What? You could afford EGA? All I could muster up was enough for a (used) CGA (8-colors, IIRC) card and 10- or 11- inch monitor on my 8086 PC AT2. But it was quite a step up from playing pong on a green screen.
CGA cards sometimes had tv-out rca jacks, but the display looked terrible on my TV: the screen was too glossy.
Put this into the future file, I suppose, as the technology to extract it is yet-to-be developed and looks to be expensive in today's terms.
As you suggest, once the cost of drilling goes ballistic (and it seems inevitible it will) shale oil will be tapped.
Time was educated people were predicting widespread food shortages back when the world's population was 2 or 2 1/2 billion souls; that hasn't happened, by and large, and neither will we necessarily run out of oil as long as technology moves forward so to extract what poor reserves may be left in the future.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of petroleum. But the expense of changing over to sustainable energy sources, coupled with the fall of the dollar and its expected effect on standards of living in the US may prevent their adoption soon.
Last I heard -- a long, long time ago -- extraction of shale oil deposits required abundant water, as the technology then used steam to liquify the oil and release it from the shale.
Last I heard, there was not abundant water in the area of the deposits. If a/. reader with recent expertise in the extraction of oil from shale would post a reply on the most recent technologies and the free or cheap water requirement, I would be, as they say in the Western Movies, "beholden."
Otherwise, like those in California's Central Valley, the extent and practical worth of such deposits is debatable.
Can their be a bubble and a recession at the same time, or do the two cancel each other out like Penn & Teller?
Of course there can, and that's exactly what is happening. There is too much venture capital out there and few good places to invest it. There is a recession because oil and other commodities have cut into corporate profits and a bubble because billions of VC funding is available, due to GWB's tax cuts for the rich.
Reagan's trickle-down policies caused a simiilar bubble (in derivatives) in 1987, A decade later, more easy Fed money caused Venture Capitalists to invest in high-tech stocks, causing the famous dot-com bubble and bust.
A recession is when lots of poor and middle class people lose their jobs; a bubble is when a few VCs all decide to put their money in the same place at the same time, driving up prices but not value or production.
...makes loads of cheap, low power dispersing x86 CPUs. They're fairly slow but compatible and very power-conserving. Via owns the former S3 GPU company, and makes its own chipsets as well.
Right now, they're not attacking the high-end, high power chips gamers love, but they have LOTS of experience designing chips for cheap PCs and relatively good fabs.
I find their chips (usually integrated into mobos with S3 graphics and via chipsets) priced rather higher than their speed would dictate, but they *are* a viable (no pun intended) competitor to both AMD and Intel.
I'll have to paraphrase, as I cannot Google the quotation (!)
When the exit polls don't jibe with the results (and there is a Diebold evoting machine involved) then the results have probably been tampered with.
He was speaking before a committee of Congress about being asked to write a program to fix a Florida election, and was responding to a question about whether the Ohio elections of 2004 might have been tampered with.
I remembered his meaning yesterday when every member of the press and their pundits was trying to make sense of a situation that has only one explanation that fits Occam's Razor.
I hate to say it, but it appears our votes no longer count. Or no longer count right.
Negotiate for what you want. You may find theirs is a defensive position, one that seeks to prevent making off with work they paid you for under the guise of it being "done on my own time."
For example Paragraph B says the invention must be related to their company, its goals, etc. If you work in IT and devise a solar collector, it's yours.
If you can't live with these kinds of binds at all, you may be unemployable.
According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings Kent State polarized the nation. That doesn't fit my memory. Outside of a nationwide student strike over the Kent State Massacre itself, there were no more mass antiwar demonstrations.
If the antiwar movement wasn't dead by then, it was certainly in its sickbed. The war (including the absurd arguments over the shape of the table the negotiators would sit at) continued for three more years -- until April 30, 1973.
NB: There was a month or so before KS another antiwar demonstration at a school in Mississippi, IIRC, where guardsmen fired at and injured or killed peaceful assemblers, but it did not achieve the notoriety of KS.
I would remind readers that the US Government has shown little reluctance to shoot at civilians demanding their "rights" from the WW-One Bonus Army March to the Hooverville campsite on the National Mall, to Kent State.
I am not advocating an armed revolution. I *am* advocating passive demonstrations against these abhorrent policies, typified by FEMA's sham news conference.
My Kent State example was not that demonstrators should have shot back at Guardsmen, but that the "Peace Movement" had neither the courage nor even the integrity to continue regardless of personal danger -- courage that the union movement and civil rights movement found. Those movemenets did not take arms against the government, they persisted until the government's cupidity was profoundly unmasked, and the voters changed the government's policies.
I am the last to advocate war. I am a Viet Nam vet. I have seen war. You will not like it.
But no empire lasts forever; it looks like the US Empire is falling faster than any before it. Look to the history of Great Britain after World War Two for a clue as to what will happen to the US -- that is, IF we find an undiscovered stash of oil on the order of the one in the North Sea that has been keeping GB monetarily afloat for decades.
But that's another story.
Hint: it might be a crime for a US citizen to advocate taking up arms against his government. It might be called treason.
In the first few decades of the last century, labor unions were founded and became dominant in the US; by 1950 more than half of American workers were union, and, having won, the leaders turned to the next social problem, equal rights. Beginning in the mid-fifties, the same personalities, by and large, and methods were used to bring about legal racial equality, culminating in the Civil Rights and Voting Acts of 1964. In that year, the focus turned from unions and racial equality to (VietNam) war resistance.
Although both the Union and the Civil Rights movements survived many, many casualties in their struggle, they persisted until the goal was reached. Not so the the war resisters: the National Guard shootings of demonstrators at Kent State University, Ohio, stopped the "Peace" movement in its tracks.
Had the union or civil rights movements been abandoned because two people were killed in the resulting violence, nothing would have been accomplished.
Now, of course, no outrage is enough even to get our (US) citizens up in arms (pun intended).
The framers of our Constitution understood it was simply an *experiment* and once the government learned to game the people (as FEMA has apologized for) the people would replace it, having learned from the current experiment what pitfalls to avoid next time.
T. Jefferson reckoned the consititution ought to be replace every thirty years or so. We're WAAAYY overdue.
Question: I understand (and correct me if I am in error) that one can use patented techniques and processes for *private and noncommercial* use. So --
IF the patents in question are upheld (and I sincerely hope they are not) and Red Hat and Novell remove infringing code/features, then may I legally recompile *for my own use* infringing source code (from present releases, f'rexample) to include multiple desktops?
Carly changed HP's motto, apparently, from "Invent" to "Remarket" in selling iPods under HP's name.
Now, apparently after some time unemployed and unemployable after the mess she and her hubris left at HP, she turns up, where? At Fox, the spinmeisters.
5.1 Suspension/Termination. Your Service may be suspended or terminated if your payment is past due and such condition continues un-remedied for thirty (30) days. In addition, AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries. Termination or suspension by AT&T of Service also constitutes termination or suspension (as applicable) of your license to use any Software. AT&T may also terminate or suspend your Service if you provide false or inaccurate information that is required for the provision of Service or is necessary to allow AT&T to bill you for Service.
You're right on both points. I had forgotten that there was no trial, just the execution of sentence: give up your exclusive right to use the phone networks of the US and break yourself up.
Never having had to market beyond "reach out and touch someone," what was left of ATT went shopping for marketing-types from other industries, or borrowed sales pitches and techniques from their (new) competitors.
I am quite sure their management never knew how frickin mad users had become.
The term plus the example of GHWB using the "Bully Pulpit" to promote bigotry and incite violence IS my entire point. The power of the President to persuade is the essence of the position. Roosevelt may have meant it in a "positive" way, but any tool can be used to destroy as well as to build.
AT&T, taken apart decades ago because of their abuse of monopoly power, has not learned how to compete in a free marketplace and, thus, must go back to their orginal business model: hateful monopolizing. Perhaps some of you remember or have seen reruns of Lily Tomlin's wonderful ATT operator.
The main problem with having a president who lies and suspends constitutional rights is that the public, by example, are led to believe lying and bullying are OK. "Gee, the president makes it work for him...."
This is the famous Bully Pulpit that the first President Roosevelt talked about.
To give a more specific example of this principle, when former president George Herbert Walker Bush complained publicly that the Japanese government was trading unfairly with the United States (this was before the Tokyo stock crash) several Japanese tourists were attacked and beaten on the streets of US cities.
We need a president who loves truth. Otherwise, the US has more to worry about than Ma Bell.
Of course, Ma Bell is bad enough....
disclaimer: I am an ATT customer in CA. rethinking my subscription to their service.
I have followed some of the discussion about the kernal and its optimizations for desktop vs. server usage, especially recent arguments over the scheduler. Although I am most definitly NOT a kernel hacker, I am quite well-read on the subject of McLuhan and his insights into media.
Computers are "hot." Their screens are clear, and, more and more, are solid-state rather than CRT (McLuhan said we feel the electrons come through a TV-type screen to land on our skin). As a "hot" medium (compared to TV or even FM radio) it is fitting that a computer spring into action immediately a control, key or mouse button, is activated. That it does not do so is frustrating. It is like watching an Imax movie and listening to the audio through cheap headphones; it is an unsatisfying experience.
A server, OTOH, is not a medium. It is an appliance. It does not interface with our personalities as a desktop computer does.
But I disagree that the problem lies with the kernel or its scheduler. It seems to lie elsewhere in the system as KDE seems sluggish and slow-to-respond to input even with 1.5 gigs of RAM on a 2800Mhz-rated Semprom, while Blackbox on a RH-6.2 box with one-fifteenth the computing power and one-sixth of the RAM was much, much more responsive. On this box, KDE (versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2) was no more or less responsive than it is on my current Mepis-6.0 installation. I do not have Gnome installed so I cannot compare it.
During the years of using the AMD-K6 300 box, I experimented with various self-compiled kernels (the old 2.4 series) and patches. Optimizing sometimes radically, I might achieve a modest (2-3 per cent) improvement in certain benchmarks but nothing noticeable in the real world, so I stopped compiling my own kernels and used bone-stock distribution-supplied ones.
I agree that the Linux Desktop should SNAP-TO when a command is issued or pressed. But I do not see significant gains to be made to this end by the kernel scheduler. Perhaps reading all those KDE text config files each time an event happens has something to do with desktop sluggishness. Perhaps RAM latency is part of the prob and some data could be prefetched in some way. Or perhaps engineers might install an enormous, fast L3 cache on mobos.
Whatever the solution, the organization that makes a computer to respond in a way that would please McLuhan, were he still with us, will own the 21st century, IMHO.
H'mmm. I r'member those days. Seems to me I tweaked Qemm and DOS-5 to show ~703Kb under 640k. Eventually, I moved on to DR-DOS, which was able to free more than 720k "under 640.
Virtual memory made of RAM chips, run through a 64kb page file window. What a dull idea....
Slashdot Mirror
In a related development, the U.S. FDIC has ruled that it is illegal to keep dollar bills of any denomination in banks. Details to follow....
What? You could afford EGA? All I could muster up was enough for a (used) CGA (8-colors, IIRC) card and 10- or 11- inch monitor on my 8086 PC AT2. But it was quite a step up from playing pong on a green screen.
CGA cards sometimes had tv-out rca jacks, but the display looked terrible on my TV: the screen was too glossy.
Perhaps. The article, though, says the oil is trapped between two shale layers, suggesting "horizontal drilling."
Good info.
Put this into the future file, I suppose, as the technology to extract it is yet-to-be developed and looks to be expensive in today's terms.
As you suggest, once the cost of drilling goes ballistic (and it seems inevitible it will) shale oil will be tapped.
Time was educated people were predicting widespread food shortages back when the world's population was 2 or 2 1/2 billion souls; that hasn't happened, by and large, and neither will we necessarily run out of oil as long as technology moves forward so to extract what poor reserves may be left in the future.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of petroleum. But the expense of changing over to sustainable energy sources, coupled with the fall of the dollar and its expected effect on standards of living in the US may prevent their adoption soon.
Water levels in that aquifer are problematic without tapping it for use in extracting oil. http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/FS078-03/ http://southwestfarmpress.com/mag/farming_ogallala_water_level/ plus thousands more citations.
Last I heard -- a long, long time ago -- extraction of shale oil deposits required abundant water, as the technology then used steam to liquify the oil and release it from the shale.
Last I heard, there was not abundant water in the area of the deposits. If a /. reader with recent expertise in the extraction of oil from shale would post a reply on the most recent technologies and the free or cheap water requirement, I would be, as they say in the Western Movies, "beholden."
Otherwise, like those in California's Central Valley, the extent and practical worth of such deposits is debatable.
Of course, we can hope.
Can their be a bubble and a recession at the same time, or do the two cancel each other out like Penn & Teller?
Of course there can, and that's exactly what is happening. There is too much venture capital out there and few good places to invest it. There is a recession because oil and other commodities have cut into corporate profits and a bubble because billions of VC funding is available, due to GWB's tax cuts for the rich.
Reagan's trickle-down policies caused a simiilar bubble (in derivatives) in 1987, A decade later, more easy Fed money caused Venture Capitalists to invest in high-tech stocks, causing the famous dot-com bubble and bust.
A recession is when lots of poor and middle class people lose their jobs; a bubble is when a few VCs all decide to put their money in the same place at the same time, driving up prices but not value or production.Which is what's happening now.
...makes loads of cheap, low power dispersing x86 CPUs. They're fairly slow but compatible and very power-conserving. Via owns the former S3 GPU company, and makes its own chipsets as well.
Right now, they're not attacking the high-end, high power chips gamers love, but they have LOTS of experience designing chips for cheap PCs and relatively good fabs.
I find their chips (usually integrated into mobos with S3 graphics and via chipsets) priced rather higher than their speed would dictate, but they *are* a viable (no pun intended) competitor to both AMD and Intel.
I'll have to paraphrase, as I cannot Google the quotation (!)
When the exit polls don't jibe with the results (and there is a Diebold evoting machine involved) then the results have probably been tampered with.
He was speaking before a committee of Congress about being asked to write a program to fix a Florida election, and was responding to a question about whether the Ohio elections of 2004 might have been tampered with.
I remembered his meaning yesterday when every member of the press and their pundits was trying to make sense of a situation that has only one explanation that fits Occam's Razor.
I hate to say it, but it appears our votes no longer count. Or no longer count right.Negotiate for what you want. You may find theirs is a defensive position, one that seeks to prevent making off with work they paid you for under the guise of it being "done on my own time."
For example Paragraph B says the invention must be related to their company, its goals, etc. If you work in IT and devise a solar collector, it's yours.
If you can't live with these kinds of binds at all, you may be unemployable.
I beleieve you are correct. I regret the factual error.
From the article you cite:
According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings Kent State polarized the nation. That doesn't fit my memory. Outside of a nationwide student strike over the Kent State Massacre itself, there were no more mass antiwar demonstrations.
If the antiwar movement wasn't dead by then, it was certainly in its sickbed. The war (including the absurd arguments over the shape of the table the negotiators would sit at) continued for three more years -- until April 30, 1973.
NB: There was a month or so before KS another antiwar demonstration at a school in Mississippi, IIRC, where guardsmen fired at and injured or killed peaceful assemblers, but it did not achieve the notoriety of KS. I would remind readers that the US Government has shown little reluctance to shoot at civilians demanding their "rights" from the WW-One Bonus Army March to the Hooverville campsite on the National Mall, to Kent State.
I am not advocating an armed revolution. I *am* advocating passive demonstrations against these abhorrent policies, typified by FEMA's sham news conference.
My Kent State example was not that demonstrators should have shot back at Guardsmen, but that the "Peace Movement" had neither the courage nor even the integrity to continue regardless of personal danger -- courage that the union movement and civil rights movement found. Those movemenets did not take arms against the government, they persisted until the government's cupidity was profoundly unmasked, and the voters changed the government's policies.
I am the last to advocate war. I am a Viet Nam vet. I have seen war. You will not like it.
But no empire lasts forever; it looks like the US Empire is falling faster than any before it. Look to the history of Great Britain after World War Two for a clue as to what will happen to the US -- that is, IF we find an undiscovered stash of oil on the order of the one in the North Sea that has been keeping GB monetarily afloat for decades.
But that's another story.
Hint: it might be a crime for a US citizen to advocate taking up arms against his government. It might be called treason.
No revolution in sight...and don't expect one.
In the first few decades of the last century, labor unions were founded and became dominant in the US; by 1950 more than half of American workers were union, and, having won, the leaders turned to the next social problem, equal rights. Beginning in the mid-fifties, the same personalities, by and large, and methods were used to bring about legal racial equality, culminating in the Civil Rights and Voting Acts of 1964. In that year, the focus turned from unions and racial equality to (VietNam) war resistance.
Although both the Union and the Civil Rights movements survived many, many casualties in their struggle, they persisted until the goal was reached. Not so the the war resisters: the National Guard shootings of demonstrators at Kent State University, Ohio, stopped the "Peace" movement in its tracks.
Had the union or civil rights movements been abandoned because two people were killed in the resulting violence, nothing would have been accomplished.
Now, of course, no outrage is enough even to get our (US) citizens up in arms (pun intended).
The framers of our Constitution understood it was simply an *experiment* and once the government learned to game the people (as FEMA has apologized for) the people would replace it, having learned from the current experiment what pitfalls to avoid next time.
T. Jefferson reckoned the consititution ought to be replace every thirty years or so. We're WAAAYY overdue.
Liberty is fed with the blood of tyrants.
Question: I understand (and correct me if I am in error) that one can use patented techniques and processes for *private and noncommercial* use. So --
IF the patents in question are upheld (and I sincerely hope they are not) and Red Hat and Novell remove infringing code/features, then may I legally recompile *for my own use* infringing source code (from present releases, f'rexample) to include multiple desktops?
Any lawyers still following this thread?
Carly changed HP's motto, apparently, from "Invent" to "Remarket" in selling iPods under HP's name.
Now, apparently after some time unemployed and unemployable after the mess she and her hubris left at HP, she turns up, where? At Fox, the spinmeisters.
They deserve each other.
Found it:
5.1 Suspension/Termination. Your Service may be suspended or terminated if your payment is past due and such condition continues un-remedied for thirty (30) days. In addition, AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries. Termination or suspension by AT&T of Service also constitutes termination or suspension (as applicable) of your license to use any Software. AT&T may also terminate or suspend your Service if you provide false or inaccurate information that is required for the provision of Service or is necessary to allow AT&T to bill you for Service.
Not p0wned
You're right on both points. I had forgotten that there was no trial, just the execution of sentence: give up your exclusive right to use the phone networks of the US and break yourself up.
Never having had to market beyond "reach out and touch someone," what was left of ATT went shopping for marketing-types from other industries, or borrowed sales pitches and techniques from their (new) competitors.
I am quite sure their management never knew how frickin mad users had become.
Where's the problem?
The term plus the example of GHWB using the "Bully Pulpit" to promote bigotry and incite violence IS my entire point. The power of the President to persuade is the essence of the position. Roosevelt may have meant it in a "positive" way, but any tool can be used to destroy as well as to build.
So explain how we disagree?
You may be right about that; I had scanned TFA but, like you, I found no mention of it.
Nevertheless, I stand by what I wrote, which applies whether I've been p0wned or not.
AT&T, taken apart decades ago because of their abuse of monopoly power, has not learned how to compete in a free marketplace and, thus, must go back to their orginal business model: hateful monopolizing. Perhaps some of you remember or have seen reruns of Lily Tomlin's wonderful ATT operator.
The main problem with having a president who lies and suspends constitutional rights is that the public, by example, are led to believe lying and bullying are OK. "Gee, the president makes it work for him...."
This is the famous Bully Pulpit that the first President Roosevelt talked about.
To give a more specific example of this principle, when former president George Herbert Walker Bush complained publicly that the Japanese government was trading unfairly with the United States (this was before the Tokyo stock crash) several Japanese tourists were attacked and beaten on the streets of US cities.
We need a president who loves truth. Otherwise, the US has more to worry about than Ma Bell.
Of course, Ma Bell is bad enough....
disclaimer: I am an ATT customer in CA. rethinking my subscription to their service.
But wait -- that leaves me with using ComCast....
I have no fear.
_____________________
Stop following me -- I don't know where I'm going!
I have followed some of the discussion about the kernal and its optimizations for desktop vs. server usage, especially recent arguments over the scheduler. Although I am most definitly NOT a kernel hacker, I am quite well-read on the subject of McLuhan and his insights into media.
Computers are "hot." Their screens are clear, and, more and more, are solid-state rather than CRT (McLuhan said we feel the electrons come through a TV-type screen to land on our skin). As a "hot" medium (compared to TV or even FM radio) it is fitting that a computer spring into action immediately a control, key or mouse button, is activated. That it does not do so is frustrating. It is like watching an Imax movie and listening to the audio through cheap headphones; it is an unsatisfying experience.
A server, OTOH, is not a medium. It is an appliance. It does not interface with our personalities as a desktop computer does.
But I disagree that the problem lies with the kernel or its scheduler. It seems to lie elsewhere in the system as KDE seems sluggish and slow-to-respond to input even with 1.5 gigs of RAM on a 2800Mhz-rated Semprom, while Blackbox on a RH-6.2 box with one-fifteenth the computing power and one-sixth of the RAM was much, much more responsive. On this box, KDE (versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2) was no more or less responsive than it is on my current Mepis-6.0 installation. I do not have Gnome installed so I cannot compare it.
During the years of using the AMD-K6 300 box, I experimented with various self-compiled kernels (the old 2.4 series) and patches. Optimizing sometimes radically, I might achieve a modest (2-3 per cent) improvement in certain benchmarks but nothing noticeable in the real world, so I stopped compiling my own kernels and used bone-stock distribution-supplied ones.
I agree that the Linux Desktop should SNAP-TO when a command is issued or pressed. But I do not see significant gains to be made to this end by the kernel scheduler. Perhaps reading all those KDE text config files each time an event happens has something to do with desktop sluggishness. Perhaps RAM latency is part of the prob and some data could be prefetched in some way. Or perhaps engineers might install an enormous, fast L3 cache on mobos.
Whatever the solution, the organization that makes a computer to respond in a way that would please McLuhan, were he still with us, will own the 21st century, IMHO.
H'mmm. I r'member those days. Seems to me I tweaked Qemm and DOS-5 to show ~703Kb under 640k. Eventually, I moved on to DR-DOS, which was able to free more than 720k "under 640.
Virtual memory made of RAM chips, run through a 64kb page file window. What a dull idea....
Oh, it's still being used?