Hell, where I work, we're still patting ourselves of the back for getting rid of that rotten old coax. We'll probably be languishing in 100Base-T land for a while yet.
The early adopters of 10Gb ethernet are certain to be:
Universities
e-Commerce/ISP outfits
Large corporation's data centers
There is still plenty of life left in gigabit ethernet. In fact, it is still just gaining momentum.
The company where I work pays about US$900/month for a T-1. That doesn't include data services, just the leased line from SBC.
It's about another 600 or 700 dollars for the data services that are provided by a different company, but that includes 100 DiD numbers and 6 voice lines in addition to Internet connectivity.
T-1 prices vary greatly by area, competition, etc. Supposedly, SBC's price is set based on the length of the run. Their bloody fiber stops about 1/2 mile from our place... so a 1/2 mile of copper costs 900/mo.
someone said: I don't personally know anyone who doesn't use the numpad for entering numbers.
you said: I don't. I try not to move my hands from the home row
I agree with you about home row. That's why I *must* have an editor compatible with WordStar. Borland's IDE products fit the bill nicely. WordStar was the king of word processors for a few short years, back in the days of CP/M. Because of the variety of keyboard/terminal arrangements on the many different CP/M computers, WordStar chose cursoring and menu manipulation based on ASCII control+letter combinations. One example is CTL-K + R to read a block from a file. Cursoring is done with CTL-E,D,S and X. With the WordStar method, one's hands *never* need to wander from home row, except to pick up the coffee cup.
There's a tech writer in our office who has a secretarial background; man can she type! But Windows and MickeySoft Turd (tm) ruin the whole effect... there she is, typing along at better than 100 WPM, and then, errrrk! She stops to move her hand to the arrow keys.
On the numeric keypad angle. I can see your point, except when you need to enter large volumes of numbers. If I'm typing something like this:
a = abs(number - 3);
Then I use the number keys along the top of the keyboard. When I need to enter calibration data for a 20 point linearization curve, I switch to 10-key and wouldn't be happy without it.
Nah. It's NT with a different GUI. Maybe mainstreamed a little, since NT's original inception was as a 'professional' OS. Nicer? No. Just different. Annoyingly different. Feels almost like they made some of the changes from NT to 2K while thinking of ways to retire old MCx certificates and force recertification whilst the base technology remains the same.
broadband may be the exception that makes all the difference in the future. Especially considering the emergence of new wireless technologies. Satellite, while of limited utility to the common user at this time, may also help prevent control from falling into the hands of just a few.
FM radio is more line-of-sight than is AM radio. But of course line-of-sightedness is a characteristic that has absolutely nothing to do with the modulation method but everything to do with carrier frequency. The higher the frequency, the more line-of-sight it is. Consider light, which is very line-of-sight.
FM = Frequency Modulation in which information is encoded by varying (modulating) the frequency of the carrier.
AM = Amplitude Modulation in which information is encoded by varying the amplitude of the carrier.
that even our (presumably/.) favorite search engine still is not reliably capable of delivering results apropos to any given quest. In clarification, the apropos results may be listed, but finding them amongst the other 10K to 1M results is may be problematic.
There has been a respectable amount of research applied to making web search results meet the criteria of the user. The results have been improvement, much to Google's credit, but the product is not yet acceptable. Efforts to create search engines with a special interest focus have been met with mild success and meek acceptance. The correct approach, I think, is that some entity in the position that Google has should provide a method to segregate results, not only based on keywords, but by meaningful content as well. The early rough-and-tumble days of the Weird-Wild-Web brought us search engines that were easily fooled by meta-tags and other keyword embedding methods. The next step is to provide, via AI methods, a search engine that can provide, given well defined search criteria, only the set of results that make the *best fit*.
SETI is, while not quite passe', at least a little worn.
I understand the basic tenents of SETI and run one, sometimes two, SETI clients myself. Popular interest is notoriously fickle and SETI hasn't delivered any aliens of yet. So, correspondingly, the fickle alien hunters, as well as the general public, have lost interest to some notable degree. SETI does gain the occasional new signup (client-wise), but its peak is done.
In spite of my statements above, I believe that SETI will maintain its position as, at the very least, a quasi-respectable scientic research venture, with many supporters and I support its interests fully.
You may recall, a few years ago, some concern expressed about the obsolescene and general decrepitude of FAA ATC systems. The software/systems that the FAA is trying to expedite are badly needed and have been a *long* time coming.
I have a cousin who was an ATC in for about 20 years; now he is an ATC trainer at the FAA in OKC. He is intimately familiar with the old equipment and has had some exposure to the new. It it his considered opinion that the sooner the new systems are put online, the better. That is not to say that catastrophic bugs are acceptable, but the old systems are not acceptable either.
Ummm... it appears that most of those 'gopher link' to which you refer are actually http links that matched your 'gopher://' keyword but were not actual links utilizing the gopher protocol (RFC1436). Repeating the search with -www added yields about 131,000 hits, most of which are still http links.
The prevalence of active gopher links still appears to be limited.
then they should design and market their own Tivo/ReplayTV, etc device. I'm sure that they would know how to market it and I bet they could sell to countless Joe Schmedley's who wouldn't care if their viewing practices were monitored. Especially if they were given some kind of incentive like a chance to win some prize by actively participating in info gathering.
OTOH, the enterainment industry might wreck that product by not providing a commercial skip/fast forward feature. They're still deathly afraid that they'll piss of they're advertisers.
Not as impressive...
on
Mars on Earth
·
· Score: 3, Informative
...as what a poster to another article showed us here
The Leicester people have "...recreated the hostile Martian atmosphere in a box the size of a desktop computer"
Whereas NASA Ames Research has "...a vacuum chamber more than 6 meters across"
Re:Somebody wants to do this for a living:
on
Organic Farming Examined
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think you may have missed the main thrust of the poster to whom you replied. Restated, can organic farming be scaled to commercial operations? Not small-time stuff like selling your organically grown tomatoes at the roadside, I mean single operations that grown *tons* of produce. A Kansas or Oklahoma wheat farmer may work anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand acres of land. In 1997, Kansas produced a record 492.2 million bushels of wheat. Thats a lot of bread. That wheat really does feed the world.
That's all well and good, but the economy of wheat production is an unstable affair. Many smaller farm operations (ummm, less than 1000 acres) literally "bet the farm" every year. Usually, it's a fairly safe bet. The costs and cashflow are unlike those of other businesses. A new 4WD tractor from John Deere or Case can pull an unbelievable number/size of ploughs or drills and allow 1 or 2 people to work all that land, but they cost more than the farmer's house. During the planting and growing seasons, there is *no income*. You borrow from the bank.
When June/July rolls around, the yield must be just right. If the yield is too low, you may find it difficult to finance the next crop. If the yield is very high on average (not just your farm), the selling price will nosedive and you may find it difficult to finance the next crop.
The costs associated with planting, growing and harvesting are fairly well understood. An infestation of pests is guaranteed to reduce your income. Let alone, your yield will be too low. Hiring a cropduster and paying for the chemicals is money right out of the bank.
Organic gardening methods, which I practice in my 0.125 acre vegatable garden, just don't scale to "feed the world" proportions.
Thank you very much for that link. I'd like to quote another apropos section if I may... "Bottom line: All airplanes on Mars are AIRBORNE TITANICS: Ripping blissfully along, unaware of their impending doom due to their inability to TURN against their tremendous inertia.
Landings are impossible without arresting gear. If you can work the flare out right (it IS possible with advance planning) then you will touch down doing about 400 mph. Now how do you stop?
That, and other portions, support my earlier statement that low speed aerodynamic flight is problematic. OTOH, perhaps the "flapping insect" designs can generate the lift necessary. If so, I suspect they'll had to flap as quickly as a hummingbird.
According to this Earth's average atmospheric pressure is about 1013 mBar, whereas on Mars it's about 8 mBar. Mars' atmosphere is 95% CO2. From there, you may work out the potential for aerodynamic lift, but I'll say, it's quite small. More static methods of lift, such as hydrogen balloons, might be of greater potential, especially when you consider that flammability is less of an issue with air that's 95% CO2.
I honestly don't think that low speed aerodynamic flight is achievable on Mars, but I agree that we have enough data that there shouldn't be much left to guess.
Venter is a egotist to the nth degree, as we saw when he revealed that much of Celera's gene database is comprised of his own genetic code. The news related to the whole Celera enterprise over the last few years is rife with other examples.
Global warming, in my opinion, is not a well understood phenomenon, scientifically. In fact, I'm not convinced that it is even a problem to worry about, but I don't wish to become involved in that debate in this context.
What concerns me is Venter's apparent disregard for scientific procedure, which is often quite rightly conservative. I am afraid that Venter is just the man to unleash a dubious solution to a phantom problem, potentially unbalancing the environment with his CO2-eating bugs much worse than "global warming". Thusfar, Mankind has been shown to be ineffective in reversing the global processes of nature, unless global warming really is such an effect. Attempting to create a form of life with the intent to reverse a reversal of natural processes seems to like playing with fire... or nuclear weapons.
Recall that the days of the dot-com explosion were also marked by a dramatic expansion of the number of ISP's. Quite a few of the dot-bombs were from the ranks of those ISP startups. Excite@Home comes to mind. At one time in my town of about 50,000, there were at least 8 local ISP's, each trying to undercut the others in price in order to gain market share. Now there are only 3 local ISP's of any consequence offering broadband operating here. Actually, there are a couple more, but they just resell SBC's pipes.
My prices may be a little out of date, but this is what I can get locally:
ISDN: SBC, $150/mo
DSL: SBC, $69/mo + equip
Cable: Cox, $49/mo + equip (maybe more) 802.11a: Chickasaw, $79/mo
Maybe Cox will put the scare into the others in my area... or maybe Cox will raise their price in my area.
Anyway. I'm not sure the pricing and profitability have been worked out completely enough to be certain exactly what broadband is worth. I don't buy the idea that there isn't enough capacity, in the backbone sense. There may be capacity problems at individual ISP's, however.
You are absolutely correct. On NPR, I heard a brief interview of a salesperson at Coca Cola in which they were discussing the introduction of a new Coke flavor, Vanilla. She was asked how they approached their marketing; who did they spend the most advertising money trying to reach? The answer was precisely what you alluded to. They *must* attempt to sway the teenagers to their own products, before those youngsters have "decided" what the like.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.pcisig.com/feedback/
Yep. This must be a new record. By the way, 'slimo, did you forget a closing tag there?
Hemos, do you read slashdot? This is amazing. There actually no news since yesterday, other than that AMSAT has re-classified AO-7's status.
I would recommend everyone post thoughtful replies only to the original (posted yesterday) article, not this one.
In the late '80's, I programmed some support machinery that was a part of the A-6 re-wing project... performed by Beoing.
I think Grumman is out of consideration and G-D mostly sticks to their engines.
Gigabit?
Hell, where I work, we're still patting ourselves of the back for getting rid of that rotten old coax. We'll probably be languishing in 100Base-T land for a while yet.
The early adopters of 10Gb ethernet are certain to be:
Universities
e-Commerce/ISP outfits
Large corporation's data centers
There is still plenty of life left in gigabit ethernet. In fact, it is still just gaining momentum.
The company where I work pays about US$900/month for a T-1. That doesn't include data services, just the leased line from SBC.
It's about another 600 or 700 dollars for the data services that are provided by a different company, but that includes 100 DiD numbers and 6 voice lines in addition to Internet connectivity.
T-1 prices vary greatly by area, competition, etc. Supposedly, SBC's price is set based on the length of the run. Their bloody fiber stops about 1/2 mile from our place... so a 1/2 mile of copper costs 900/mo.
Stick with your cable modem.
someone said: I don't personally know anyone who doesn't use the numpad for entering numbers.
you said: I don't. I try not to move my hands from the home row
I agree with you about home row. That's why I *must* have an editor compatible with WordStar. Borland's IDE products fit the bill nicely. WordStar was the king of word processors for a few short years, back in the days of CP/M. Because of the variety of keyboard/terminal arrangements on the many different CP/M computers, WordStar chose cursoring and menu manipulation based on ASCII control+letter combinations. One example is CTL-K + R to read a block from a file. Cursoring is done with CTL-E,D,S and X. With the WordStar method, one's hands *never* need to wander from home row, except to pick up the coffee cup.
There's a tech writer in our office who has a secretarial background; man can she type! But Windows and MickeySoft Turd (tm) ruin the whole effect... there she is, typing along at better than 100 WPM, and then, errrrk! She stops to move her hand to the arrow keys.
On the numeric keypad angle. I can see your point, except when you need to enter large volumes of numbers. If I'm typing something like this:
a = abs(number - 3);
Then I use the number keys along the top of the keyboard. When I need to enter calibration data for a 20 point linearization curve, I switch to 10-key and wouldn't be happy without it.
its NT with a nicer GUI
Nah. It's NT with a different GUI. Maybe mainstreamed a little, since NT's original inception was as a 'professional' OS. Nicer? No. Just different. Annoyingly different. Feels almost like they made some of the changes from NT to 2K while thinking of ways to retire old MCx certificates and force recertification whilst the base technology remains the same.
The only person who seems to be doing any work is the big guy with the beard.
/.
Ah, hell. He's probably just reading about himself on
broadband may be the exception that makes all the difference in the future. Especially considering the emergence of new wireless technologies. Satellite, while of limited utility to the common user at this time, may also help prevent control from falling into the hands of just a few.
Well, seeing as how EFF is helping to bring the suit, just donate here
Paypal is amongst their many payment methods.
The best way of saying it...
FM radio is more line-of-sight than is AM radio. But of course line-of-sightedness is a characteristic that has absolutely nothing to do with the modulation method but everything to do with carrier frequency. The higher the frequency, the more line-of-sight it is. Consider light, which is very line-of-sight.
FM = Frequency Modulation in which information is encoded by varying (modulating) the frequency of the carrier.
AM = Amplitude Modulation in which information is encoded by varying the amplitude of the carrier.
That can't do it now, unless they also block google.com.
A savvy Chinese citizen can simply view google's cached copy. They've got to know in general what they're looking for, but try this example:
A CNN story about Falun Gong here
that even our (presumably /.) favorite search engine still is not reliably capable of delivering results apropos to any given quest. In clarification, the apropos results may be listed, but finding them amongst the other 10K to 1M results is may be problematic.
There has been a respectable amount of research applied to making web search results meet the criteria of the user. The results have been improvement, much to Google's credit, but the product is not yet acceptable. Efforts to create search engines with a special interest focus have been met with mild success and meek acceptance. The correct approach, I think, is that some entity in the position that Google has should provide a method to segregate results, not only based on keywords, but by meaningful content as well. The early rough-and-tumble days of the Weird-Wild-Web brought us search engines that were easily fooled by meta-tags and other keyword embedding methods. The next step is to provide, via AI methods, a search engine that can provide, given well defined search criteria, only the set of results that make the *best fit*.
SETI is, while not quite passe', at least a little worn.
I understand the basic tenents of SETI and run one, sometimes two, SETI clients myself. Popular interest is notoriously fickle and SETI hasn't delivered any aliens of yet. So, correspondingly, the fickle alien hunters, as well as the general public, have lost interest to some notable degree. SETI does gain the occasional new signup (client-wise), but its peak is done.
In spite of my statements above, I believe that SETI will maintain its position as, at the very least, a quasi-respectable scientic research venture, with many supporters and I support its interests fully.
You may recall, a few years ago, some concern expressed about the obsolescene and general decrepitude of FAA ATC systems. The software/systems that the FAA is trying to expedite are badly needed and have been a *long* time coming.
I have a cousin who was an ATC in for about 20 years; now he is an ATC trainer at the FAA in OKC. He is intimately familiar with the old equipment and has had some exposure to the new. It it his considered opinion that the sooner the new systems are put online, the better. That is not to say that catastrophic bugs are acceptable, but the old systems are not acceptable either.
I just got the release binary from mozilla.org, but it looks like the mirrors aren't ready yet (at least the 2 that I checked).
Perhaps we shouldn't get too frenzied to download until the mirrors are updated.
Ummm... it appears that most of those 'gopher link' to which you refer are actually http links that matched your 'gopher://' keyword but were not actual links utilizing the gopher protocol (RFC1436). Repeating the search with -www added yields about 131,000 hits, most of which are still http links.
The prevalence of active gopher links still appears to be limited.
then they should design and market their own Tivo/ReplayTV, etc device. I'm sure that they would know how to market it and I bet they could sell to countless Joe Schmedley's who wouldn't care if their viewing practices were monitored. Especially if they were given some kind of incentive like a chance to win some prize by actively participating in info gathering.
OTOH, the enterainment industry might wreck that product by not providing a commercial skip/fast forward feature. They're still deathly afraid that they'll piss of they're advertisers.
...as what a poster to another article showed us here
The Leicester people have "...recreated the hostile Martian atmosphere in a box the size of a desktop computer"
Whereas NASA Ames Research has "...a vacuum chamber more than 6 meters across"
I think you may have missed the main thrust of the poster to whom you replied. Restated, can organic farming be scaled to commercial operations? Not small-time stuff like selling your organically grown tomatoes at the roadside, I mean single operations that grown *tons* of produce. A Kansas or Oklahoma wheat farmer may work anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand acres of land. In 1997, Kansas produced a record 492.2 million bushels of wheat. Thats a lot of bread. That wheat really does feed the world.
That's all well and good, but the economy of wheat production is an unstable affair. Many smaller farm operations (ummm, less than 1000 acres) literally "bet the farm" every year. Usually, it's a fairly safe bet. The costs and cashflow are unlike those of other businesses. A new 4WD tractor from John Deere or Case can pull an unbelievable number/size of ploughs or drills and allow 1 or 2 people to work all that land, but they cost more than the farmer's house. During the planting and growing seasons, there is *no income*. You borrow from the bank.
When June/July rolls around, the yield must be just right. If the yield is too low, you may find it difficult to finance the next crop. If the yield is very high on average (not just your farm), the selling price will nosedive and you may find it difficult to finance the next crop.
The costs associated with planting, growing and harvesting are fairly well understood. An infestation of pests is guaranteed to reduce your income. Let alone, your yield will be too low. Hiring a cropduster and paying for the chemicals is money right out of the bank.
Organic gardening methods, which I practice in my 0.125 acre vegatable garden, just don't scale to "feed the world" proportions.
Thank you very much for that link. I'd like to quote another apropos section if I may...
"Bottom line: All airplanes on Mars are AIRBORNE TITANICS: Ripping blissfully along, unaware of their impending doom due to their inability to TURN against their tremendous inertia.
Landings are impossible without arresting gear. If you can work the flare out right (it IS possible with advance planning) then you will touch down doing about 400 mph. Now how do you stop?
That, and other portions, support my earlier statement that low speed aerodynamic flight is problematic. OTOH, perhaps the "flapping insect" designs can generate the lift necessary. If so, I suspect they'll had to flap as quickly as a hummingbird.
According to this Earth's average atmospheric pressure is about 1013 mBar, whereas on Mars it's about 8 mBar. Mars' atmosphere is 95% CO2. From there, you may work out the potential for aerodynamic lift, but I'll say, it's quite small. More static methods of lift, such as hydrogen balloons, might be of greater potential, especially when you consider that flammability is less of an issue with air that's 95% CO2.
I honestly don't think that low speed aerodynamic flight is achievable on Mars, but I agree that we have enough data that there shouldn't be much left to guess.
Venter is a egotist to the nth degree, as we saw when he revealed that much of Celera's gene database is comprised of his own genetic code. The news related to the whole Celera enterprise over the last few years is rife with other examples.
Global warming, in my opinion, is not a well understood phenomenon, scientifically. In fact, I'm not convinced that it is even a problem to worry about, but I don't wish to become involved in that debate in this context.
What concerns me is Venter's apparent disregard for scientific procedure, which is often quite rightly conservative. I am afraid that Venter is just the man to unleash a dubious solution to a phantom problem, potentially unbalancing the environment with his CO2-eating bugs much worse than "global warming". Thusfar, Mankind has been shown to be ineffective in reversing the global processes of nature, unless global warming really is such an effect. Attempting to create a form of life with the intent to reverse a reversal of natural processes seems to like playing with fire... or nuclear weapons.
but maybe broadband providers *need* a raise.
Recall that the days of the dot-com explosion were also marked by a dramatic expansion of the number of ISP's. Quite a few of the dot-bombs were from the ranks of those ISP startups. Excite@Home comes to mind. At one time in my town of about 50,000, there were at least 8 local ISP's, each trying to undercut the others in price in order to gain market share. Now there are only 3 local ISP's of any consequence offering broadband operating here. Actually, there are a couple more, but they just resell SBC's pipes.
My prices may be a little out of date, but this is what I can get locally:
ISDN: SBC, $150/mo
DSL: SBC, $69/mo + equip
Cable: Cox, $49/mo + equip (maybe more)
802.11a: Chickasaw, $79/mo
Maybe Cox will put the scare into the others in my area... or maybe Cox will raise their price in my area.
Anyway. I'm not sure the pricing and profitability have been worked out completely enough to be certain exactly what broadband is worth. I don't buy the idea that there isn't enough capacity, in the backbone sense. There may be capacity problems at individual ISP's, however.
You are absolutely correct. On NPR, I heard a brief interview of a salesperson at Coca Cola in which they were discussing the introduction of a new Coke flavor, Vanilla. She was asked how they approached their marketing; who did they spend the most advertising money trying to reach? The answer was precisely what you alluded to. They *must* attempt to sway the teenagers to their own products, before those youngsters have "decided" what the like.