Hmm I'm not very good at reading Italian, just how much uplink bandwidth do you get with this free service? Who paid to put the satellite up there? It looks like one of those DSS style systems, which makes me think you might have to buy Satellite TV (not a bad deal actually) to use this thing. Of course it's another example of broadcast technologies that can be cheaper because of economies of scale, and most likely because they offer up the bandwidth the aren't using (yet) for free, so the more channels they add the crappier your service gets.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
The article is wrong, Iridium DID offer some data services (they were pretty much still in development when the company went bankrupt though) that were quite unimpressive. Basically, it was a small dongle that attached to the bottom of the phone with an RS232 port on it that you could hook to a laptop. The phone emulated a fairly bare bones 2400bps modem. Unfortunatly the connection was basically just sending data over the same channel it normally sent digitized voice traffic (which is why people used to sound so tinny on those phones, their voice was being encoded at 2400bps!) which left you with rather high latency (~1 second round trip ping times for instance). Because the handoff wasn't perfected yet with the data traffic (sound worked a lot better) you would frequntly be disconnected after 8-15 minutes or so. Honestly, it wasn't fast or reliable enough to run pine over, although it was OK for ftping a mail spool file and opening it locally. Any sort of realtime interactive game is out of the question, and really anything online other than quick email or light web browsing (we had a little program that would proxy the web for us and compress the pages down for transmission over the satellite).
There is some good news though. The service is a lot better if you get out of the city (driving down 81 I was able to keep the connection running for nearly 20 minutes once) and it does work EVERYWHERE. Finally, you do get better data rates with this than many (most) other commerically avilable satellite services (ComTech (~24 bytes a second, several second latency), OmniTracs (~7-8 bytes a second, several minute latency), and others).
Next time you need to check your email in the middle of Africa, you will thank your lucky stars that Iridium exists though, since your choices are the cheap-by-satellite-comms standards Iridium, or a much heavier much bulkier much much more expensive satellite solution.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
That's the burst speed your thinking of. The sustained data rate on an IDE drive is much lower than that. When you have to seek to 8 different spots on the disk constantly during your writes it will be even slower than that.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
They are forbidden to declare war against the US. Does that sound like sovereignty?
Wow, I didn't know you had to have permission from you opponent before you could declare war on them. Boy, international politics should be a lot easier:
"I declare war on you"
"Sorry, you can't do that, I won't acknowledge it"
"But I really want to, PLEEEASE let me declare war on you"
"Sorry, maybe next year"
On a side note. (WARNING: Rant approaching!) Why do we Americans beat ourselves up constantly over the Indians. It's not like it was the first or last time in history a force with a superior military conquered an idiginous people. Why are we as Americans so hung up on this. Sins of the Father (or Great Grandfather in this case) don't carry down to the family, unless you are a society I guess.
Oh, and before all of the Europeans get high and mighty on us, just remember the Aztecs[1], Pagans, Ottomans, and many others. I don't want to read N posts saying "That's why everyone knows America Sucks" for the umteenth time.
[1] Technically we should blame the Central Americans for this, but I mostly blame the Spanish since they were pretty much wiping out the Aztecs as part of settling on the land instead of waiting until they needed to landgrab the entire country years later.
End Rant Mode
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Just because you can't read other langauges doesn't mean multi-language support is useless. Oh, and inputting Kanji on a keyboard is quite feasable, try using the Windows IME sometime (It's built into 2000).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Ah, I love reading Slashdot, it always has the best disinformation! Not two articles away from the big discussion on the Human Extinction Project to boot. What a great website!
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Please make the media for these drives cost at least twice as much as a hard drive of the same size, Oh, and never ever bring the price down so nobody will feel compelled to use it for anything.
When Zip first came out I tought "They are going to kill floppies" Of course floppy technology was pretty much on it's death bed already, but Zip drives looked to fill the void left by floppy drives, and IOmega was poised to make a fortune on the media once people started thinking of them as disposable and started buying 100 packs. Then I realized the parallel port interface most people used was slow, and IOmega never seemed willing to drop the media costs down to the
Maybe IOmega really stands for Incredibly Overpriced media electronics guarenteed awful.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Um, I count any unreadable CD as surprising. CD technology is pretty well understood, and somebody has to work had to make a CD that will fail in some percentage of CD-ROMs but not others. No, I'd say the onerious copyright mechanism is noteworthy and certainly something I hope other manufacturers don't start to repeat. Not only is that protection mostly worthless (I bet there was still 0-day Warez out for this game), but it just makes the entire experiance more hostile for the user.
Personally, nothing turns me off on a company faster than user-hostile or invasive practices, which is why I used to crack all of the copy protection on the software I bought (especially when it consisted of looking up work x on page x in the manual!), even though I never actually copied it for anyone else.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
One advantage that ReiserFS and XFS are supposed to hold over ext2fs and other ufs based filesystems is the directory lookup time on directories with moderate to moderatly large numbers of files (1 million to 10 million or so). Does anybody know of any benchmarks available on the net that can backup this claim? If you want to test it yourself, you can look into Postmark which is easy to compile and simulates a heavily loaded mail or news server.
Unfortunatly the primary site appears to be down (I just downloaded the file a couple of days ago!), but if it comes back the primary distribution site is: http://www.netapp.com/ftp/postmark-1_13.c
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You know, I think everybody who cares saw this the first 1000 times you posted it, you can turn off your autoposting bot now.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Actually the ISS is a good canidate for this technology. Just because someone is in orbit doesn't mean communication is easy. First off, the distances involved still add quite a bit of lag to the communction, second the window in which you can transmit before the ISS moves out of range of your antenna is quite small, so you have to really pack as much data as you can into that window, which is what this technology excells at.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
This is the same technology (SCPS gateways for instance) that is used to talk to some LEO satellites and the Space Shuttle, where you only have window of a few minutes to transmit whatever data you have.
Some of the technologies used in this are also applicable to any low bandwidth high latency connection. IP header compression is a prime example of this. Most people on Slashdot probably havn't considered the consequences of using IP over a link with a bandwidth measured in the low double digit bytes per second where return traffic may take several minutes to reach you, but people working with secure communications or low power long distance wireless links sure have.
One final thing I'm sure will interest many Slashdotters, the SCPS gateway runs on FreeBSD (and many other platforms as well, but it was developed under FreeBSD).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Read the article, the inventor here managed to keep the weight down to that of an Intellimouse (granted, the Intellimouse is easily the heavist mouse I've ever used). He didn't address my #2 concern (after the weight one of course): This looks a lot more fragile than your average mouse. Mice take quite of bit of punishment over their lifetime, and now this guy is attaching half of an ultralight keyboard to the nose of it and we are supposed to avoid banging it on every other thing littering our desks. Worse, he used a laptop keyboard, and laptop keyboards generally have terrible tactile feedback.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Interesting theory:
Selling one book costs us $5, we sell it for $4.50.
Now we sell a million of them and make a profit (when the integer holding your "profit" underflows perhaps?)
There are economic theories that allow you to reduce costs when working in volume, but if you sell everything below cost you will never turn a profit. See the previous post in this thread that goes into detail so gory it should be on The Stile Project.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.