I noticed that one of the tags on this article is "gay"...
I am up to here with this 1984'esque redefinition of words. If you want to say "I hate gay people" then fucking stand up and say that... And if you don't, then why are you absent mindedly throwing around the label of a group to mean something sucks? Words hurt.
Think about it for a second. Would it be appropriate to say "That's so black" or "That's deaf"?
And before someone mentions it - yes, calling something "Retarded" really hurts when someone you know has a mental disability. Fuck political correctness --- but there is a difference between hate speech (even "unintentional"), and saying what you mean.
Infinite was a bad choice of words, but the energy required is still much much greater.
There are two kinds of friction, sliding friction and static friction. The coefficient of sliding friction is lower than that of static friction. Static friction contributes more to overall friction because the surfaces in contact are partly bonded together by molecular forces. However, since this bonding isn't instantaneous, surfaces that are moving don't end up bonding together as strongly. So to get something moving you have to overcome static friction and then just keep pouring in a much smaller amount of energy to continue to overcome the sliding friction.
Ok, I was almost down to the bottom of the page moderating, and had to back out to respond to this point.
You have come close to hitting on the quintessential question behind all of the debate.
What makes a human a human?
Arguably, the most important criteria for being human is awareness... consciousness.
Here's a rather graphic gedanken:
Shave off all your hair... are you still human?
What if you amputate your arms and legs?
How about body organs? Artificial heart, kidney dialysis, iron lung, etc...
Take this beyond what is possible with modern day science... brain in a vat. Quality of life has certainly decreased dramatically! However, the brain is still thinking, the software of mind is still running. What if it were possible to run the software on other hardware? Sure, cyberpunk has beat this topic to death... but I certainly don't consider my brain to be me! To quote Rene Descartes: "cogito ergo sum". Nothing else is relevant... software is everything (yeah, I'm a programmer;-) )
Unfortunately, science has not been able to answer the question of when during development the spark of consciousness begins.
Can we agree that awareness requires a brain? Can we agree that this brain needs to be working... ie. the synapses are firing, neural potentials exist?
If so, then consciousness must begin sometime between 4 and 6 months of development.
This experiment was limited to 14 days of development. This is the point when cells begin to differentiate. Clearly this is long before a brain and the potential for consciousness arises.
Really, this is an ideal stop-gap measure. If by mixing mitochondrial DNA of another species with human nuclear DNA you achieve a development term necessary for medicinal purposes, and at the same time insure development self-aborts prior to brain development, then you end up with a self regulating procedure that prevents the accidental creation of a human consciousness.
You know, technically, the Federal government is for the people, by the people.
So if telemarketers are sueing the Federal government, then they are sueing both the people who buy their products, and those that do not wish even to consider them. In effect, we are looking at companies sueing consumers to force them to hear free speech. Fortunately, freedom of speech grants the right to say something; not the right to force others to listen.
The Arecibo radio telescope is a fixed dish, which rotates along with the Earth. As the beam of the dish passes a constant power signal source in the sky, the power of the received signal will increase, peak, and decrease following a gaussian profile.
You are correct in the limitations of the dish, however. By pointing the detectors at different places on the dish, the beam can be moved in relation to the plane of the Earth's rotation. The Seti@Home equipment at Arecibo is capable of tracking +1 to +35 degrees declination, and has a beam width of 0.1 degrees. Thus it is only able to see 28% of the sky.
When I first put my AMD together, it was the beginning of summer on a Sunday and all the computer stores in the area were closed.
Unfortunately for me, the CPU fan and two case fans weren't enough to keep the CPU at a temperature to run the machine for more than about 10 minutes...
Luckily, I hadn't put the window air conditioning unit in for the year at that point. The temporary solution was to open up the side of the case, stick the air conditioner right up to it, and set it full blast. My cpu hasn't run cooler since. (Something like 35 degrees C). Glad that it wasn't humid that day.;-)
The web was available to the general public prior to 1995. If it wasn't then I'm not sure what I was using while in high school!
Netscape was not the first publically available web browser. You mention Mosaic, but assume that it was only available to academic institutions. It might have crashed every third image, but it was available.
There were public ISPs well before 1993. In fact, one of my accounts from that time is still active (after 9 years of not being billed). The web was just as open as the rest of the net was at that time.
Early adopter, sure... but definately not impossible.
Licensing is via the CDRH (part of the FDA). According to the specifications for the printer:
"Class 1 safety enclosure for CO2 laser beam. Class IIIa for red laser pointer."
This means that the CO2 laser is fully enclosed when the cover is closed (which would be opaque to infared red) and the cover would have a interlock switch to turn off the laser when open.
If the beam were exposed, then it would be a class IV device, require a key switch, and all kinds of other fun stuff.
The best CO2 lasers can approach 30% efficiency, so the laser in this is definately less then 150W, most likely much less.
100W for a CO2 laser is nothing... the big CO2 cutting lasers have light outputs in the kilowatts.
First off, where is he advocating illegal activity? Not one place in the interview does Kevin express that he would like someone to go out and do something illegal. In fact, he is advocating not committing computer crime, and gives alternative legal methods if you still care to learn about hacking.
Secondly, what country do I live in again? The basic premise of justice is that an illegal action can be counterbalanced by restitution. The subtle concept here is that the penal system does not exist to punish, but rather it exists to rehabilitate. (Its supposed to at any rate, YMWV). So we shouldn't be locking up people based on what others think or worry about, we should be locking them up based on what damage they have actually caused. The reason Kevin is a hero, is not because he was a hacker, it is because he survived an ordeal that should never have happened in this country. And in so doing, he and others have brought to our attention just how out of control the justice system in this country is at the moment.
Why has a large majority of population of the United States suddenly forgotten our government, our law, is based on a constitution? Why all of a sudden is it OK to ignore laws in some cases, enforce them in others, and blow them way out of proportion in yet others? Is there some type of Moore's Law in relation to repeating history?
The moment our laws reflect our fears rather then the facts will be the moment in which we are all doomed. Like money, laws are not tangible things. Laws are based on the faith of the people. The more the justice system fails to follow procedure and law, the less faith citizens will have in those laws. If citizens lose faith in the justice system, justice and laws will no longer have any power.
1-0xx-xxx-xxxx will still not be likely, as it would conflict with the 1010xxx carrier codes.
But you are on to something. Dialing the 1 first would make 1xx area codes available. Some offices must be using 0xx/1xx exchanges for routing, hence the need for the 1- prefix to signal an area code follows, not an exchange.
I have personal experience with doing this... working 80+ hours a week to make sure my company stayed on target (getting paid for a salary figured on a nominal 40 hours). 6 months into it I renegotiated my salary and more then tripled it. If you work for a company which is small enough or organised enough to notice what you are doing, then putting your heart and soul into your work pays off. The real question is: "Are adding value to the company?" Are you? If you aren't, then your position is already worthless.
If you are trying to make money; government intervention, the lack of jobs, unpleasant work, etc., etc. are all great excuses to make you think that you are doing everything that you can to get by... Instead, realize that things have radically changed; use your ubertech skills to find a new solution to the "making a living" problem.
(Or were you really a fake "techie" who wasn't really that intelligent? Go ahead, I _dare_ you to think outside of that box you are in.)
I've used all three (Bochs, WINE, VMWare) and each are designed for different purposes.
Bochs is quite slow for normal application usage, but it is absolutely ideal for low level OS development work. Compare crashing your real machine hundreds of times while debugging your bootloader and memory management code to having a "virtual" crash in Bochs. Also, Bochs provides stubs for implementing runtime instrumentation, so you can use powerful debugging techniques that remain 100% insulated from the debugee.
If you are primarily concerned with running one or two Windows apps under Linux that you just can't live without, then Wine is for you. Sure, there are still some rough edges, but in many cases, your application will actually run faster under Linux then under Windows. However, parts of Wine are still incomplete, so YMMV. The biggest plus with the Wine approach is that interaction between apps is a tad simpler.
VMWare creates a bit of a middle ground between Wine and Bochs. I've used it for the past two years to keep a copy of Win98 and Win2k on my Linux box. Because being an independent programmer/consultant sometimes requires me to use technologies I don't exactly embrace, the Windows in VMWare option allows me to maintain productivity while not opening myself to network *cough* problems. In addition, I can keep multiple OS's running concurrently so testing and debugging apps is fairly painless. Except for a few operations (installing software, for example) the virtual machine runs almost as fast as if I ran the OS natively. BTW, when Windows inevitably hoses itself, I have it running again in the time it takes to copy a 1G file;-)
So in summary, if you are doing some hardcore hacking, get yourself Bochs... it will save you many many reboots.
If you want to run MS Office and can live with a few glitches, get yourself Wine.
Looking to simplify cross-OS application debugging, need to have Windows close at hand, doing tech support? Then VMWare is your answer.
Want to run the latest DirectX 9.0, wet your pants LOD game... yet run Linux as well? Get yourself a second machine.
Actually, from a technical standpoint, it doesn't look like requiring a GPS and a database would be necessary at all.
If the FCC opened up the UHF broadcast television band to unlicensed spread-spectrum, in most cases the raise in noise floor due to the spread-spectrum transmitter will barely (if at all) effect reception in fringe areas (ie. where there is already so much snow that you can barely see the image).
I did some quick digging, and a back of of the napkin calculation, and here is what I came up with...
The assumptions:
1. The FCC requires a minimal threshold signal of -45dBm at a satellite uplink for stations which are being received via the airwaves and rebroadcast via satellite. This is considered a "good" signal.
2. -75dBm is typically the minimal perceptable signal received by an analog television tuner (I converted this from some test documents which mentioned -85dBu, but did not mention into what load. I assumed a reference of 0.775V into 75ohm and converted to dBm (1mW into 50 ohm). I don't work with broadcast television, so I am accustomed to units in dBm... if my conversion is incorrect, please reply - as my argument hinges on this!
3. A typical FHSS receiver has a minimal signal strength requirement of -116 dBm.
4. Depending on who you ask, a FHSS transmitter will raise the noise floor over a 10MHz band by between 10dB and 50dB. (10 by supporters of the technology, 50 by the detractors). I'll assume the middle of the road figure of 30dB.
The argument:
The FCC and broadcast television providers will be concerned with possible interference to their services. As licensed spectrum operators, their signal must not be interfered with by any unlicensed operators.
In order to receive a signal with the spread-spectrum signal, the incoming signal must be above the receiver's sensitivity threshold. Using -116dB and adding in the peak spectrum power of 30dB, we get a figure of -86dBm as a minimal "good" quality reception.
Since the FHSS signal appears as noise, the -86dBm received by the television tuner will represent its noise floor. Compared to the -75dBm minimal television signal strength, this represents a power margin of 11dB. The FHSS should have no impact on a well designed television tuner. In addition, if you only consider interference with "great" reception (at -45dBm) you have a power margin of 41dB.
Now, while not important to the FCC and broadcasters, reception of the FHSS signal is important to us. Without going into a bunch of signal theory, it sums up to reception of the signal, but can be as low as 10% of the total non-interefered channel capacity (assuming a 6MHz television channel). But that is not exactly a problem - considering how many unused channels are available on UHF!
So according to this, a FHSS could be simplified greatly. Set it to a channel like normal, and if you goofed and set it to a TV channel in use, it won't interfere, but you will get (much) reduced bandwidth.
I'm all for it! It's a great idea!
The only justification I can come up with to purchase one of these cards is if you have already maxed out your motherboard system RAM.
Does anyone know if this maps in as a normal ATA or SCSI controller? Or do you need a special windows only driver?
If linux can recognize it as a normal block device, and I was rich enough to already have 4G of PC2700 on my mobo, then a mkswap/swapon on this device would become beneficial.
Actually, it is Gigawatts. Giga is supposed to be pronounced with a soft "G", making it sound like a J... Someone, somewhere, many years ago said giga with a hard g and it stuck.
I don't remember if it was AT&T specifically, but it may have been. At H2K in 2000, a memo similar to this actually prompted the social engineering call - which was actually made to the security people... They did indeed to see to be inclined to believe that they were speaking to an actual employee of the company, as they were asked to explain this memo the "employee" just received.
The entire conversation was hillarious as it gave a glimpse into the security office's view of hackers, live, to a roomful of 400-500 or so of them.
Maintaining backend infrastructure with a 5 9's service level agreement really is prohibitively expensive for all but the largest businesses. Especially if they are not a tech company.
The level of engineering that goes into providing true 5 9's service is extraordinary. Also, some military contracts actually require 6 9's!! (Let alone completely seperate networks for classified data).
I'm actually in the design phase of a data center which requires 5 9's (so we can take on those who decide to outsource). Redundant generators, redundant UPS, redundant routers, redundant HVAC, two seperate cable runs from different sides of the building, two connections to the power grid, etc., etc....
And thats just the physical infrastructure! Now you need to develop, or integrate the software to completely cover every aspect of your operations. Anything from cable tagging, to ticketting systems, to emergency procedures. After you build all the infrastructure, take that price and double it... that's how much you will be spending to develop all of those operating procedures. Which, at that point, go get ISO certified - since you've already gone above all the requirements.
If I had to take a guess at a physical cost, $250-300 a square foot seems pretty close (around here anyway). And that only gets cheaper if you are looking at a facility greater than about 10000 sq. ft.
Sure took them long enough to start seriously considering alternatives. First off, IANAD, but I'm not obeise either, and I know what works.
I eat no special diet, in fact, for a while I was eating fast food almost everyday for lunch. When I had a cholesterol test the doctor remarked that I had the lowest cholestorol count he had ever seen.
Perhaps I have just been lucky and have a great metabolism... But after I started researching to put together a regular exercise program (mostly jogging), I kept hearing the same facts repeated. These were: If you eat mostly fats consistently, your metabolism with adjust to run your body on fat calories. If you eat mostly carbohydrates (complex-sugars) your body will adjust to burn them. If you are adjusted to burning carbohydrates, and start running, when you run out of sugars in your blood, you "hit the wall" while you body tries to switch over to burning fats (and does a crappy job at it, leaving all kinds of junk floating around).
So basically, what looks like is happening, at least from my lay perspective, is that if you eat a ton of carbohydrates any extra fat you eat is going to be dropped off as fat. However, if you eat mostly fats, your body is already burning them, and extra sugar will be converted to fat and burnt later.
So the best thing to do, if you like eating fat, is to keep eating it... and do get off your butt once and a while and actually use all those calories!
I entirely agree. I would much rather see technological innovation thrown at the problem by both sides, rather then short sighted legislation.
This way, everyone wins. P2P technology created for legitimate uses doesn't face the possibilities of being made illegal. We should see the same approaches used in deep linking cases, and DRM cases.
Just to make it clear, I strongly dislike the RIAA, and MPAA. And do not agree with their reasons for existence. However, given a choose of evils, I would prefer these DoS attacks rather then legislation. On the other hand, however, couldn't these DoS attacks be considered illegal, or hacking, or terrorist acts by already too broad US legislation???
For an ISP, yes. Especially when you consider an outfit that is willing to go into an exclusivity agreement with them will probably get another 20-30% slashed of the prices.
A few words on the technology, from what I read on their site. The modulation is BFSK (Binary Frequency Shift Keying) which is one of many different methods to implement frequency hopping spread spectrum and direct sequence spread spectrum. Unfortunately they don't delve into any details into the method they use.
Since it is spread spectrum, other units (not colocated) will not directly interfere. Spread spectrum signals look like wideband noise to other receivers that do not have the same hopping pattern. Activating one of these units will raise the noise floor in the LOS of it's signal.
If the equipment uses DSSS, well, that's ok, but not too exciting. DSSS has a problem with interference with other DSSS radios, and manifests itself by a sharp drop in bandwidth. If in the other hand this is using FHSS, then awesome. The only interference will be an increase in noise floor, which can be absorbed with a good enough link margin.
Link margin is what counts here. Several people have already mentioned questionable reliability as a mark against these technologies. That is simply not a problem with a properly margined link. In a wireless link, several factors affect your reception (and ultimately bandwidth and reliability). You will have signal losses in the feed cables, signal gains at the antenna, and signal losses due to free space propagation. Yes, rain and other atmospheric conditions do raise the term used in calculating free space losses at these frequencies.
Now, by a properly margined link, here is what I mean. Take the amount of power going out of one unit into its feeder cable, add the gains for the antenna on each end, subtract maximal expected freespace propagation loss. Now, based on your equipments specified signal to noise ratio (SNR) you can find the minimal power your receiver needs to decode the signal. Subtract it from the previous number, and you have a link margin. A higher link margin is a better link. What this measures is the "additional" power above and beyond what the receiver needs to pickup the signal. As long as this margin is enough to cover things like unusual atmospheric conditions, and nearby band interferers, you have a good, reliable link.
Finally, back to cost. These prices are decent for a local ISP exactly because of amortization. Think like cable companies that lease you the cable modem for a few dollars a month. If you disconnect your service, they get the unit back and can redeploy it. Next, focus on business users before the residential ones. Business customers are more willing to purchase equipment outright, instead of paying a lease amount (at least in my experience). This lets you concentrate your tiny pile of cash on building the POP end of the network, instead of footing the bill for each customer premise unit.
Yeah... I used to do this for a living. Headed the engineering department for a midsized wireless ISP that used technology like this. My email is listed if anyone has any questions.
By sensitivity to "environmental" factors, I'm sure they are referring to light.
Requiring cryogenic cooling for operation, it will be a long time before we see these "transistors" in a CPU humming under our desk.
An application we are likely to see for this technology in the near term is supersensitive CCD imagers for use in devices such as the Hubble. Having the switching element consist of a single atom is likely to make each transistor sensitive to single photons of light, with the proper cooling and biasing.
From reading the article, the biggest trouble with these devices is they all share the same gate (the silicon substrate). So for real world use we are still no further ahead... in other words, still dependant on the feature size we can produce using lithography techniques on silicon.
OK, this thread has turned into a complete joke.
First - I would like to tell everyone to go take
a course in reading comprehension. Obviously with
more then one acronym per post everyone gets
confused.;-)
Now, having said that:
I know that VLIW means very long instruction
word, not data path
I know that Intel processors are based on a
RISC like core - I'm not talking about execution,
I'm talking about decoding,scheduling,dispatch, and issue.
Anything that does more then one operation at
a time is superscalar.
RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) and
CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) are
distinctly different methods of CPU design.
VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) computers use
multiple RISC like instructions packed into each
VLIW instruction word. The sub-instructions are
called atoms; the packed together instructions are
called molecules. The point of doing this is
to get rid of the decoding/scheduling/dispatch
circuitry, since the compiler already pairs atoms
together that can run in parallel. The atoms are
always occupying the same bits, and are all of the
same form... That is what RISC like means folks.
The only difference between a RISC processor and
a VLIW processor is that the RISC processor still
has to pair instructions together as it gets them.
The pairing of VLIW atoms has already been accomplished
by the compiler.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed that one of the tags on this article is "gay"...
I am up to here with this 1984'esque redefinition of words. If you want to say "I hate gay people" then fucking stand up and say that... And if you don't, then why are you absent mindedly throwing around the label of a group to mean something sucks? Words hurt.
Think about it for a second. Would it be appropriate to say "That's so black" or "That's deaf"?
And before someone mentions it - yes, calling something "Retarded" really hurts when someone you know has a mental disability. Fuck political correctness --- but there is a difference between hate speech (even "unintentional"), and saying what you mean.
We'll just make talking about DOD security flaws illegal in Patriot Act 3 and then nobody will know.
Depth tube? How long does that take to warm up?
Infinite was a bad choice of words, but the energy required is still much much greater. There are two kinds of friction, sliding friction and static friction. The coefficient of sliding friction is lower than that of static friction. Static friction contributes more to overall friction because the surfaces in contact are partly bonded together by molecular forces. However, since this bonding isn't instantaneous, surfaces that are moving don't end up bonding together as strongly. So to get something moving you have to overcome static friction and then just keep pouring in a much smaller amount of energy to continue to overcome the sliding friction.
Ok, I was almost down to the bottom of the page moderating, and had to back out to respond to this point.
You have come close to hitting on the quintessential question behind all of the debate.
What makes a human a human?
Arguably, the most important criteria for being human is awareness... consciousness.
Here's a rather graphic gedanken:
Shave off all your hair... are you still human? What if you amputate your arms and legs? How about body organs? Artificial heart, kidney dialysis, iron lung, etc... Take this beyond what is possible with modern day science... brain in a vat. Quality of life has certainly decreased dramatically! However, the brain is still thinking, the software of mind is still running. What if it were possible to run the software on other hardware? Sure, cyberpunk has beat this topic to death... but I certainly don't consider my brain to be me! To quote Rene Descartes: "cogito ergo sum". Nothing else is relevant... software is everything (yeah, I'm a programmer ;-) )
Unfortunately, science has not been able to answer the question of when during development the spark of consciousness begins.
Can we agree that awareness requires a brain? Can we agree that this brain needs to be working... ie. the synapses are firing, neural potentials exist?
If so, then consciousness must begin sometime between 4 and 6 months of development.
This experiment was limited to 14 days of development. This is the point when cells begin to differentiate. Clearly this is long before a brain and the potential for consciousness arises.
Really, this is an ideal stop-gap measure. If by mixing mitochondrial DNA of another species with human nuclear DNA you achieve a development term necessary for medicinal purposes, and at the same time insure development self-aborts prior to brain development, then you end up with a self regulating procedure that prevents the accidental creation of a human consciousness.
You know, technically, the Federal government is for the people, by the people.
So if telemarketers are sueing the Federal government, then they are sueing both the people who buy their products, and those that do not wish even to consider them. In effect, we are looking at companies sueing consumers to force them to hear free speech. Fortunately, freedom of speech grants the right to say something; not the right to force others to listen.
uhh... no.
The Arecibo radio telescope is a fixed dish, which rotates along with the Earth. As the beam of the dish passes a constant power signal source in the sky, the power of the received signal will increase, peak, and decrease following a gaussian profile.
You are correct in the limitations of the dish, however. By pointing the detectors at different places on the dish, the beam can be moved in relation to the plane of the Earth's rotation. The Seti@Home equipment at Arecibo is capable of tracking +1 to +35 degrees declination, and has a beam width of 0.1 degrees. Thus it is only able to see 28% of the sky.
Seti@Home Whitepaper
When I first put my AMD together, it was the beginning of summer on a Sunday and all the computer stores in the area were closed.
Unfortunately for me, the CPU fan and two case fans weren't enough to keep the CPU at a temperature to run the machine for more than about 10 minutes...
Luckily, I hadn't put the window air conditioning unit in for the year at that point. The temporary solution was to open up the side of the case, stick the air conditioner right up to it, and set it full blast. My cpu hasn't run cooler since. (Something like 35 degrees C). Glad that it wasn't humid that day. ;-)
Sorry, but you are wrong...
Early adopter, sure... but definately not impossible.
After running for over 3 months continuously, my Athlon PC shut down due to CPU temperature... while reading the article!!! Too weird.
Licensing is via the CDRH (part of the FDA). According to the specifications for the printer:
"Class 1 safety enclosure for CO2 laser beam. Class IIIa for red laser pointer."
This means that the CO2 laser is fully enclosed when the cover is closed (which would be opaque to infared red) and the cover would have a interlock switch to turn off the laser when open.
If the beam were exposed, then it would be a class IV device, require a key switch, and all kinds of other fun stuff.
The best CO2 lasers can approach 30% efficiency, so the laser in this is definately less then 150W, most likely much less.
100W for a CO2 laser is nothing... the big CO2 cutting lasers have light outputs in the kilowatts.
First off, where is he advocating illegal activity? Not one place in the interview does Kevin express that he would like someone to go out and do something illegal. In fact, he is advocating not committing computer crime, and gives alternative legal methods if you still care to learn about hacking.
Secondly, what country do I live in again? The basic premise of justice is that an illegal action can be counterbalanced by restitution. The subtle concept here is that the penal system does not exist to punish, but rather it exists to rehabilitate. (Its supposed to at any rate, YMWV). So we shouldn't be locking up people based on what others think or worry about, we should be locking them up based on what damage they have actually caused. The reason Kevin is a hero, is not because he was a hacker, it is because he survived an ordeal that should never have happened in this country. And in so doing, he and others have brought to our attention just how out of control the justice system in this country is at the moment.
Why has a large majority of population of the United States suddenly forgotten our government, our law, is based on a constitution? Why all of a sudden is it OK to ignore laws in some cases, enforce them in others, and blow them way out of proportion in yet others? Is there some type of Moore's Law in relation to repeating history?
The moment our laws reflect our fears rather then the facts will be the moment in which we are all doomed. Like money, laws are not tangible things. Laws are based on the faith of the people. The more the justice system fails to follow procedure and law, the less faith citizens will have in those laws. If citizens lose faith in the justice system, justice and laws will no longer have any power.
1-0xx-xxx-xxxx will still not be likely, as it would conflict with the 1010xxx carrier codes.
But you are on to something. Dialing the 1 first would make 1xx area codes available. Some offices must be using 0xx/1xx exchanges for routing, hence the need for the 1- prefix to signal an area code follows, not an exchange.
Absolutely not:
I have personal experience with doing this... working 80+ hours a week to make sure my company stayed on target (getting paid for a salary figured on a nominal 40 hours). 6 months into it I renegotiated my salary and more then tripled it. If you work for a company which is small enough or organised enough to notice what you are doing, then putting your heart and soul into your work pays off. The real question is: "Are adding value to the company?" Are you? If you aren't, then your position is already worthless.
If you are trying to make money; government intervention, the lack of jobs, unpleasant work, etc., etc. are all great excuses to make you think that you are doing everything that you can to get by... Instead, realize that things have radically changed; use your ubertech skills to find a new solution to the "making a living" problem.
(Or were you really a fake "techie" who wasn't really that intelligent? Go ahead, I _dare_ you to think outside of that box you are in.)
Precisely.
I've used all three (Bochs, WINE, VMWare) and each are designed for different purposes.
Bochs is quite slow for normal application usage, but it is absolutely ideal for low level OS development work. Compare crashing your real machine hundreds of times while debugging your bootloader and memory management code to having a "virtual" crash in Bochs. Also, Bochs provides stubs for implementing runtime instrumentation, so you can use powerful debugging techniques that remain 100% insulated from the debugee.
If you are primarily concerned with running one or two Windows apps under Linux that you just can't live without, then Wine is for you. Sure, there are still some rough edges, but in many cases, your application will actually run faster under Linux then under Windows. However, parts of Wine are still incomplete, so YMMV. The biggest plus with the Wine approach is that interaction between apps is a tad simpler.
VMWare creates a bit of a middle ground between Wine and Bochs. I've used it for the past two years to keep a copy of Win98 and Win2k on my Linux box. Because being an independent programmer/consultant sometimes requires me to use technologies I don't exactly embrace, the Windows in VMWare option allows me to maintain productivity while not opening myself to network *cough* problems. In addition, I can keep multiple OS's running concurrently so testing and debugging apps is fairly painless. Except for a few operations (installing software, for example) the virtual machine runs almost as fast as if I ran the OS natively. BTW, when Windows inevitably hoses itself, I have it running again in the time it takes to copy a 1G file ;-)
So in summary, if you are doing some hardcore hacking, get yourself Bochs... it will save you many many reboots.
If you want to run MS Office and can live with a few glitches, get yourself Wine.
Looking to simplify cross-OS application debugging, need to have Windows close at hand, doing tech support? Then VMWare is your answer.
Want to run the latest DirectX 9.0, wet your pants LOD game... yet run Linux as well? Get yourself a second machine.
Actually, from a technical standpoint, it doesn't look like requiring a GPS and a database would be necessary at all. If the FCC opened up the UHF broadcast television band to unlicensed spread-spectrum, in most cases the raise in noise floor due to the spread-spectrum transmitter will barely (if at all) effect reception in fringe areas (ie. where there is already so much snow that you can barely see the image). I did some quick digging, and a back of of the napkin calculation, and here is what I came up with... The assumptions: 1. The FCC requires a minimal threshold signal of -45dBm at a satellite uplink for stations which are being received via the airwaves and rebroadcast via satellite. This is considered a "good" signal. 2. -75dBm is typically the minimal perceptable signal received by an analog television tuner (I converted this from some test documents which mentioned -85dBu, but did not mention into what load. I assumed a reference of 0.775V into 75ohm and converted to dBm (1mW into 50 ohm). I don't work with broadcast television, so I am accustomed to units in dBm... if my conversion is incorrect, please reply - as my argument hinges on this! 3. A typical FHSS receiver has a minimal signal strength requirement of -116 dBm. 4. Depending on who you ask, a FHSS transmitter will raise the noise floor over a 10MHz band by between 10dB and 50dB. (10 by supporters of the technology, 50 by the detractors). I'll assume the middle of the road figure of 30dB. The argument: The FCC and broadcast television providers will be concerned with possible interference to their services. As licensed spectrum operators, their signal must not be interfered with by any unlicensed operators. In order to receive a signal with the spread-spectrum signal, the incoming signal must be above the receiver's sensitivity threshold. Using -116dB and adding in the peak spectrum power of 30dB, we get a figure of -86dBm as a minimal "good" quality reception. Since the FHSS signal appears as noise, the -86dBm received by the television tuner will represent its noise floor. Compared to the -75dBm minimal television signal strength, this represents a power margin of 11dB. The FHSS should have no impact on a well designed television tuner. In addition, if you only consider interference with "great" reception (at -45dBm) you have a power margin of 41dB. Now, while not important to the FCC and broadcasters, reception of the FHSS signal is important to us. Without going into a bunch of signal theory, it sums up to reception of the signal, but can be as low as 10% of the total non-interefered channel capacity (assuming a 6MHz television channel). But that is not exactly a problem - considering how many unused channels are available on UHF! So according to this, a FHSS could be simplified greatly. Set it to a channel like normal, and if you goofed and set it to a TV channel in use, it won't interfere, but you will get (much) reduced bandwidth. I'm all for it! It's a great idea!
The only justification I can come up with to purchase one of these cards is if you have already maxed out your motherboard system RAM.
Does anyone know if this maps in as a normal ATA or SCSI controller? Or do you need a special windows only driver?
If linux can recognize it as a normal block device, and I was rich enough to already have 4G of PC2700 on my mobo, then a mkswap/swapon on this device would become beneficial.
Also, can you install more then one in a system?
Actually, it is Gigawatts. Giga is supposed to be pronounced with a soft "G", making it sound like a J... Someone, somewhere, many years ago said giga with a hard g and it stuck.
I don't remember if it was AT&T specifically, but it may have been. At H2K in 2000, a memo similar to this actually prompted the social engineering call - which was actually made to the security people... They did indeed to see to be inclined to believe that they were speaking to an actual employee of the company, as they were asked to explain this memo the "employee" just received.
The entire conversation was hillarious as it gave a glimpse into the security office's view of hackers, live, to a roomful of 400-500 or so of them.
One word to clients... "Outsource"
Maintaining backend infrastructure with a 5 9's service level agreement really is prohibitively expensive for all but the largest businesses. Especially if they are not a tech company.
The level of engineering that goes into providing true 5 9's service is extraordinary. Also, some military contracts actually require 6 9's!! (Let alone completely seperate networks for classified data).
I'm actually in the design phase of a data center which requires 5 9's (so we can take on those who decide to outsource). Redundant generators, redundant UPS, redundant routers, redundant HVAC, two seperate cable runs from different sides of the building, two connections to the power grid, etc., etc....
And thats just the physical infrastructure! Now you need to develop, or integrate the software to completely cover every aspect of your operations. Anything from cable tagging, to ticketting systems, to emergency procedures. After you build all the infrastructure, take that price and double it... that's how much you will be spending to develop all of those operating procedures. Which, at that point, go get ISO certified - since you've already gone above all the requirements.
If I had to take a guess at a physical cost, $250-300 a square foot seems pretty close (around here anyway). And that only gets cheaper if you are looking at a facility greater than about 10000 sq. ft.
Unless of course, only marketing has those 5 9's!
Sure took them long enough to start seriously considering alternatives. First off, IANAD, but I'm not obeise either, and I know what works.
I eat no special diet, in fact, for a while I was eating fast food almost everyday for lunch. When I had a cholesterol test the doctor remarked that I had the lowest cholestorol count he had ever seen.
Perhaps I have just been lucky and have a great metabolism... But after I started researching to put together a regular exercise program (mostly jogging), I kept hearing the same facts repeated. These were: If you eat mostly fats consistently, your metabolism with adjust to run your body on fat calories. If you eat mostly carbohydrates (complex-sugars) your body will adjust to burn them. If you are adjusted to burning carbohydrates, and start running, when you run out of sugars in your blood, you "hit the wall" while you body tries to switch over to burning fats (and does a crappy job at it, leaving all kinds of junk floating around).
So basically, what looks like is happening, at least from my lay perspective, is that if you eat a ton of carbohydrates any extra fat you eat is going to be dropped off as fat. However, if you eat mostly fats, your body is already burning them, and extra sugar will be converted to fat and burnt later.
So the best thing to do, if you like eating fat, is to keep eating it... and do get off your butt once and a while and actually use all those calories!
I entirely agree. I would much rather see technological innovation thrown at the problem by both sides, rather then short sighted legislation. This way, everyone wins. P2P technology created for legitimate uses doesn't face the possibilities of being made illegal. We should see the same approaches used in deep linking cases, and DRM cases. Just to make it clear, I strongly dislike the RIAA, and MPAA. And do not agree with their reasons for existence. However, given a choose of evils, I would prefer these DoS attacks rather then legislation. On the other hand, however, couldn't these DoS attacks be considered illegal, or hacking, or terrorist acts by already too broad US legislation???
For an ISP, yes. Especially when you consider an outfit that is willing to go into an exclusivity agreement with them will probably get another 20-30% slashed of the prices.
A few words on the technology, from what I read on their site. The modulation is BFSK (Binary Frequency Shift Keying) which is one of many different methods to implement frequency hopping spread spectrum and direct sequence spread spectrum. Unfortunately they don't delve into any details into the method they use.
Since it is spread spectrum, other units (not colocated) will not directly interfere. Spread spectrum signals look like wideband noise to other receivers that do not have the same hopping pattern. Activating one of these units will raise the noise floor in the LOS of it's signal.
If the equipment uses DSSS, well, that's ok, but not too exciting. DSSS has a problem with interference with other DSSS radios, and manifests itself by a sharp drop in bandwidth. If in the other hand this is using FHSS, then awesome. The only interference will be an increase in noise floor, which can be absorbed with a good enough link margin.
Link margin is what counts here. Several people have already mentioned questionable reliability as a mark against these technologies. That is simply not a problem with a properly margined link. In a wireless link, several factors affect your reception (and ultimately bandwidth and reliability). You will have signal losses in the feed cables, signal gains at the antenna, and signal losses due to free space propagation. Yes, rain and other atmospheric conditions do raise the term used in calculating free space losses at these frequencies.
Now, by a properly margined link, here is what I mean. Take the amount of power going out of one unit into its feeder cable, add the gains for the antenna on each end, subtract maximal expected freespace propagation loss. Now, based on your equipments specified signal to noise ratio (SNR) you can find the minimal power your receiver needs to decode the signal. Subtract it from the previous number, and you have a link margin. A higher link margin is a better link. What this measures is the "additional" power above and beyond what the receiver needs to pickup the signal. As long as this margin is enough to cover things like unusual atmospheric conditions, and nearby band interferers, you have a good, reliable link.
Finally, back to cost. These prices are decent for a local ISP exactly because of amortization. Think like cable companies that lease you the cable modem for a few dollars a month. If you disconnect your service, they get the unit back and can redeploy it. Next, focus on business users before the residential ones. Business customers are more willing to purchase equipment outright, instead of paying a lease amount (at least in my experience). This lets you concentrate your tiny pile of cash on building the POP end of the network, instead of footing the bill for each customer premise unit.
Yeah... I used to do this for a living. Headed the engineering department for a midsized wireless ISP that used technology like this. My email is listed if anyone has any questions.
Dave
By sensitivity to "environmental" factors, I'm sure they are referring to light.
Requiring cryogenic cooling for operation, it will be a long time before we see these "transistors" in a CPU humming under our desk.
An application we are likely to see for this technology in the near term is supersensitive CCD imagers for use in devices such as the Hubble. Having the switching element consist of a single atom is likely to make each transistor sensitive to single photons of light, with the proper cooling and biasing.
From reading the article, the biggest trouble with these devices is they all share the same gate (the silicon substrate). So for real world use we are still no further ahead... in other words, still dependant on the feature size we can produce using lithography techniques on silicon.
OK, this thread has turned into a complete joke. First - I would like to tell everyone to go take a course in reading comprehension. Obviously with more then one acronym per post everyone gets confused. ;-)
Now, having said that:
RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) and CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) are distinctly different methods of CPU design. VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) computers use multiple RISC like instructions packed into each VLIW instruction word. The sub-instructions are called atoms; the packed together instructions are called molecules. The point of doing this is to get rid of the decoding/scheduling/dispatch circuitry, since the compiler already pairs atoms together that can run in parallel. The atoms are always occupying the same bits, and are all of the same form... That is what RISC like means folks. The only difference between a RISC processor and a VLIW processor is that the RISC processor still has to pair instructions together as it gets them. The pairing of VLIW atoms has already been accomplished by the compiler.
Go read. Then reply.