The FCC has told TV stations to transition to digital TV. The 12/31/2006 date is a goal, but there are extension built into the rules that WILL be invoked, so expect analog to stay on the air through 2008 at least. Many DTV stations are already on the air, though not all shows are produced with HDTV quality. After the deadline, analog TV transmitters will go dark and the broadcasters will be back to one channel, DTV, between channels 2 and 51 (52+ are being recycled).
The DTV standard uses a single TV channel with digital modulation to create a >20Mbps bitstream. That stream can be used for a single HDTV show or multiple lower-rate streams. MPEG-2 compression, used on satellites for high-quality feeds, is generally 6 Mbps; HDTV has various formats that compress to under 20 Mbps.
If you don't, then knowing all there is to know about your major shouldn't be worth more than, say, half of a degree, from any respectable school. That's because a college degree (undergrad BA/BS level) implies more than passing your major, it implies some degree of general education. It means you've taken the "distribution requirements" in humanities, sciences, etc. That's what distinguishes college from trade school. A college grad should have been exposed to at least a good selection from literature, art, history, economics, and other subjects utterly unrelated to the major. And should be able to write a decent essay, if not a thesis -- literacy is a two way street.
At the grad school level, your work experience and trade ability are more focused. But don't confuse training with education.
I work at a major consulting firm, in a technical group. We're largely a bunch of liberal arts majors who have technical skills. Moving up in consulting requires educational breadth, not depth. At least not the kind of depth you get in college.
Ah, PC cassette decks. Brings back the good;-) old days of the 1970s... and reminds me of a story.
I went to work for a publisher who was launching a new computer-hobbyist magazine. (No names, but rhymes with "fright".) In his office was one of those brand-new MITS Altair 8800s. It was running a blinkinglight routine, its binary string of lights simply counting upwards. Its main I/O consisted of the front panel lights, the front panel sense switches (something like 8 bits, address, store, and load next, IIRC), and a cassette connection.
Now to boot this puppy, you used the sense switches to load a 30ish byte bootstrap program into memory. One byte at a time, each bit set individually. Like an old PDP-8 or other primitive mini, which it was designed to resemble.
On cassette, we had Altair 4K Basic. But we couldn't figure out how to get it working. We did manage, however, to get the system to read in at least some of the tape. Then we read out the ASCII from the binary patterns on the lights and decoded the message. Something like this:
MICROSOFT ALTAIR BASIC COPYRIGHT 1975 BILL GATES AND MONTE DAVIDOFF. Then some binary.
So we called up MITS in Albuquerque and asked to speak to Mr. Gates. He got on the phone and explained how to read in the tape and start it executing. This let us then use a terminal like a Teletype 33 as an I/O device.
Who would have imagined?
(Okay, it's a digression, but it wasn't until about five years later that floppies became affordable to the high-end home user, so various incompatible cassette-input systems remained popular for several years. And were never much good. There were even "standards" for bits on cassette, like Tarbell and Oklahoma City.)
Y'know, I was playing Flight Simulator today. And then I saw that Norad Santacam. Hmmm, looks a little similar; you have a sprite of Santa in this flying contraption, atop some scenery. Hey, what would it be like to fly one of those things? No throttle, but reins, and minimal instrumentation. It's certainly fast enough, navigable, and doesn't need regular airports to land at. Yeah, that'd be a nice addition! Why just airplanes and helicopters?
You might have to set the date to late December to get it to take off, though.
You understate how difficult the bottled water business is.
You need to find a good spring/source ("source" btw is the French word for "spring", and the good ones aren't usually "open"). You need to constantly check the water quality, and be subject to government inspections. You need to collect it, and bottle it in clean bottles which btw aren't free either. You need to truck it around (water's heavy) to its end user. You need to market it, because it's a competitive business. You need to maintain those bubbler/cooler/heaters that the large bottles sit on.
There's some software floating around which looks, on the other hand, to be about as quality controlled as you'd find by filling old Coke bottles from the stream running behind a factory in Woburn.
Yes, the Bells want competition. About as much as Fidel Castro wants free elections. I know well; I work with CLECs, write business plans for them, work on the interconnect agreements between CLECs and Bells, etc. The Bells do every trick in the book, and then some, and know that they can get away with flouting the law by using political influence.
The Bells are the holders of the former AT&T local monopoly. AT&T got the monopoly in 1876 via the patent. When that expired, they bought another patent (Putin's, for the loading coil) that gave them a monopoly on calls of more than ten or so miles. When that expired, they already had a huge advantage over their many, many competitors (CLECs were common as dirt ninety years ago). They then agreed to become a regulated monopoly, and the other local phone companies either accepted a buyout, shut down, or stayed out of Bell territories (whose territorial borders, most of the urban/low-cost-to-serve areas, were then blocked from expansion). So we ended up with multiple local monoplies.
Those days are over. VZ wants it all, minus the regulation. Whatever works for CLECs, they'll come out against it. Count on it.
There is a natural monopoly -- extremely difficult barrier to entry due to the cost of entry vs. economies of scale -- in one major sector of the phone market. That's the local loop to residential and non-huge business locations. You can't just string more wire in hopes of getting market share: The cost is largely per home passed, and if you string second wire, you'll start with a lower market share and thus a higher per-subscriber cost. You basically can't win unless the incumbent (monopoly) really screws the pooch.
But everything else is not a natural monopoly. Services are not. DSL, dial tone (switching), and other services delivered over the wire are not natural monopolies. Congress recognized this is 1996 when it passed the Telecom Act, which called for the network to be unbundled. Thus competitors can lease VZ's wires, and the wires of every other incumbent telco, at a rate based (per the law) on cost plus a reasonable profit. And btw in order to use the wire, the competitor needs collocation rights in the central office where the wire ends.
What the despicable scum running VZ want, however, is to be relieved of their obligation to lease the raw wire. Not that there have ever been terror attacks by competitors' technicians. Not that competitors are subject to loose security; indeed, they can only get unescorted access to the CO if they are accessing a collocation room or cage separate from VZ's own equipment. Competitors don't get to touch VZ's gear.
Without access to the loop, "competition" will be limited to cable companies, cellular companies, and huge customers who can justify trenching fiber optics to their site. Except for the cableco, consumers will be left with a monopoly of VZ's frequently awful service.
Sure, the technology's cool. But the way Uncle (Frank Charlie) Charlie licensed it is indicative of everything that's wrong with modern American media.
With broadcast radio, in urban areas at least, there used to be a lot of broadcasters. Now they're allowed to consolidate so Clear Channel and Viacom own most of the stations. College radio and a handful of local holdouts are what remains of diversity.
With satellite radio, they cut right to the chase. Two licenses, nationwide, high capital corporate players. No other diversity. Sure, those players can select their providers from a diverse supply, if they so choose. But only if the dollars say so. No equivalent of Cable Leased Access, which theoretically allows anybody to buy a slot on a cable network, or for that matter cable's Public Access. Just 100 channels of what your Providers wants. Big Brother Knows Best. In the olden days, if there were a "natural monopoly" of this sort (if, for techical reasons, there could only be one or two providers, each with many channels, which seems to be the case here), then there might be the common carrier obligation or more open third-party-programming rules. But that's not what the content monopolists want.
Worse, the two systems are not interoperable. So you can't even pick one. You get either Sirius or XM, depending on which car (or aftermarket radio) you buy. So the duopoly is really a monopoly so far as listeners are concerned -- at least with broadcast radio, you get your choice of Viacom or Clear Channel pablum. And that interesting stuff down at the low end of the dial.
This is the DMCA's companion, a broadcast model from hell.
Pinball was a different situation. The City of Chicago banned it inside the city limits, largely, I think, because it was used for illegal gambling. Which was ironic because Chicago was the place where most of the machines were made (Chicago Coin, Chicago Dynamic Industries, etc.). Or perhaps that was why it had once gotten out of hand.
I grew up in the New York area where pinball was everywhere and considered quite harmless. Sure, if you "won" (mostly on skill) you got a free game for your quarter. But that wasn't really gambling. Indeed a good resort hotel was one where the kids' area (in those days, the early sixties, many resort hotels had supervised summer camp-like kids' programs; as a parent today, I miss them) had a *free* pinball machine (often just the door taken off the coin box). I played them the way kids today play video games. And the video game largely killed pinball by displacing it from arcades, though there are some diehard pinball fans and some machines still around.
The Lionandlamb listing is, as others have noted, a list of violent, not "dangerous", games and toys. A different list comes out every year of dangerous toys, things that can actually hurt your body. Check out http://www.toysafety.org . Most of these look innocent but have parts that come loose in the wrong way, or have some other non-obvious hazard.
Re:How Would the Telcos Pervert This One?
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Why ADCo?
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The old AT&T monopoly wasn't proclaimed by the government as you assume. It came in stages.
Stage 1: In 1876, Al Bell patented the telphone. He didn't actually have the working design (Elisha Gray did), but he got his patent application in earlier and had the better patent attorney. That gave him and his backers 17 years of monopoly, as with any patent. They didn't choose to license it.
Stage 2: In 1893, competition began. Al Strowger invented the dial. Bell Telephone bought the loading coil patent from Putin, increasing the range of the phone from a few miles to a few dozen. (No amplifiers yet.) So Bell had, by dint of a non-licensed patent, had another monopoly, on long distance. Independent telcos sprang up like weeds delivering local service, many with dial (which Bell didn't have until the 1920s, when Strowger's patents had run out).
In 1912, Bell, already dominant, entered into an agreement with the feds. They stopped buying up independent telephone companies, and agreed to interconnect the networks for toll calls. So the industry was formed. Bell had almost all the LD and most of the local business, but small local telcos continued to operate. Later, state regulators enshrined the monopolies into rules.
Patents gave Bell a head start. So they were able to become dominant, in a business where economy of scale matters. That's what makes it so hard to compete with them for wire: It costs money to pass houses, and if you have an 80%/20% market split, the 20% player's cost per home will be, oh, roughly four times the 80% player's, and they'll lose money.
I don't think that the record labels want or expect these services to succeed. They are designed to fail. When they fail, the record labels will have the cover of "plausible deniability" they need. They can say that honest people don't want online music, that they really want to purchase CDs, and that the role of the Internet is to accept orders for copy-protected CDs that can be mailed to them. Now nobody will believe this, but it will be all that Congress needs. That's where the game is played.
And because Congress is in their pockets, they're protected by the DMCA. If (well, "when" is more appropriate) anyone cracks the service, they'll be liable for prosecution. So will web sites that post the cracks, although of course there will be just as many of these as there are sites carrying DeCSS. Again, it'll be a way of separating the world into "thieves" and their good customers.
These services download proprietary encrypted formats, which is why there can be timebombs. They might be semi-useful for a Kid In A Dorm Room, for whom the computer (consumer grade Windows box with subwoofer, etc.) has become the music system. But if you can't move it to a real disk or portable MP3 player, then it's not going to be usable on your real hifi system or in the car. Big whoop. Again, designed to fail. Why pay $10/month for what is, in effect, the right to sample things?
Now personally, I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for the right to download some number of tracks a month, in an unrestricted format, and/or to sample (stream, whatever) from a catalog before buying. Then I'd burn my own CDs. The artists could make just as much as they do now. But the record labels are wedded to their high-overhead business models and don't care what the customers want.
I expect an impasse to last for some time, with online filesharing continuing one step ahead of the law, until some successful artists band together and join an alternative to the Big 5 record labels. That alternative would promote online distribution as well as sell CDs, and would have the clout to buy radio play. No, not MP3.com, which was basically unsigned acts.
F. Badger's post was below my threshold, but in any case HE was presumably joking. There is no particular connection between 3GIO noise and 3G wireless. Buses make noise and radios are sensitive, but he was presumably punning on "3G". This is Slashdot, after all, where bad jokes turn into unsubstantiated rumors. You apparently took him too seriously.
In the cellphone context, "3G" refers to the next generation of wireless services. These will have faster data capabilities (>100 kbps). 3G licenses have been auctioned off in some European countries for ridiculous amounts of money, with nothing to show for it for a while and little hope of payback.
"3GIO" in the PCISIG sense refers to an interconnection technology on printed circuit boards. No radio, except maybe some unwanted emissions....
What the two have in common is an excessive use of the "3G" label, as in too many episodes of Star Trek.
Why a switch is often better than a hub:
A hub is basically passive. All of the ports have to be running the same speed. A switch is active. Each port is handled independently, so you can mix 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps devices.
While a lot of newer stuff is 100 Mbps, there's still a lot of 10 Mbps kit out there, so a switch lets you migrate as you please.
I disagree with the characterization of DR-DOS as an upgraded CP/M-86. It was a virtually complete clone of MS-DOS. It hit the market, as I recall, during the late-'80s boom of MS-DOS 3.x. DR-DOS 3.31 was the first release I was familiar with, being a work-alike of MS-DOS 3.3. But it wasn't a clone. Unlike MS-DOS 3.x, DR-DOS code was re-entrant, so it could be run from ROM. This gave it a niche in embedded systems.
DR-DOS 5 added a bunch of features, and DR-DOS 6 had more. I bought DR-DOS 6 around 1990, when I bought a 286. It included disk compression (SuperStor, I think) before DOS did; that helped a lot with my 20 MB drive! It had a lousy graphical shell that I never used. DR's GEM was no gem either; I was using an Atari ST with DR's buggy GEM-based TOS for several years before moving to the Inteloid Dark Side.
Novell had bought DR by the time V7 came out, hence the name Novell DOS. Caldera had the good sense to go back to the DR-DOS name.
Mickeysoft buggered Windows 3 to detect DR-DOS and fail for no good reason. This sort of stuff led to a big legal victory for Caldera a couple of years ago, when Caldera was the holder of the DR heritage.
Pretty much everything works on the "original" burner, like my Acer. The problems are when I try to play them elsewhere. A couple of weeks ago I burned a data disk for a friend. The "IBM" disk didn't play on either a Dell or a Mac. Retry: A Maxell Pro worked on the Dell. But I've had various random results, hence my Original Post.
A good burner can probably read almost anything, but it's harder to get good interchangeability.
BTW I've learned a lot from the replies to this Ask Slashdot. Very helpful! Thanks y'all.
The 2.4 series was treated like odd-numbered ones
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Linux 2.4.16 Released
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Okay, isn't the convention supposed to be that even-numbered middle-dot releases (2.2, 2.4...) were supposed to be stable with the experimental stuff in odd-numbered (2.1, 2.3...)? While 2.4 in general has many nice things about it, the whole thing feels too much like a "2.3" series for my taste. This umount error is just one more example.
I note that 2.4.x broke my system badly -- it decided (as supplied with both Mandrake 8.1 and RedHat 7.2) that my ATAPI CD-RW was a DMA device, regardless of what I told the BIOS. With ide-scsi loaded over it, mounting caused kernel panic. An extremely helpful person on comp.os.linux.development.system helped me debug it with hdparm. But even building a custom 2.4.13 kernel didn't "solve" the problem (meaning that I have to leave hdparm in place and not use devfs). The kernel README is way, way out of date too. I'd expect this kind of stuff on an odd-numbered series. Perhaps even-numbered kernels need a bit more of a testing stage before release.
Wouldn't it be strange if 2.5 became the more stable one? At this rate, it could happen.
If the government wants a really secure network of nontrivial size, then it probably should not use TCP/IP as its underlying protocol suite. TCP/IP was designed in the 1970s for a limited-access insecure network of researchers (ARPAnet). If anyone misbehaved, they'd be booted, and/or their site manager would get a nasty notice. Nobody was "entitled" to be on ARPAnet, and almost everyone cooperated. The network was designed for maximum openness within that selected community.
Now we have the public Internet, and Microsoft's virusware for applications. Firewalls help, but as many have noted, it's too easy for a laptop or floppy to inject something, and if an email gateway it provided, MSware will do the rest. Or any other mail client that follows their evil lead and executes email.
A serious fix is to create a new protocol suite that has security designed in. New stack code with no buffer overflows. A stack that doesn't invite address spoofing, flooding, or various other vulnerabilities of TCP/IP. Not that TCP/IP is all that bad for public use, but you just don't try to add security later and expect it to work! (It's a sieve: It should stand for Transmission Colander Protocol/Insecure Protocol.)
This new stack would have new, or at least modified, applications written for it, the way ARPAnet did back when it was young. And rules against insecure crap, so no Outlook ports! It might then catch on outside, but if the protocols have security handles in them, it's okay; there's no security through obscurity. This would help long-term stabilization of the public Internet, if it adopted more secure (and probably more efficient) protocols. Just as government funding for its own use led to TCP/IP.
Some people seem to think that TCP/IP was handed down to Moses on Sinai, and is thus sacred, Perfect, and should be inviolate. I don't buy that for a minute, and I was on the ARPAnet back in the NCP days. It was a nice experiment but it has ossified with widespread use, and clearly has trouble keeping up with current needs. IPv6 is not an improvement in any sense, efficiency or security; it is a distraction whose misbegotten presence, on balance, makes things worse.
Indeed, this is one of the few things Rowling did in her books that really annoyed me. She uses "witch" for females and "wizard" for males, while both terms are sex-neutral. ("Gender" is a late 20th century euphemism for "sex" in this case. "Sex" in the late 20th century has become a euphemism for "coitus". Fooey on neologisms.)
I suppose she was following common usage. But it did take away from the believability of the story, which in other respects is amazingly believable for a fantasy (okay, that's a weird statement too). I'd rather have seen her use the words correctly, perhaps helping correct common semantic misunderstandings.
The only use of "warlock" I can think of in the books is "Warlock's Assembly", presumably a legislative body of the magical world that meets maybe every century or so. If "warlock" is taken to be male, which she does not actually imply, then the story would imply a lack of female suffrage. But Rowlings' magical world is remarkably non-sexist: Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff houses, for instance, are named for the female co-founders of Hogwarts, and women seem to be treated rather equally. But the leaders of the Ministry seem to all be male.
The 6502's initial excitement was the price -- it was the first real $20 microprocessor. The 8080 cost quite a bit more in 1976. The 6502 was, I would suggest, a far more elegant chip than the 8080. The 6502 was Federico Faggin's second microprocessor. He did the Motorola 6800, then jumped ship to MOS Technology. The 6800 was loosely inspired by the PDP-11, a very nice machine for the day. The 6502 rethought a few of the 6800's design decisions and was even nicer. Apple picked the right chip.
BTW the original 6501 was pin compatible with the 6800, but didn't ship because Moto made some threats. The 6502, I think, added an internal clock; there were a bunch of other 65xx chips that followed. Rockwell was the second source and kept the line going after MOS Tech, which had been bought by Commodore, tanked. I think it's still fairly popular in the embedded world.
The 8080's instruction set was more reminiscent of the PDP-8, and rather ugly. The 4004 was not really a microprocessor, just a controller, because it lacked interrupts and some other features needed to be a "computer". The 8008 was a major improvement. And only 18 pins -- a lot of jelly beans needed to run it! The 8085 was the easier one to glue to. I recently read an article explaining the history of those early Intels, but I don't recall where.
That's irrelevant. Broadcast receivers aren't regulated, and the FCC's current rules -- well, the law the NAB paid Congress to impose last year when the FCC tried to reform 1950s rules -- are incredibly conservative with regard to interference. Nonetheless, Chinese and other low-cost radio manufacturers manage to make receivers worse and worse, so that interference can be created in the receiver no matter how far or close they are apart.
Cellular is different -- the receiver is part of the type-approved handset, and quality standards are rather strict. The FCC isn't changing interference standards for cellular/CMRS/PCS at all. It's simply allowing network operators to buy each other up.
The 45 MHz limitation is adequate for any rational use, but it does cause competition; it means that of the 170 MHz of cellular+PCS bandwidth, there are at least four providers, usually five or six. The big players would rather have less competition.
The other advantage of the extra bandwidth is that it allows fewer cells to do the job. Remember the reason for the "cellular" name -- you divide the coveage area into cells, which get smaller and smaller as usage goes up, so that frequencies get reused more often. With more spectrum, a given cell can carry more calls at once. This is cheaper than setting up more antennas, needing more towers and base station equipment. So the giants -- Cingular and VZW -- will be able to carry more per cell.
There's no real consumer benefit -- 3G is too costly for consumer use, except for voice. If you're paying 20c/minute for 13 kbps voice today, you're not going to like the price of 384 kbps data -- the price per bit will probably be fairly close to what you're paying now (because they paid that much for spectrum, not to mention the cost of the gear), making the math dismal.
You're close, but I think you're maybe even too optimistic.
I learned this about 25 years ago, while at a startup that was trying to build a computer out of the then-hot 6502-class microprocessor. The company tanked, never fully delivering. The smarter folks there (alas, there were not enough common-sense smarts where needed, just comp-sci-smarts always looking for another feature) knew the real Rule of Three:
Take the amount of time you think it should take. Triple it. Then increment the unit of time.
So three days is nine weeks, two months is six quarters.
Double plus one is, well, just too optimistic. Of course there are a lot of people who understand a "rule of three" that forgets to increment the unit, so the rest is just quibbling.
But hey, Microsoft did finally deliver something labeled Cairo (X P)! Lessee, that was due in what, 1995?
And Linux, while ten years old, still manages its desktop (rendering, fonts, etc.) somewhat worse than the Win95 GDI did. Nobody's immune.
What we call the Red Sea is the Sea of Reeds? Not necessarily. The Sea of Reeds sounds more like a swampy area than a true sea. The King James Version translators blew it, and Hollywood planted a meme about a body of water parting (hey, I went on that ride at Universal Studios), but it is a lot more logical to think that folks simply traversed a tidal swamp at low tide and were followed by others who got caught up in high tide.
Besides, lots of details about the Exodus were, uh, embellished after the fact. It's a Jewish book, and the Jewish tradition is far from "fundamentalist"; it doesn't take stories at their literal anyway. So it never mattered much what Yam Suf referred to, because it was a neat story that you learned lessons from, but not history.
Well, no. Bluetooth does NOT add $5 to the cost of a device today, except perhaps for very large values of $5. That was the goal, but today it costs quite a bit more. It needs critical mass to come down that low, and critical mass is proving elusive.
Bluetooth's advantage is low power, making it suitable as a "cordless" technology. But 802.11 can be run with less power than the legal limit, again invading Bluetooth's turf. That's probably Bluetooth's Achilees Heel -- it's not that much better than 802.11 at what it's better at (low power).
Further putting a nail in Harold B's coffin is the actual Bluetooth spec. I've looked at it and IT STINKS. They have a preposterously complex protocol stack for doing simple things. They literally take the packets, serialize them, put in an RS-232 emulation protocol (control pins & stuff), stick Hayes AT modem commands atop that, and run packets atop THAT! Truly demented. Work done by a committee that had NO FREAKING CLUE what they were doing. That as much as anything explains the lack of interoperability. (802.11, at least, is easy to use, like other 802-family protocols.)
Which is too bad, because a $5 Bluetooth chip with micropower battery drain really would complement 802.11 and other things. But that's not what the corporate sponsors put out.
Slashdot Mirror
HDTV fits into a single TV channel.
The FCC has told TV stations to transition to digital TV. The 12/31/2006 date is a goal, but there are extension built into the rules that WILL be invoked, so expect analog to stay on the air through 2008 at least. Many DTV stations are already on the air, though not all shows are produced with HDTV quality. After the deadline, analog TV transmitters will go dark and the broadcasters will be back to one channel, DTV, between channels 2 and 51 (52+ are being recycled).
The DTV standard uses a single TV channel with digital modulation to create a >20Mbps bitstream. That stream can be used for a single HDTV show or multiple lower-rate streams. MPEG-2 compression, used on satellites for high-quality feeds, is generally 6 Mbps; HDTV has various formats that compress to under 20 Mbps.
If you don't, then knowing all there is to know about your major shouldn't be worth more than, say, half of a degree, from any respectable school. That's because a college degree (undergrad BA/BS level) implies more than passing your major, it implies some degree of general education. It means you've taken the "distribution requirements" in humanities, sciences, etc. That's what distinguishes college from trade school. A college grad should have been exposed to at least a good selection from literature, art, history, economics, and other subjects utterly unrelated to the major. And should be able to write a decent essay, if not a thesis -- literacy is a two way street.
At the grad school level, your work experience and trade ability are more focused. But don't confuse training with education.
I work at a major consulting firm, in a technical group. We're largely a bunch of liberal arts majors who have technical skills. Moving up in consulting requires educational breadth, not depth. At least not the kind of depth you get in college.
Ah, PC cassette decks. Brings back the good ;-) old days of the 1970s... and reminds me of a story.
I went to work for a publisher who was launching a new computer-hobbyist magazine. (No names, but rhymes with "fright".) In his office was one of those brand-new MITS Altair 8800s. It was running a blinkinglight routine, its binary string of lights simply counting upwards. Its main I/O consisted of the front panel lights, the front panel sense switches (something like 8 bits, address, store, and load next, IIRC), and a cassette connection.
Now to boot this puppy, you used the sense switches to load a 30ish byte bootstrap program into memory. One byte at a time, each bit set individually. Like an old PDP-8 or other primitive mini, which it was designed to resemble.
On cassette, we had Altair 4K Basic. But we couldn't figure out how to get it working. We did manage, however, to get the system to read in at least some of the tape. Then we read out the ASCII from the binary patterns on the lights and decoded the message. Something like this:
MICROSOFT ALTAIR BASIC COPYRIGHT 1975 BILL GATES AND MONTE DAVIDOFF. Then some binary.
So we called up MITS in Albuquerque and asked to speak to Mr. Gates. He got on the phone and explained how to read in the tape and start it executing. This let us then use a terminal like a Teletype 33 as an I/O device.
Who would have imagined?
(Okay, it's a digression, but it wasn't until about five years later that floppies became affordable to the high-end home user, so various incompatible cassette-input systems remained popular for several years. And were never much good. There were even "standards" for bits on cassette, like Tarbell and Oklahoma City.)
Y'know, I was playing Flight Simulator today. And then I saw that Norad Santacam. Hmmm, looks a little similar; you have a sprite of Santa in this flying contraption, atop some scenery. Hey, what would it be like to fly one of those things? No throttle, but reins, and minimal instrumentation. It's certainly fast enough, navigable, and doesn't need regular airports to land at. Yeah, that'd be a nice addition! Why just airplanes and helicopters?
You might have to set the date to late December to get it to take off, though.
You understate how difficult the bottled water business is.
You need to find a good spring/source ("source" btw is the French word for "spring", and the good ones aren't usually "open"). You need to constantly check the water quality, and be subject to government inspections. You need to collect it, and bottle it in clean bottles which btw aren't free either. You need to truck it around (water's heavy) to its end user. You need to market it, because it's a competitive business. You need to maintain those bubbler/cooler/heaters that the large bottles sit on.
There's some software floating around which looks, on the other hand, to be about as quality controlled as you'd find by filling old Coke bottles from the stream running behind a factory in Woburn.
Yes, the Bells want competition. About as much as Fidel Castro wants free elections. I know well; I work with CLECs, write business plans for them, work on the interconnect agreements between CLECs and Bells, etc. The Bells do every trick in the book, and then some, and know that they can get away with flouting the law by using political influence.
The Bells are the holders of the former AT&T local monopoly. AT&T got the monopoly in 1876 via the patent. When that expired, they bought another patent (Putin's, for the loading coil) that gave them a monopoly on calls of more than ten or so miles. When that expired, they already had a huge advantage over their many, many competitors (CLECs were common as dirt ninety years ago). They then agreed to become a regulated monopoly, and the other local phone companies either accepted a buyout, shut down, or stayed out of Bell territories (whose territorial borders, most of the urban/low-cost-to-serve areas, were then blocked from expansion). So we ended up with multiple local monoplies.
Those days are over. VZ wants it all, minus the regulation. Whatever works for CLECs, they'll come out against it. Count on it.
There is a natural monopoly -- extremely difficult barrier to entry due to the cost of entry vs. economies of scale -- in one major sector of the phone market. That's the local loop to residential and non-huge business locations. You can't just string more wire in hopes of getting market share: The cost is largely per home passed, and if you string second wire, you'll start with a lower market share and thus a higher per-subscriber cost. You basically can't win unless the incumbent (monopoly) really screws the pooch.
But everything else is not a natural monopoly. Services are not. DSL, dial tone (switching), and other services delivered over the wire are not natural monopolies. Congress recognized this is 1996 when it passed the Telecom Act, which called for the network to be unbundled. Thus competitors can lease VZ's wires, and the wires of every other incumbent telco, at a rate based (per the law) on cost plus a reasonable profit. And btw in order to use the wire, the competitor needs collocation rights in the central office where the wire ends.
What the despicable scum running VZ want, however, is to be relieved of their obligation to lease the raw wire. Not that there have ever been terror attacks by competitors' technicians. Not that competitors are subject to loose security; indeed, they can only get unescorted access to the CO if they are accessing a collocation room or cage separate from VZ's own equipment. Competitors don't get to touch VZ's gear.
Without access to the loop, "competition" will be limited to cable companies, cellular companies, and huge customers who can justify trenching fiber optics to their site. Except for the cableco, consumers will be left with a monopoly of VZ's frequently awful service.
Sure, the technology's cool. But the way Uncle (Frank Charlie) Charlie licensed it is indicative of everything that's wrong with modern American media.
With broadcast radio, in urban areas at least, there used to be a lot of broadcasters. Now they're allowed to consolidate so Clear Channel and Viacom own most of the stations. College radio and a handful of local holdouts are what remains of diversity.
With satellite radio, they cut right to the chase. Two licenses, nationwide, high capital corporate players. No other diversity. Sure, those players can select their providers from a diverse supply, if they so choose. But only if the dollars say so. No equivalent of Cable Leased Access, which theoretically allows anybody to buy a slot on a cable network, or for that matter cable's Public Access. Just 100 channels of what your Providers wants. Big Brother Knows Best. In the olden days, if there were a "natural monopoly" of this sort (if, for techical reasons, there could only be one or two providers, each with many channels, which seems to be the case here), then there might be the common carrier obligation or more open third-party-programming rules. But that's not what the content monopolists want.
Worse, the two systems are not interoperable. So you can't even pick one. You get either Sirius or XM, depending on which car (or aftermarket radio) you buy. So the duopoly is really a monopoly so far as listeners are concerned -- at least with broadcast radio, you get your choice of Viacom or Clear Channel pablum. And that interesting stuff down at the low end of the dial.
This is the DMCA's companion, a broadcast model from hell.
Pinball was a different situation. The City of Chicago banned it inside the city limits, largely, I think, because it was used for illegal gambling. Which was ironic because Chicago was the place where most of the machines were made (Chicago Coin, Chicago Dynamic Industries, etc.). Or perhaps that was why it had once gotten out of hand.
I grew up in the New York area where pinball was everywhere and considered quite harmless. Sure, if you "won" (mostly on skill) you got a free game for your quarter. But that wasn't really gambling. Indeed a good resort hotel was one where the kids' area (in those days, the early sixties, many resort hotels had supervised summer camp-like kids' programs; as a parent today, I miss them) had a *free* pinball machine (often just the door taken off the coin box). I played them the way kids today play video games. And the video game largely killed pinball by displacing it from arcades, though there are some diehard pinball fans and some machines still around.
The Lionandlamb listing is, as others have noted, a list of violent, not "dangerous", games and toys. A different list comes out every year of dangerous toys, things that can actually hurt your body. Check out http://www.toysafety.org . Most of these look innocent but have parts that come loose in the wrong way, or have some other non-obvious hazard.
The old AT&T monopoly wasn't proclaimed by the government as you assume. It came in stages.
Stage 1: In 1876, Al Bell patented the telphone. He didn't actually have the working design (Elisha Gray did), but he got his patent application in earlier and had the better patent attorney. That gave him and his backers 17 years of monopoly, as with any patent. They didn't choose to license it.
Stage 2: In 1893, competition began. Al Strowger invented the dial. Bell Telephone bought the loading coil patent from Putin, increasing the range of the phone from a few miles to a few dozen. (No amplifiers yet.) So Bell had, by dint of a non-licensed patent, had another monopoly, on long distance. Independent telcos sprang up like weeds delivering local service, many with dial (which Bell didn't have until the 1920s, when Strowger's patents had run out).
In 1912, Bell, already dominant, entered into an agreement with the feds. They stopped buying up independent telephone companies, and agreed to interconnect the networks for toll calls. So the industry was formed. Bell had almost all the LD and most of the local business, but small local telcos continued to operate. Later, state regulators enshrined the monopolies into rules.
Patents gave Bell a head start. So they were able to become dominant, in a business where economy of scale matters. That's what makes it so hard to compete with them for wire: It costs money to pass houses, and if you have an 80%/20% market split, the 20% player's cost per home will be, oh, roughly four times the 80% player's, and they'll lose money.
I don't think that the record labels want or expect these services to succeed. They are designed to fail. When they fail, the record labels will have the cover of "plausible deniability" they need. They can say that honest people don't want online music, that they really want to purchase CDs, and that the role of the Internet is to accept orders for copy-protected CDs that can be mailed to them. Now nobody will believe this, but it will be all that Congress needs. That's where the game is played.
And because Congress is in their pockets, they're protected by the DMCA. If (well, "when" is more appropriate) anyone cracks the service, they'll be liable for prosecution. So will web sites that post the cracks, although of course there will be just as many of these as there are sites carrying DeCSS. Again, it'll be a way of separating the world into "thieves" and their good customers.
These services download proprietary encrypted formats, which is why there can be timebombs. They might be semi-useful for a Kid In A Dorm Room, for whom the computer (consumer grade Windows box with subwoofer, etc.) has become the music system. But if you can't move it to a real disk or portable MP3 player, then it's not going to be usable on your real hifi system or in the car. Big whoop. Again, designed to fail. Why pay $10/month for what is, in effect, the right to sample things?
Now personally, I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for the right to download some number of tracks a month, in an unrestricted format, and/or to sample (stream, whatever) from a catalog before buying. Then I'd burn my own CDs. The artists could make just as much as they do now. But the record labels are wedded to their high-overhead business models and don't care what the customers want.
I expect an impasse to last for some time, with online filesharing continuing one step ahead of the law, until some successful artists band together and join an alternative to the Big 5 record labels. That alternative would promote online distribution as well as sell CDs, and would have the clout to buy radio play. No, not MP3.com, which was basically unsigned acts.
F. Badger's post was below my threshold, but in any case HE was presumably joking. There is no particular connection between 3GIO noise and 3G wireless. Buses make noise and radios are sensitive, but he was presumably punning on "3G". This is Slashdot, after all, where bad jokes turn into unsubstantiated rumors. You apparently took him too seriously.
Are you kidding or just confused?
In the cellphone context, "3G" refers to the next generation of wireless services. These will have faster data capabilities (>100 kbps). 3G licenses have been auctioned off in some European countries for ridiculous amounts of money, with nothing to show for it for a while and little hope of payback.
"3GIO" in the PCISIG sense refers to an interconnection technology on printed circuit boards. No radio, except maybe some unwanted emissions....
What the two have in common is an excessive use of the "3G" label, as in too many episodes of Star Trek.
Why a switch is often better than a hub:
A hub is basically passive. All of the ports have to be running the same speed. A switch is active. Each port is handled independently, so you can mix 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps devices.
While a lot of newer stuff is 100 Mbps, there's still a lot of 10 Mbps kit out there, so a switch lets you migrate as you please.
I disagree with the characterization of DR-DOS as an upgraded CP/M-86. It was a virtually complete clone of MS-DOS. It hit the market, as I recall, during the late-'80s boom of MS-DOS 3.x. DR-DOS 3.31 was the first release I was familiar with, being a work-alike of MS-DOS 3.3. But it wasn't a clone. Unlike MS-DOS 3.x, DR-DOS code was re-entrant, so it could be run from ROM. This gave it a niche in embedded systems.
DR-DOS 5 added a bunch of features, and DR-DOS 6 had more. I bought DR-DOS 6 around 1990, when I bought a 286. It included disk compression (SuperStor, I think) before DOS did; that helped a lot with my 20 MB drive! It had a lousy graphical shell that I never used. DR's GEM was no gem either; I was using an Atari ST with DR's buggy GEM-based TOS for several years before moving to the Inteloid Dark Side.
Novell had bought DR by the time V7 came out, hence the name Novell DOS. Caldera had the good sense to go back to the DR-DOS name.
Mickeysoft buggered Windows 3 to detect DR-DOS and fail for no good reason. This sort of stuff led to a big legal victory for Caldera a couple of years ago, when Caldera was the holder of the DR heritage.
Pretty much everything works on the "original" burner, like my Acer. The problems are when I try to play them elsewhere. A couple of weeks ago I burned a data disk for a friend. The "IBM" disk didn't play on either a Dell or a Mac. Retry: A Maxell Pro worked on the Dell. But I've had various random results, hence my Original Post.
A good burner can probably read almost anything, but it's harder to get good interchangeability.
BTW I've learned a lot from the replies to this Ask Slashdot. Very helpful! Thanks y'all.
Okay, isn't the convention supposed to be that even-numbered middle-dot releases (2.2, 2.4...) were supposed to be stable with the experimental stuff in odd-numbered (2.1, 2.3...)? While 2.4 in general has many nice things about it, the whole thing feels too much like a "2.3" series for my taste. This umount error is just one more example.
I note that 2.4.x broke my system badly -- it decided (as supplied with both Mandrake 8.1 and RedHat 7.2) that my ATAPI CD-RW was a DMA device, regardless of what I told the BIOS. With ide-scsi loaded over it, mounting caused kernel panic. An extremely helpful person on comp.os.linux.development.system helped me debug it with hdparm. But even building a custom 2.4.13 kernel didn't "solve" the problem (meaning that I have to leave hdparm in place and not use devfs). The kernel README is way, way out of date too. I'd expect this kind of stuff on an odd-numbered series. Perhaps even-numbered kernels need a bit more of a testing stage before release.
Wouldn't it be strange if 2.5 became the more stable one? At this rate, it could happen.
If the government wants a really secure network of nontrivial size, then it probably should not use TCP/IP as its underlying protocol suite. TCP/IP was designed in the 1970s for a limited-access insecure network of researchers (ARPAnet). If anyone misbehaved, they'd be booted, and/or their site manager would get a nasty notice. Nobody was "entitled" to be on ARPAnet, and almost everyone cooperated. The network was designed for maximum openness within that selected community.
Now we have the public Internet, and Microsoft's virusware for applications. Firewalls help, but as many have noted, it's too easy for a laptop or floppy to inject something, and if an email gateway it provided, MSware will do the rest. Or any other mail client that follows their evil lead and executes email.
A serious fix is to create a new protocol suite that has security designed in. New stack code with no buffer overflows. A stack that doesn't invite address spoofing, flooding, or various other vulnerabilities of TCP/IP. Not that TCP/IP is all that bad for public use, but you just don't try to add security later and expect it to work! (It's a sieve: It should stand for Transmission Colander Protocol/Insecure Protocol.)
This new stack would have new, or at least modified, applications written for it, the way ARPAnet did back when it was young. And rules against insecure crap, so no Outlook ports! It might then catch on outside, but if the protocols have security handles in them, it's okay; there's no security through obscurity. This would help long-term stabilization of the public Internet, if it adopted more secure (and probably more efficient) protocols. Just as government funding for its own use led to TCP/IP.
Some people seem to think that TCP/IP was handed down to Moses on Sinai, and is thus sacred, Perfect, and should be inviolate. I don't buy that for a minute, and I was on the ARPAnet back in the NCP days. It was a nice experiment but it has ossified with widespread use, and clearly has trouble keeping up with current needs. IPv6 is not an improvement in any sense, efficiency or security; it is a distraction whose misbegotten presence, on balance, makes things worse.
Indeed, this is one of the few things Rowling did in her books that really annoyed me. She uses "witch" for females and "wizard" for males, while both terms are sex-neutral. ("Gender" is a late 20th century euphemism for "sex" in this case. "Sex" in the late 20th century has become a euphemism for "coitus". Fooey on neologisms.)
I suppose she was following common usage. But it did take away from the believability of the story, which in other respects is amazingly believable for a fantasy (okay, that's a weird statement too). I'd rather have seen her use the words correctly, perhaps helping correct common semantic misunderstandings.
The only use of "warlock" I can think of in the books is "Warlock's Assembly", presumably a legislative body of the magical world that meets maybe every century or so. If "warlock" is taken to be male, which she does not actually imply, then the story would imply a lack of female suffrage. But Rowlings' magical world is remarkably non-sexist: Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff houses, for instance, are named for the female co-founders of Hogwarts, and women seem to be treated rather equally. But the leaders of the Ministry seem to all be male.
The 6502's initial excitement was the price -- it was the first real $20 microprocessor. The 8080 cost quite a bit more in 1976. The 6502 was, I would suggest, a far more elegant chip than the 8080. The 6502 was Federico Faggin's second microprocessor. He did the Motorola 6800, then jumped ship to MOS Technology. The 6800 was loosely inspired by the PDP-11, a very nice machine for the day. The 6502 rethought a few of the 6800's design decisions and was even nicer. Apple picked the right chip.
BTW the original 6501 was pin compatible with the 6800, but didn't ship because Moto made some threats. The 6502, I think, added an internal clock; there were a bunch of other 65xx chips that followed. Rockwell was the second source and kept the line going after MOS Tech, which had been bought by Commodore, tanked. I think it's still fairly popular in the embedded world.
The 8080's instruction set was more reminiscent of the PDP-8, and rather ugly. The 4004 was not really a microprocessor, just a controller, because it lacked interrupts and some other features needed to be a "computer". The 8008 was a major improvement. And only 18 pins -- a lot of jelly beans needed to run it! The 8085 was the easier one to glue to. I recently read an article explaining the history of those early Intels, but I don't recall where.
That's irrelevant. Broadcast receivers aren't regulated, and the FCC's current rules -- well, the law the NAB paid Congress to impose last year when the FCC tried to reform 1950s rules -- are incredibly conservative with regard to interference. Nonetheless, Chinese and other low-cost radio manufacturers manage to make receivers worse and worse, so that interference can be created in the receiver no matter how far or close they are apart.
Cellular is different -- the receiver is part of the type-approved handset, and quality standards are rather strict. The FCC isn't changing interference standards for cellular/CMRS/PCS at all. It's simply allowing network operators to buy each other up.
The 45 MHz limitation is adequate for any rational use, but it does cause competition; it means that of the 170 MHz of cellular+PCS bandwidth, there are at least four providers, usually five or six. The big players would rather have less competition.
The other advantage of the extra bandwidth is that it allows fewer cells to do the job. Remember the reason for the "cellular" name -- you divide the coveage area into cells, which get smaller and smaller as usage goes up, so that frequencies get reused more often. With more spectrum, a given cell can carry more calls at once. This is cheaper than setting up more antennas, needing more towers and base station equipment. So the giants -- Cingular and VZW -- will be able to carry more per cell.
There's no real consumer benefit -- 3G is too costly for consumer use, except for voice. If you're paying 20c/minute for 13 kbps voice today, you're not going to like the price of 384 kbps data -- the price per bit will probably be fairly close to what you're paying now (because they paid that much for spectrum, not to mention the cost of the gear), making the math dismal.
You're close, but I think you're maybe even too optimistic.
I learned this about 25 years ago, while at a startup that was trying to build a computer out of the then-hot 6502-class microprocessor. The company tanked, never fully delivering. The smarter folks there (alas, there were not enough common-sense smarts where needed, just comp-sci-smarts always looking for another feature) knew the real Rule of Three:
Take the amount of time you think it should take. Triple it. Then increment the unit of time.
So three days is nine weeks, two months is six quarters.
Double plus one is, well, just too optimistic. Of course there are a lot of people who understand a "rule of three" that forgets to increment the unit, so the rest is just quibbling.
But hey, Microsoft did finally deliver something labeled Cairo (X P)! Lessee, that was due in what, 1995?
And Linux, while ten years old, still manages its desktop (rendering, fonts, etc.) somewhat worse than the Win95 GDI did. Nobody's immune.
What we call the Red Sea is the Sea of Reeds? Not necessarily. The Sea of Reeds sounds more like a swampy area than a true sea. The King James Version translators blew it, and Hollywood planted a meme about a body of water parting (hey, I went on that ride at Universal Studios), but it is a lot more logical to think that folks simply traversed a tidal swamp at low tide and were followed by others who got caught up in high tide.
Besides, lots of details about the Exodus were, uh, embellished after the fact. It's a Jewish book, and the Jewish tradition is far from "fundamentalist"; it doesn't take stories at their literal anyway. So it never mattered much what Yam Suf referred to, because it was a neat story that you learned lessons from, but not history.
Well, no. Bluetooth does NOT add $5 to the cost of a device today, except perhaps for very large values of $5. That was the goal, but today it costs quite a bit more. It needs critical mass to come down that low, and critical mass is proving elusive.
Bluetooth's advantage is low power, making it suitable as a "cordless" technology. But 802.11 can be run with less power than the legal limit, again invading Bluetooth's turf. That's probably Bluetooth's Achilees Heel -- it's not that much better than 802.11 at what it's better at (low power).
Further putting a nail in Harold B's coffin is the actual Bluetooth spec. I've looked at it and IT STINKS. They have a preposterously complex protocol stack for doing simple things. They literally take the packets, serialize them, put in an RS-232 emulation protocol (control pins & stuff), stick Hayes AT modem commands atop that, and run packets atop THAT! Truly demented. Work done by a committee that had NO FREAKING CLUE what they were doing. That as much as anything explains the lack of interoperability. (802.11, at least, is easy to use, like other 802-family protocols.)
Which is too bad, because a $5 Bluetooth chip with micropower battery drain really would complement 802.11 and other things. But that's not what the corporate sponsors put out.