Actually you're right about the 65c02 main chip. The performance "boost" came from the way it used the auxilliary graphics and sound chips. Also, I had replaced the memory chips (faster ones than stock) and memory handler to bring it up to 512k, not useful for much but it did make the chat function possible as a read/write messeaging system on a RAMdisk. To the user it was streaming in memory, but it was actually an edit/write/read/display cycle. Back then the utilities to measure mhz were written with the assumption that the 65x02 series was the only processor on board, but no one did that except apple, so you often got effective speeds on measurements faster than the actual main processor chip rating (again, excepting most apples).
It's not online anymore, but in the mid 80s I ran an ATARI board with both internet and dialup connections. (note: pre-HTML, CSS, etc.).
It was designed exclusively in ASCII, including graphics (there are a lot of characters between 128 and 256 that most people have forgotten about). We had online games, mazes, "graphical" adventures, online chat, and a FIDOnet messaging system. Not bad for an ATARI 8-bit system at 2.5mhz and 8 floppy drives.
I hooked up the old geezer (actually loaded it onto the laptop I'm using for "virtual" drives on the ATARI now) and let my kid log online a few months ago. The system was designed originally to work acceptably at 300 baud, I was shocked at the speed over my 100mb/s ethernet setup. Not as shocked as the kid though who's used to the online game world response time. Makes me wonder sometimes why we gave up the simple stuff when it worked so great.
Actually I think the system was called "Firefox", as in the movie (that's why it stuck in my head). Actually the system worked pretty good (I was, as usual, an "early user"), but most users couldn't get past the training phase, too much to remember, and you couldn't use the system and have a conversation at the same time so it killed the idea of having a conversation and looking things up at the same time. In essence you were having two (or more) conversations at the same time and most people honestly have trouble following one when it gets really technical. If you notice, on Star Trek: TNG the people spend a lot of time ignoring people who are politely quiet while the person uses the computer. That may work on a TV set, but no chance in real life, real people see a silent moment as a chance to get THEIR word into the conversation.
Sadly, the good old 101 key keyboard seems to be the most versatile, usable system available.
Except for embedded devices like cell phones and pdas, this won't change much. The memory density may go up, and since the chips are thinner the heat problem may improve, but the size of system chips won't change.
The reason is simple, human fingers and hands aren't going to shrink. SDRAM cards are about as small as most people can handle comfortably. SDRAM chips for CPUs work very well not at holding chips but at being easy to install and make positive contact with a large number of contacts on a relatively small edge. The design factors for these things are many, the chips they carry are only a single one of them.
I suppose someday it'll be theoretically possible to put that monster gamer machine in a thinline dress watch, but as they found with the "databank" watches the limitations are the input/output devices average people can comfortably work with, not electronic capabilities.
I was wondering WHAT could take the place of "THE BIG DIG", now I know.
This is a stroke of genious, fully worthy of a legacy for Teddy K. and J.F.Kerry. Just imagine, a government agency authorized to spend the governments money to store and maintain active datacenters for publically available program code they rip off the internet. Just imagine the Terrabytes waiting to be archived in some dismal data warehouse that will need a continually increasing budget. Best yet, the only people that will be aware of it will be a few legislators that actually read the budget and notice a single line item for "data storage".
If the air force had figured this out area 51 would still be a total secret and the budget would be high enough by now to have their OWN space station.
Absolutely, that's the point, you can never actually retrieve the item (in this case a string, not a cat) and therefore you can only infer its' state by observation of external fluxes (i.e. xray and gamma bursts at the event horizon, etc.) This puts the item (string) in a permanent state of flux. Our predispositions influence our interpretation of the data to support or deny the proposition (in this case, string theory).
It's very similar to the argument that arises in archealogy and paleontology every 5-10 years when they discover a new "missing link" or "earliest ancestor" of modern man, namely is it an early human or just another early ape? The news media hypes the "new discovery" for weeks and a few years later most are reclassified as early apes and disappear from mention. The fossils never changed, one side just looked at them differently than the other and had different predispositions about what made it a man or an ape. The important point was never the raw, pure, evidence, it was always about the interpretation.
I have to change careers. These physicists (sp?) have just created the biggest manefestation of a quantom physics illustration ever (namely scrondiggers (sp?) cat). The black hole is the box, the information entering the event horizon is the cat. Anything at the singularity is not observable and is therefore in a permanent state of flux between states (not really, but our ignorance of what's going on creates that condition). When we make observation our predispositions on the data influence the observation and change the reality. In other words YOU CAN'T BE WRONG NO MATTER WHAT YOU SAY!
No, It was before that (although I had a Timex-Sinclair later. This was a Tandy "pocket Computer". An overgrown calculator with alpha-numeric keyboard (no caps) and a thermal printer that hung off the side with a cassette interface cable. It would run around 2 hours on AA batteries so it was somewhat of an improvement over my other system, a "frankenstein" of an Altair 8008 connected to a cassette, phonograph (I actually did get some programs, like tiny basic, on 33 1/3 rpm records)and a DECWriter console for input/output.
I had a LOT of fun with the TS1000 when I got it though, it was nice and tiny and I could hook it up to just about any TV!
I used to laugh, but nowdays I've seen it so much it's like deja'vue. I remember the first one like this I met, He was nutso about the "elegant" structure of CP/M.
Don't get me wrong, I love tech, in all its' manefestations, and I really appreciate the developments of the past 40 years (my first "purchased", not built, system had a whopping 1k of memory), but the people that wrap their emotional life around a bunch of over-refined sand (silicon) can give circus maximus a run for its' money.
The cause of the stress is simply the humans who cluster around it. This is not a joke, just an observation.
First are the people who confuse tech with religion. Read Slashdot enough and you'll notice them quickly. They treat their favorite hardware/software/operating system as a saviour of mankind. The classic example are the Apple groupies that take that one step past effective use of a great hardware/software platform into the rare ether of religious ferver.
Second are those that have to have the latest tech, but can't use it when they get it. These high-maintenance people continually screw up perfectly good hardware with their ignorence as they blaim their "defective" computers for losing files and crashing all the time. These are the people that type letters, print them, and hit the power button on the case without saving the document or closing the application, then get mad when they can't find it later (thank goodness for MS Words periodic saves and recovery files).
Third are the untrainable, those that expect the machines to work the way they "feel" they should. Tech is machinery, it works one way, it doesn't care how you "feel" that day.
Finally there are the fearful that live their lives out of their fear of inadequacy instead of increasing their competencies. These are the people that slow down to 30 in a 55 mph zone when the first snowflake falls, backing people up for miles at rush hour. They ARE incompetent but would prefer to stay that way than learn the simple things of life, like where the windshield wiper switch is.
I can prove that evolution never happened. Look around you and you'll realize that the neanderthols are still among us and we genetic survivors of a higher plane (maybe 5% of the population) are their slaves keeping them alive and well. (chill out, that's a joke.)
On the lighter side we have probably been saved from domination by machines. As the computers develop artificial intelligence they will naturally, like children, imitate the "adults" around them (i.e., the average user). If this event ever happens no one will notice (unless the monitor starts to drool on the keyboard).
Hey folks, remember when laptops and pdas came out and companies started charging $50 - $100 for "leather like" " (i.e. vinyl)cases? I can't wait for the "nappa leather Franklin-covey pocket protectors". Plastic just won't be enough for the PHBs, the $1.00 pocket protector will be so out of it no one will want it, it'll die for lack of sales and the laundry business will have a revival as people try to figure out how to keep pencils from messing up their shirts.
Back when I started playing in the '60s we used a piano harmonic to tune or a "pitch pipe". Chromatic tuners started to come in the REALLY high end dollar range and people said they'd ruin musicians ears, never tune right, yada, yada, yada. Nowdays you can get a great tuner for around $15 bucks discounted online and they're built into every digital pedal you get. Even acoustic guitars come with them built in in everything except the bottom of the line models (love the tuner in my new Ovation, the electronics beat the heck out of my first).
If you play ANY old rock you gotta get good at alternate tunings or the songs just DON'T sound right This is called "The Performer" for a reason, if you do anything nowdays you'll use at least 2-3 tunings to get the set right, so hitting a button to retune to Drop-D, Drop-C, DABGAD, or some of those really weird Led Zep or Blue Oyster Cult stuff this would be a blessing.
I expect in another 15-20 years every decent guitar will have this or something similar built in just like the chromatic tuners and stuffed shirts will be arguing about something else wrecking musicians ears. The price will drop, just like Seth Lovers' humbuckers and the Bigsby and Whammy tremelos.
Personally, as I get older, It'd be nice to not lug around a van load of gear, I'm REALLY looking hard at the Line 6 guitars, but just don't like the actions (personal preference, some love them).
Back in the late 70's when I went to grad school I used to fix PAC-MAN, Donkey Kong, Tempest (a real bear to work on that French X-Y monitor) and other systems for pocket money.
The games were easy to learn quickly so people could get addicted yet the upper stages would be challenging so they would keep coming back and not get bored. Also, there was a wide varience of themes so if someone didn't like shooting or bombing something they could just roll a marble around an obstacle course or something.
Nowdays if you don't want to beat the s**t out of someones on-screen avatar or shoot someone with a realistic gun you're pretty much out of luck. I used to go to the arcades (I was addicted to the AREA 51 series, no I have nothing against shooters), but my kids didn't like any of it until a local Putt-Putt operation got Dance-Dance-Revolution (and now DDRII). I quit going because the arcades in the malls turned into gang hangouts. The punks spent the day practicing shooting and beating each other up on-screen. Another favorite activity was getting arrested by the cops in the arcade since the cops knew where to pick up the punks that beat up or shot someone the night before. Since my kids didn't like those jerks they had no desire to go there, no matter what was there.
Back in the '70s I would fill in on shifts while I worked on machines (extra bucks). We had strict policies that the punks weren't welcome and that was what security was there to insure. Families were welcome, doctors, medical students, and college students were the advertised audience, and they dropped the quarters as long as the machines were running (which was where I came in).
If they want me and my kids to show up and drop our money (and we have it to blow, thanks to many years of hard work) it needs to be a place I don't feel a need to bring a REAL gun.
Incidently, we added poll tables, arcade games, foosball tables, and some tables and chairs to a side room at our church cafe' - it stays full. The problem with arcades is the same as the problems with bars, it isn't what's in there, it's who they let in.
For what it's worth, the folks arguing about environmental impact of the new vs. the old resin are missing a big part of the picture. The costs in time and replacement to organizations is a lot more than just buying a part.
To use the Fujitsu drives for example. Data lost on a failed drive has a value and may be non recoverable. Most places don't do daily backups, but even the changes in data over 24 hours can be significant and add the cost of the employee's salary in time in recreating the data. Replacement of drives known defective and not failed costs in time for data transfer and drive replacement in addition to purchase and validation of new drives. After the drive is replaced if it contains sensitive data it has to be disassembled and destroyed properly. After all that it makes it to the landfill.
Figure it this way: $30 - 1 hour (failed) attempted data recovery $60 - cost of replacement drive $30 - 1 hour installation and reghosting of new drive $100 - 4 hours recreating lost data $15 - 30 min manual destruction of old drive =$235 -$60 assume reimbursement for drive (not guaranteed) =$175 because it was defective material!
Multiply that by the Fujitsu disaster (one and a half dumpster loads of drives after destruction, as I remember) and the cost gets up there. Remember, you may get the cost of the drive back, eventually, but never the cost of your labor.
Oh yeah, and you're still filling up the landfill.
"I wonder how long it would be before the legality of thwarting observation by wearing such devices would be decided by the supreme court."
FYI, this has already been decided. Many states and municipalities have laws that generically outlaw any such device. Generally they're used against radar detectors and so called "radar scramblers" but they've been successfully used against CB radios (for example, when it was shown a particular trucker was giving "bear reports") and other things including spray paint used on cameras and even water misters used on camera lenses.
In some states mere possession is a ticketable offense, whether the unit is in use or not, in the passenger area or stored in the trunk.
These laws have been around since the '60s. I'm surprised no one else has mentioned them since the first consideration of computer security is the physical security of your master consoles and these laws directly affect your ability to control that area.
I hate to ask, but did anyone besides me read the actual report? These comments were based on attending (sitting) through two 3 day meetings, not even noting if the authors actually bothered to ask any questions or just sat through the powerpoints. Does anyone think these were the only ones there? Even the authors acknowledge they were not.
The criticisms basically fall down on "computers are broke and can be exploited" - ain't that a newsflash. They fail to note that the system is being deployed in physically secure areas over a segment of the internet that is not accessible from non-military servers, the IP is not even available on standard DNS servers.
It is worth noting that they spent much space at the end telling the media how to get hold of them for interviews, is OPRAH listening?
Seriously, these are the days when you can register anyone as a.org, put out a press release and say anything to get your 15 minutes of fame. Maybe my age has soured me but I smell trolling for a morning news segment.
Incidently, for those wondering what interest the Pentagon has in elections, just ask all the military personnel stationed out of port and overseas that had their votes tossed out by party challenges in the 2000 elections. If they HAD been counted then the Supremem Court wouldn't have been involved in that year. Then again, maybe that's what really scares people about this whole idea.
Why is anyone surprised? The legal eagles (actually, vultures) have been screaming for a year now that their bread and butter will be in suing manufacturers of equipment used in a crime or civil litigation by convincing people that when you produce a product you commit the crime, the criminal who uses that product is errelevant because he couldn't do it if you didn't make the product (besides, he doesn't have the big pockets to get into, so why would the law (lawyers) have any interest in a petty crook. If you think the gun manufacturers were an abberation you're living in Lilliput.
When someone gets caught with counterfit money they usually lose it, no reimbursement. Lets' say you got your paycheck out of the instant banker in $20s and the cashier at the restaurant finds out they're counterfit. You lose the money, and after talking the police out of taking you to jail (hope you got a printed receipt at the IB) who's your lawyer gonna sue? If you think he's going to sue a petty crook for a few hundred bucks you're nuts.
The major loss of liberties don't come from the government, they come from our fear of the legal vultures and uncontrolled, unjustified litigation.
No, although next time I see him I'll ask. Apparently LEGO is big in Norway with the kids also, almost to the point of fetish. My friends told me that they have a lot of time on their hands in the Winter. Interestingly enough, while they said that it was in the 20s' outside and they Yorge had a large screen live picture from a Miami webcam up, he said it just looked warmer than looking out the window.
Thanks, I've heard that also. My source was a friend from Norway who showed me a book of Norwegian mythology that, except for the character names, read like the audio script for the Bionicle movie.
I suppose there was enough similarities for several cultures to make claim to it. Either way, the BIONICLE toy set was hardly invented by LEGO, and it really doesn't fit into their previous toy offerings.
I have an old 9" Heathkit amber monitor (NTSC video) I built for an Altair kit computer in the '70s. I think the monitor was a 1980 kit. It's currently hooked up to an old radio shack Tandy 1000HX next to my front door we use for a family calendar/in-out box/leave a note for mom thingy.
I also have two 1982 Magnavox separated video monitors (color), one is being used as a TV monitor on a VCR tape/DVD deck and the other still serves an ATARI 800XL (1 meg ram upgrade with 500 mb hard drive) that I use for quick letters, games, simple databases and of course, the ever present INFOCOM addictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually you're right about the 65c02 main chip. The performance "boost" came from the way it used the auxilliary graphics and sound chips. Also, I had replaced the memory chips (faster ones than stock) and memory handler to bring it up to 512k, not useful for much but it did make the chat function possible as a read/write messeaging system on a RAMdisk. To the user it was streaming in memory, but it was actually an edit/write/read/display cycle. Back then the utilities to measure mhz were written with the assumption that the 65x02 series was the only processor on board, but no one did that except apple, so you often got effective speeds on measurements faster than the actual main processor chip rating (again, excepting most apples).
It's not online anymore, but in the mid 80s I ran an ATARI board with both internet and dialup connections. (note: pre-HTML, CSS, etc.).
It was designed exclusively in ASCII, including graphics (there are a lot of characters between 128 and 256 that most people have forgotten about). We had online games, mazes, "graphical" adventures, online chat, and a FIDOnet messaging system. Not bad for an ATARI 8-bit system at 2.5mhz and 8 floppy drives.
I hooked up the old geezer (actually loaded it onto the laptop I'm using for "virtual" drives on the ATARI now) and let my kid log online a few months ago. The system was designed originally to work acceptably at 300 baud, I was shocked at the speed over my 100mb/s ethernet setup. Not as shocked as the kid though who's used to the online game world response time. Makes me wonder sometimes why we gave up the simple stuff when it worked so great.
Actually I think the system was called "Firefox", as in the movie (that's why it stuck in my head). Actually the system worked pretty good (I was, as usual, an "early user"), but most users couldn't get past the training phase, too much to remember, and you couldn't use the system and have a conversation at the same time so it killed the idea of having a conversation and looking things up at the same time. In essence you were having two (or more) conversations at the same time and most people honestly have trouble following one when it gets really technical. If you notice, on Star Trek: TNG the people spend a lot of time ignoring people who are politely quiet while the person uses the computer. That may work on a TV set, but no chance in real life, real people see a silent moment as a chance to get THEIR word into the conversation.
Sadly, the good old 101 key keyboard seems to be the most versatile, usable system available.
Except for embedded devices like cell phones and pdas, this won't change much. The memory density may go up, and since the chips are thinner the heat problem may improve, but the size of system chips won't change.
The reason is simple, human fingers and hands aren't going to shrink. SDRAM cards are about as small as most people can handle comfortably. SDRAM chips for CPUs work very well not at holding chips but at being easy to install and make positive contact with a large number of contacts on a relatively small edge. The design factors for these things are many, the chips they carry are only a single one of them.
I suppose someday it'll be theoretically possible to put that monster gamer machine in a thinline dress watch, but as they found with the "databank" watches the limitations are the input/output devices average people can comfortably work with, not electronic capabilities.
Yeah, but they had to have that to support the massive energy transmission arrays they built up in the arctic.
I was wondering WHAT could take the place of "THE BIG DIG", now I know.
This is a stroke of genious, fully worthy of a legacy for Teddy K. and J.F.Kerry. Just imagine, a government agency authorized to spend the governments money to store and maintain active datacenters for publically available program code they rip off the internet. Just imagine the Terrabytes waiting to be archived in some dismal data warehouse that will need a continually increasing budget. Best yet, the only people that will be aware of it will be a few legislators that actually read the budget and notice a single line item for "data storage".
If the air force had figured this out area 51 would still be a total secret and the budget would be high enough by now to have their OWN space station.
and no, I'm NOT cynical.
The wisdom of the bard proves true once again, and once again it was ignored, to be specific, "first thing - kill the lawyers".
Absolutely, that's the point, you can never actually retrieve the item (in this case a string, not a cat) and therefore you can only infer its' state by observation of external fluxes (i.e. xray and gamma bursts at the event horizon, etc.) This puts the item (string) in a permanent state of flux. Our predispositions influence our interpretation of the data to support or deny the proposition (in this case, string theory).
It's very similar to the argument that arises in archealogy and paleontology every 5-10 years when they discover a new "missing link" or "earliest ancestor" of modern man, namely is it an early human or just another early ape? The news media hypes the "new discovery" for weeks and a few years later most are reclassified as early apes and disappear from mention. The fossils never changed, one side just looked at them differently than the other and had different predispositions about what made it a man or an ape. The important point was never the raw, pure, evidence, it was always about the interpretation.
I have to change careers. These physicists (sp?) have just created the biggest manefestation of a quantom physics illustration ever (namely scrondiggers (sp?) cat). The black hole is the box, the information entering the event horizon is the cat. Anything at the singularity is not observable and is therefore in a permanent state of flux between states (not really, but our ignorance of what's going on creates that condition). When we make observation our predispositions on the data influence the observation and change the reality. In other words YOU CAN'T BE WRONG NO MATTER WHAT YOU SAY!
Is there some way I can get this gig?
No, It was before that (although I had a Timex-Sinclair later. This was a Tandy "pocket Computer". An overgrown calculator with alpha-numeric keyboard (no caps) and a thermal printer that hung off the side with a cassette interface cable. It would run around 2 hours on AA batteries so it was somewhat of an improvement over my other system, a "frankenstein" of an Altair 8008 connected to a cassette, phonograph (I actually did get some programs, like tiny basic, on 33 1/3 rpm records)and a DECWriter console for input/output.
I had a LOT of fun with the TS1000 when I got it though, it was nice and tiny and I could hook it up to just about any TV!
I used to laugh, but nowdays I've seen it so much it's like deja'vue. I remember the first one like this I met, He was nutso about the "elegant" structure of CP/M.
Don't get me wrong, I love tech, in all its' manefestations, and I really appreciate the developments of the past 40 years (my first "purchased", not built, system had a whopping 1k of memory), but the people that wrap their emotional life around a bunch of over-refined sand (silicon) can give circus maximus a run for its' money.
Have a great day!
The cause of the stress is simply the humans who cluster around it. This is not a joke, just an observation.
First are the people who confuse tech with religion. Read Slashdot enough and you'll notice them quickly. They treat their favorite hardware/software/operating system as a saviour of mankind. The classic example are the Apple groupies that take that one step past effective use of a great hardware/software platform into the rare ether of religious ferver.
Second are those that have to have the latest tech, but can't use it when they get it. These high-maintenance people continually screw up perfectly good hardware with their ignorence as they blaim their "defective" computers for losing files and crashing all the time. These are the people that type letters, print them, and hit the power button on the case without saving the document or closing the application, then get mad when they can't find it later (thank goodness for MS Words periodic saves and recovery files).
Third are the untrainable, those that expect the machines to work the way they "feel" they should. Tech is machinery, it works one way, it doesn't care how you "feel" that day.
Finally there are the fearful that live their lives out of their fear of inadequacy instead of increasing their competencies. These are the people that slow down to 30 in a 55 mph zone when the first snowflake falls, backing people up for miles at rush hour. They ARE incompetent but would prefer to stay that way than learn the simple things of life, like where the windshield wiper switch is.
I can prove that evolution never happened. Look around you and you'll realize that the neanderthols are still among us and we genetic survivors of a higher plane (maybe 5% of the population) are their slaves keeping them alive and well. (chill out, that's a joke.)
On the lighter side we have probably been saved from domination by machines. As the computers develop artificial intelligence they will naturally, like children, imitate the "adults" around them (i.e., the average user). If this event ever happens no one will notice (unless the monitor starts to drool on the keyboard).
Hey folks, remember when laptops and pdas came out and companies started charging $50 - $100 for "leather like" " (i.e. vinyl)cases? I can't wait for the "nappa leather Franklin-covey pocket protectors". Plastic just won't be enough for the PHBs, the $1.00 pocket protector will be so out of it no one will want it, it'll die for lack of sales and the laundry business will have a revival as people try to figure out how to keep pencils from messing up their shirts.
Life is a trip - pack your parachute.
Wow this place makes me feel so old.
Back when I started playing in the '60s we used a piano harmonic to tune or a "pitch pipe". Chromatic tuners started to come in the REALLY high end dollar range and people said they'd ruin musicians ears, never tune right, yada, yada, yada. Nowdays you can get a great tuner for around $15 bucks discounted online and they're built into every digital pedal you get. Even acoustic guitars come with them built in in everything except the bottom of the line models (love the tuner in my new Ovation, the electronics beat the heck out of my first).
If you play ANY old rock you gotta get good at alternate tunings or the songs just DON'T sound right This is called "The Performer" for a reason, if you do anything nowdays you'll use at least 2-3 tunings to get the set right, so hitting a button to retune to Drop-D, Drop-C, DABGAD, or some of those really weird Led Zep or Blue Oyster Cult stuff this would be a blessing.
I expect in another 15-20 years every decent guitar will have this or something similar built in just like the chromatic tuners and stuffed shirts will be arguing about something else wrecking musicians ears. The price will drop, just like Seth Lovers' humbuckers and the Bigsby and Whammy tremelos.
Personally, as I get older, It'd be nice to not lug around a van load of gear, I'm REALLY looking hard at the Line 6 guitars, but just don't like the actions (personal preference, some love them).
Does anyone think the Kennedys and Kerrys will let this happen? No way!
Back in the late 70's when I went to grad school I used to fix PAC-MAN, Donkey Kong, Tempest (a real bear to work on that French X-Y monitor) and other systems for pocket money.
The games were easy to learn quickly so people could get addicted yet the upper stages would be challenging so they would keep coming back and not get bored. Also, there was a wide varience of themes so if someone didn't like shooting or bombing something they could just roll a marble around an obstacle course or something.
Nowdays if you don't want to beat the s**t out of someones on-screen avatar or shoot someone with a realistic gun you're pretty much out of luck. I used to go to the arcades (I was addicted to the AREA 51 series, no I have nothing against shooters), but my kids didn't like any of it until a local Putt-Putt operation got Dance-Dance-Revolution (and now DDRII). I quit going because the arcades in the malls turned into gang hangouts. The punks spent the day practicing shooting and beating each other up on-screen. Another favorite activity was getting arrested by the cops in the arcade since the cops knew where to pick up the punks that beat up or shot someone the night before. Since my kids didn't like those jerks they had no desire to go there, no matter what was there.
Back in the '70s I would fill in on shifts while I worked on machines (extra bucks). We had strict policies that the punks weren't welcome and that was what security was there to insure. Families were welcome, doctors, medical students, and college students were the advertised audience, and they dropped the quarters as long as the machines were running (which was where I came in).
If they want me and my kids to show up and drop our money (and we have it to blow, thanks to many years of hard work) it needs to be a place I don't feel a need to bring a REAL gun.
Incidently, we added poll tables, arcade games, foosball tables, and some tables and chairs to a side room at our church cafe' - it stays full. The problem with arcades is the same as the problems with bars, it isn't what's in there, it's who they let in.
For what it's worth, the folks arguing about environmental impact of the new vs. the old resin are missing a big part of the picture. The costs in time and replacement to organizations is a lot more than just buying a part.
To use the Fujitsu drives for example. Data lost on a failed drive has a value and may be non recoverable. Most places don't do daily backups, but even the changes in data over 24 hours can be significant and add the cost of the employee's salary in time in recreating the data. Replacement of drives known defective and not failed costs in time for data transfer and drive replacement in addition to purchase and validation of new drives. After the drive is replaced if it contains sensitive data it has to be disassembled and destroyed properly. After all that it makes it to the landfill.
Figure it this way:
$30 - 1 hour (failed) attempted data recovery
$60 - cost of replacement drive
$30 - 1 hour installation and reghosting of new drive
$100 - 4 hours recreating lost data
$15 - 30 min manual destruction of old drive
=$235
-$60 assume reimbursement for drive (not guaranteed)
=$175 because it was defective material!
Multiply that by the Fujitsu disaster (one and a half dumpster loads of drives after destruction, as I remember) and the cost gets up there. Remember, you may get the cost of the drive back, eventually, but never the cost of your labor.
Oh yeah, and you're still filling up the landfill.
"I wonder how long it would be before the legality of thwarting observation by wearing such devices would be decided by the supreme court."
FYI, this has already been decided. Many states and municipalities have laws that generically outlaw any such device. Generally they're used against radar detectors and so called "radar scramblers" but they've been successfully used against CB radios (for example, when it was shown a particular trucker was giving "bear reports") and other things including spray paint used on cameras and even water misters used on camera lenses.
In some states mere possession is a ticketable offense, whether the unit is in use or not, in the passenger area or stored in the trunk.
These laws have been around since the '60s. I'm surprised no one else has mentioned them since the first consideration of computer security is the physical security of your master consoles and these laws directly affect your ability to control that area.
Wow, you could hook this thing up to a cell phone by bluetooth and have a moble dial-up server.
Gives new meaning to "ring around the collar" doesn't it!
I hate to ask, but did anyone besides me read the actual report? These comments were based on attending (sitting) through two 3 day meetings, not even noting if the authors actually bothered to ask any questions or just sat through the powerpoints. Does anyone think these were the only ones there? Even the authors acknowledge they were not.
.org, put out a press release and say anything to get your 15 minutes of fame. Maybe my age has soured me but I smell trolling for a morning news segment.
The criticisms basically fall down on "computers are broke and can be exploited" - ain't that a newsflash. They fail to note that the system is being deployed in physically secure areas over a segment of the internet that is not accessible from non-military servers, the IP is not even available on standard DNS servers.
It is worth noting that they spent much space at the end telling the media how to get hold of them for interviews, is OPRAH listening?
Seriously, these are the days when you can register anyone as a
Incidently, for those wondering what interest the Pentagon has in elections, just ask all the military personnel stationed out of port and overseas that had their votes tossed out by party challenges in the 2000 elections. If they HAD been counted then the Supremem Court wouldn't have been involved in that year. Then again, maybe that's what really scares people about this whole idea.
Why is anyone surprised? The legal eagles (actually, vultures) have been screaming for a year now that their bread and butter will be in suing manufacturers of equipment used in a crime or civil litigation by convincing people that when you produce a product you commit the crime, the criminal who uses that product is errelevant because he couldn't do it if you didn't make the product (besides, he doesn't have the big pockets to get into, so why would the law (lawyers) have any interest in a petty crook. If you think the gun manufacturers were an abberation you're living in Lilliput.
When someone gets caught with counterfit money they usually lose it, no reimbursement. Lets' say you got your paycheck out of the instant banker in $20s and the cashier at the restaurant finds out they're counterfit. You lose the money, and after talking the police out of taking you to jail (hope you got a printed receipt at the IB) who's your lawyer gonna sue? If you think he's going to sue a petty crook for a few hundred bucks you're nuts.
The major loss of liberties don't come from the government, they come from our fear of the legal vultures and uncontrolled, unjustified litigation.
No, although next time I see him I'll ask. Apparently LEGO is big in Norway with the kids also, almost to the point of fetish. My friends told me that they have a lot of time on their hands in the Winter. Interestingly enough, while they said that it was in the 20s' outside and they Yorge had a large screen live picture from a Miami webcam up, he said it just looked warmer than looking out the window.
Thanks, I've heard that also. My source was a friend from Norway who showed me a book of Norwegian mythology that, except for the character names, read like the audio script for the Bionicle movie.
I suppose there was enough similarities for several cultures to make claim to it. Either way, the BIONICLE toy set was hardly invented by LEGO, and it really doesn't fit into their previous toy offerings.
Remember, LEGO is not an American product (although the company would probably tank if they couldn't sell here).
The BIONICLE line is built on one version of a Norwegian mythology about earth spirits (or daemons, in other versions).
Lego didn't come up with the idea, they just came up with new names they could protect in court.
I have an old 9" Heathkit amber monitor (NTSC video) I built for an Altair kit computer in the '70s. I think the monitor was a 1980 kit. It's currently hooked up to an old radio shack Tandy 1000HX next to my front door we use for a family calendar/in-out box/leave a note for mom thingy.
I also have two 1982 Magnavox separated video monitors (color), one is being used as a TV monitor on a VCR tape/DVD deck and the other still serves an ATARI 800XL (1 meg ram upgrade with 500 mb hard drive) that I use for quick letters, games, simple databases and of course, the ever present INFOCOM addictions.