Business hates new technology as the answer to everything, although it is often applicable.
In my experience, business loves new technology, especially if its expensive, proprietary technology that a director, VP, or CTO reads about in some advertisement-disguised-as-a-trade-magazine type publication. Additionally, don't underestimate the impact of vendor kickbacks on IT managers (free expensive gifts!) and marketing departments (ad dollars).
Nothing is more frustrating than having a cheap, quick, and workable solution to a problem, only to be told that it's in the company's best interest to go with the expensive solution that either doesn't address the problem, or creates a whole new set of problems. Company costs go up, workers' salaries freeze and bonuses evaporate, and eventually the company raises their prices for their respective goods or services, further driving away customers and/or profitability
I doubt that many users realize that you can pass in username to telnet like me@host; they just go "telnet host" and respond with username and login when asked.
Still, I agree, it's not like the login style of ssh is difficult to get used to.
Netbackup can be installed over ssh; it's a question of whether or not the rep doing the install wants to deal with it. I got asked to open telnet and rlogin and I stood my ground on that one. I told the rep that I'd be happy to create a temporary set of ssh keys so that he could call ssh like he'd use rlogin (and not have to use a passwd). He agreed, modified his install script, and installed. After he was done I removed the keys and everything was kosher.
Dude, even though you posted AC, I wish I had mod points for this. This is exactly the sort of stunt that a bunch of bored nukes would have thought up when I was in the Navy. Awesome.
"AT&T's network is CDMA. Current AT&T phones won't work on Cingular networks, and vica versa. They wouldn't improve their coverage at all, instead they'll wind up slowly migrating all of their phones to one network, selling off the other set in the process."
I'm curious as to what market you're referring to? In western Washington state, AT&T is selling TDMA and GSM phones (I just bought a TDMA-version Motorola v60). They're referring to GSM equipment as "next-generation network" capable, so it appears that they're trying to migrate to GSM. The carriers in this area use the following technologies:
Something tells me that the real challenge to that approach would be to find an appropriate algae capable of withstanding the lead-melting temperatures of Venus. I don't imagine the clouds of sulfuric acid would help much either.
Ahhh, Powell's Techical! It is indeed the holy grail of geek bookstores. Any bizarre leftover computer or telephony related subject I can think of, and they probably have at least 3 or 4 books on it. It's so cool. They even have a cool, ancient cat which roams the bookstore! I make a pilgrimage from Bremerton about twice a year to go there.
Almost all reactors (except for experimental or maybe bad Soviet designs) have some sort of negative reactivity coefficient; probably not as fast as the small reactor you're playing with, but the simple fact is that it's not power range operation of the reactor during a loss of coolant accident that causes damage. In loss of coolant accidents on big reactors two big problems still remain even if you SCRAM as soon as an accident occurs:
There is a lot of stored thermal energy in all of the water and steel of the primary plant. (takes a while to cool off)
Complicating matters is the fact that quite a bit of thermal energy (7% of total thermal output IIRC) of a reactor comes from decay heat... So think about that: if a 1000 Megawatt reactor is running at 100% power for a prolonged period of time (not uncommon with electrical power plants that start up and run flat out until shutdown), it's going to generate 70 MW worth of thermal energy even if SCRAMed in an accident for several hours following the SCRAM. Trust me, that's more than enough to make for significant problems in getting rid of decay heat in an accident situation.
Your basic accident scenario goes like this; if coolant is lost without some means of replacing it, the core will blister and melt not because it's still operating with any sort of power (either it's been SCRAMed or negative reactivity from the temperature increase has effectively shut it down), but because decay heat is still heating the core up. This is why once a leak is isolated, it's important to restore some means of decay heat removal as soon as possible.
Preach on, brother! Crap is exactly what I heard when I tried out XM. Having 100 more channels of the same crap I can hear on my FM dial is not what's going to bring me in. Not to mention that XM cuts out in many places where I live (Puget Sound area of Washington). XM sucks!
I'm not so sure that technique would be very effective against red light/ toll cams. Here is the spec. sheet for Ilfords special purpose traffic surveilance film; it doesn't seem to be particularly sensitive to infrared. Most IR film is sensitive in the 800-900 nanometer range; this film gives up at about 775.
The other thing to think about would be that these surveillance cameras (to photograph red light runners and whatnot) operate with flash and a pretty fast shutter speed. (1/500 or 1/1000th of a second is quick for night use; it must be powerful flash.) There is the chance that since your MIRT is flashing at say, 14Hz, and typical flash tube duration is only 1/1000th of a second or so (which means there is only IR coming out of your MIRT for 14/1000's of any given second), that the surveillance camera has a fair enough change of snapping the picture when the MIRT is not emanating light.
What would probably be effective would be to rig a bright source of visible light near the license plate facing outwards (towards a potential camera) so that it would oversaturate the film in the vicinity of your license plate. Ideally, this could be a slave flash that would be triggered by the surveillance camera's flash, so that it would definitely be firing when the picture was taken.
Either way, we have no red light runner cams or any surveillance cams (other than DOT video, which typically doesn't have the resolution to read plate numbers) in this area. All of this type of surveillance is done by concealed police. So, I have no incentive to test this around here.
The Micron pens rock! I use the 0.5 size myself. They have a great feel and the blue ink looks terrific instead of too dark and oozing out of the pen like with gel ink pens.
The amount of time a battery lasts for is highly dependent on use. I use NiMH batteries in my camera flash (Minolta 2800AF), and they absolutely kick ass over Alkalines because they maintain terminal voltage (and thereby keep the recycle time short). Overall, NiMH cells probably perform significantly better than alkaline cells in high discharge rates.
Alkaline cells probably fare much better in things like wall clocks, remote controls, and any other device where infrequence of use is a bigger deal than overal capacity. NiMH cells can (and typically will) self discharge in a couple of months of inactivity.
At this point, I see no reason for people to use NiCd batteries anymore, due to their significant memory effect, toxicity problems, lower unit capacity (compared to NiMH), etc. But NiMH cells really are ready for prime time in many devices, and are certainly more cost effective in the long run.
I like Transmeta's product, but at this point one has to concede that maybe things haven't gone as well as Transmeta execs and shareholders had expected. The idea of putting Transmeta's low power product into embedded devices certainly has technical merit, but is this a well thought out approach, or a desparation swan song? Personally, I think Transmeta should have gone for the embedded market right off the bat. Or perhaps they did, and I simply don't know. Can anyone clarify?
most channels aren't advertising-revenue driven, so there's no incentive to play the latest hit single four times an hour.
I agree with you on this, so forgive me if I don't understand how playing the same single 4 times an hour helps ad revenue for a station. From my limited experience working for a pair of stations (1993-1995 time frame), my observation was that advertisers were willing to pay more for ads when your listenership (is that a real word?) went UP. It seems to me that if a station wants to increase listenership (and consequently ad-revenue), they would be doing themselves (and the public) a favor by playing what people actually want to hear!
I think that this was supposed to be the point of all the research for station formats, but obviously even that is seriously perverted; I mean, where are these people who actually want to listen to Britney 69 times a day? I understand why music format perversion happens (music industry payola in the form of "independent promotion"), but it would seem that listenership should actually drive what the station plays. Seriously, if a commercial station here in Seattle picked up KEXP's format, and started running ads, I don't see how they couldn't make a killing by running ads for the listeners flocking from all of the Intercom, Clear Channel, and Infinity Broadcasting holdings.
Anybody else here remember when KNDD was a good station, and better yet, didn't sound like KISW?
The 386DX is different from the 386SX because the 386SX has a 16bit address bus
Actually, the 386SX has a 16bit data bus; the address bus is 24bit, allowing for 16 Meg of addressable RAM. The main reason for this was originally the 386SX was going to be a plug in replacement for the 286, to upgrade all those recently sold motherboards with 286 procs with relative ease and no major redesign needed (with the exception of maybe a new BIOS?). Why I don't remember the reason why, Intel decided to let the plug in replacement idea drop, and I don't think the 386SX was ever available in the plug in replacement for 286 packeage.
Of course, the 386SX internally had the same 32bit register set, and addressing modes that the 386DX had. Oh, and I think the 386SX could use the 80287 as a mathco as well as the 387SX; I'm not sure if the 386DX could do that, but anybody at the time who really cared about math performance was buying either a Weitek coproc equipped board, or a Cyrix FasMath coproc anyhow.
I absolutely hated those Denon caddy load players! Primarily because the radio station I worked at was way too cheap to buy more caddies, so you always were screwing up CD's trying to get them out of the caddies quick to swap them out. Caddies work great when you have plenty to play with (like one for every disc you have) but at the time they must have been really expensive or something because nobody had enough.
Those Denon players, like most Denon players of the era, were absolute crap when it came to scratch tolerance on the CD. Which really sucked because all the handling sliding it in and out of the caddy, the surface managed to get scratched quickly.
You beat me to it on this fact. I see you've most likely read Vintage Synthesizers, by Mark Vail as well....
Although I think the original Chroma also used the 80186 too; the Polaris, if I remember right, was a cheaper edition that didn't have the fancy Kimball-made weighted keyboard but did have MIDI.
Actually, the sooner we actually do this (land people on Mars), the sooner we get to hear people whining that "it was all a hoax, just like the moon landings!" I really can't wait to hear the conspiracy theories on this one.
The real point here is that while Windows might have some large amount of the installed OS base, that fact alone is not a valid argument for not supporting other OS's/using proprietary protocols. 69% of those 99.9% (or whatever) users of Windows aren't even going to know WTF a streaming media receiver even is! When you take that fact into account, suddenly users of Linux (or whatever) are a higher percentage (though probably not dominant) of the target market than what Phillips realizes.
Companies should maybe put some of that marketing data to good use and try to make sense out of the kind of people who are buying their product. I'm sure that in the realm of people who are interested in and buying streaming media receivers, a much higher percentage of them are Linux/ Mac/ whatever savvy than compared to Joe-user, who isn't buying the product.
When any company doesn't take into account what their true target market is, they offer crappy products, and then inevitably, they shake their heads and wonder why people aren't buying. Typically they then wash themselves of the operation, fold, or sell off, claiming that "there's no money in xxxx." What it really takes is a company that understands the product/ market.
Really....supporting only Windows users on such a tech savvy gadget is equivalent to Ford telling Mustang buyers that they can no longer have a V8.
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Cooling towers cool evapoatively, so they need a supply of water to make up for the losses.
In my experience, business loves new technology, especially if its expensive, proprietary technology that a director, VP, or CTO reads about in some advertisement-disguised-as-a-trade-magazine type publication. Additionally, don't underestimate the impact of vendor kickbacks on IT managers (free expensive gifts!) and marketing departments (ad dollars).
Nothing is more frustrating than having a cheap, quick, and workable solution to a problem, only to be told that it's in the company's best interest to go with the expensive solution that either doesn't address the problem, or creates a whole new set of problems. Company costs go up, workers' salaries freeze and bonuses evaporate, and eventually the company raises their prices for their respective goods or services, further driving away customers and/or profitability
I doubt that many users realize that you can pass in username to telnet like me@host; they just go "telnet host" and respond with username and login when asked. Still, I agree, it's not like the login style of ssh is difficult to get used to.
Netbackup can be installed over ssh; it's a question of whether or not the rep doing the install wants to deal with it. I got asked to open telnet and rlogin and I stood my ground on that one. I told the rep that I'd be happy to create a temporary set of ssh keys so that he could call ssh like he'd use rlogin (and not have to use a passwd). He agreed, modified his install script, and installed. After he was done I removed the keys and everything was kosher.
Dude, even though you posted AC, I wish I had mod points for this. This is exactly the sort of stunt that a bunch of bored nukes would have thought up when I was in the Navy. Awesome.
"AT&T's network is CDMA. Current AT&T phones won't work on Cingular networks, and vica versa. They wouldn't improve their coverage at all, instead they'll wind up slowly migrating all of their phones to one network, selling off the other set in the process."
I'm curious as to what market you're referring to? In western Washington state, AT&T is selling TDMA and GSM phones (I just bought a TDMA-version Motorola v60). They're referring to GSM equipment as "next-generation network" capable, so it appears that they're trying to migrate to GSM. The carriers in this area use the following technologies:
Something tells me that the real challenge to that approach would be to find an appropriate algae capable of withstanding the lead-melting temperatures of Venus. I don't imagine the clouds of sulfuric acid would help much either.
Ahhh, Powell's Techical! It is indeed the holy grail of geek bookstores. Any bizarre leftover computer or telephony related subject I can think of, and they probably have at least 3 or 4 books on it. It's so cool. They even have a cool, ancient cat which roams the bookstore! I make a pilgrimage from Bremerton about twice a year to go there.
- There is a lot of stored thermal energy in all of the water and steel of the primary plant. (takes a while to cool off)
- Complicating matters is the fact that quite a bit of thermal energy (7% of total thermal output IIRC) of a reactor comes from decay heat... So think about that: if a 1000 Megawatt reactor is running at 100% power for a prolonged period of time (not uncommon with electrical power plants that start up and run flat out until shutdown), it's going to generate 70 MW worth of thermal energy even if SCRAMed in an accident for several hours following the SCRAM. Trust me, that's more than enough to make for significant problems in getting rid of decay heat in an accident situation.
Your basic accident scenario goes like this; if coolant is lost without some means of replacing it, the core will blister and melt not because it's still operating with any sort of power (either it's been SCRAMed or negative reactivity from the temperature increase has effectively shut it down), but because decay heat is still heating the core up. This is why once a leak is isolated, it's important to restore some means of decay heat removal as soon as possible.I found the Captain Crunch cereal eating elaboration pretty amusing myself; maybe the humor is lost if you haven't had it or whatever...
But I'll agree with you that Ayn Rand sucks.
Preach on, brother! Crap is exactly what I heard when I tried out XM. Having 100 more channels of the same crap I can hear on my FM dial is not what's going to bring me in. Not to mention that XM cuts out in many places where I live (Puget Sound area of Washington). XM sucks!
I'm not so sure that technique would be very effective against red light/ toll cams. Here is the spec. sheet for Ilfords special purpose traffic surveilance film; it doesn't seem to be particularly sensitive to infrared. Most IR film is sensitive in the 800-900 nanometer range; this film gives up at about 775.
The other thing to think about would be that these surveillance cameras (to photograph red light runners and whatnot) operate with flash and a pretty fast shutter speed. (1/500 or 1/1000th of a second is quick for night use; it must be powerful flash.) There is the chance that since your MIRT is flashing at say, 14Hz, and typical flash tube duration is only 1/1000th of a second or so (which means there is only IR coming out of your MIRT for 14/1000's of any given second), that the surveillance camera has a fair enough change of snapping the picture when the MIRT is not emanating light.
What would probably be effective would be to rig a bright source of visible light near the license plate facing outwards (towards a potential camera) so that it would oversaturate the film in the vicinity of your license plate. Ideally, this could be a slave flash that would be triggered by the surveillance camera's flash, so that it would definitely be firing when the picture was taken.
Either way, we have no red light runner cams or any surveillance cams (other than DOT video, which typically doesn't have the resolution to read plate numbers) in this area. All of this type of surveillance is done by concealed police. So, I have no incentive to test this around here.
The Micron pens rock! I use the 0.5 size myself. They have a great feel and the blue ink looks terrific instead of too dark and oozing out of the pen like with gel ink pens.
Too bad the link in your sig doesn't work. I like punk rock!
Actually, one of the most outspoken critics of space exploration was Walter Mondale, a Democrat.
The amount of time a battery lasts for is highly dependent on use. I use NiMH batteries in my camera flash (Minolta 2800AF), and they absolutely kick ass over Alkalines because they maintain terminal voltage (and thereby keep the recycle time short). Overall, NiMH cells probably perform significantly better than alkaline cells in high discharge rates.
Alkaline cells probably fare much better in things like wall clocks, remote controls, and any other device where infrequence of use is a bigger deal than overal capacity. NiMH cells can (and typically will) self discharge in a couple of months of inactivity.
At this point, I see no reason for people to use NiCd batteries anymore, due to their significant memory effect, toxicity problems, lower unit capacity (compared to NiMH), etc. But NiMH cells really are ready for prime time in many devices, and are certainly more cost effective in the long run.
I like Transmeta's product, but at this point one has to concede that maybe things haven't gone as well as Transmeta execs and shareholders had expected. The idea of putting Transmeta's low power product into embedded devices certainly has technical merit, but is this a well thought out approach, or a desparation swan song? Personally, I think Transmeta should have gone for the embedded market right off the bat. Or perhaps they did, and I simply don't know. Can anyone clarify?
I can hear the QVC announcer already..... "Bash Binary!.....now available at the low low price of $5 per month under the new GNU .NET plan!"
most channels aren't advertising-revenue driven, so there's no incentive to play the latest hit single four times an hour.
I agree with you on this, so forgive me if I don't understand how playing the same single 4 times an hour helps ad revenue for a station. From my limited experience working for a pair of stations (1993-1995 time frame), my observation was that advertisers were willing to pay more for ads when your listenership (is that a real word?) went UP. It seems to me that if a station wants to increase listenership (and consequently ad-revenue), they would be doing themselves (and the public) a favor by playing what people actually want to hear!
I think that this was supposed to be the point of all the research for station formats, but obviously even that is seriously perverted; I mean, where are these people who actually want to listen to Britney 69 times a day? I understand why music format perversion happens (music industry payola in the form of "independent promotion"), but it would seem that listenership should actually drive what the station plays. Seriously, if a commercial station here in Seattle picked up KEXP's format, and started running ads, I don't see how they couldn't make a killing by running ads for the listeners flocking from all of the Intercom, Clear Channel, and Infinity Broadcasting holdings.
Anybody else here remember when KNDD was a good station, and better yet, didn't sound like KISW?
The 386DX is different from the 386SX because the 386SX has a 16bit address bus
Actually, the 386SX has a 16bit data bus; the address bus is 24bit, allowing for 16 Meg of addressable RAM. The main reason for this was originally the 386SX was going to be a plug in replacement for the 286, to upgrade all those recently sold motherboards with 286 procs with relative ease and no major redesign needed (with the exception of maybe a new BIOS?). Why I don't remember the reason why, Intel decided to let the plug in replacement idea drop, and I don't think the 386SX was ever available in the plug in replacement for 286 packeage.
Of course, the 386SX internally had the same 32bit register set, and addressing modes that the 386DX had. Oh, and I think the 386SX could use the 80287 as a mathco as well as the 387SX; I'm not sure if the 386DX could do that, but anybody at the time who really cared about math performance was buying either a Weitek coproc equipped board, or a Cyrix FasMath coproc anyhow.
I absolutely hated those Denon caddy load players! Primarily because the radio station I worked at was way too cheap to buy more caddies, so you always were screwing up CD's trying to get them out of the caddies quick to swap them out. Caddies work great when you have plenty to play with (like one for every disc you have) but at the time they must have been really expensive or something because nobody had enough.
Those Denon players, like most Denon players of the era, were absolute crap when it came to scratch tolerance on the CD. Which really sucked because all the handling sliding it in and out of the caddy, the surface managed to get scratched quickly.
You beat me to it on this fact. I see you've most likely read Vintage Synthesizers, by Mark Vail as well.... Although I think the original Chroma also used the 80186 too; the Polaris, if I remember right, was a cheaper edition that didn't have the fancy Kimball-made weighted keyboard but did have MIDI.
Actually, the sooner we actually do this (land people on Mars), the sooner we get to hear people whining that "it was all a hoax, just like the moon landings!" I really can't wait to hear the conspiracy theories on this one.
Actually, x86 does have an XCHG op.
The real point here is that while Windows might have some large amount of the installed OS base, that fact alone is not a valid argument for not supporting other OS's/using proprietary protocols. 69% of those 99.9% (or whatever) users of Windows aren't even going to know WTF a streaming media receiver even is! When you take that fact into account, suddenly users of Linux (or whatever) are a higher percentage (though probably not dominant) of the target market than what Phillips realizes.
Companies should maybe put some of that marketing data to good use and try to make sense out of the kind of people who are buying their product. I'm sure that in the realm of people who are interested in and buying streaming media receivers, a much higher percentage of them are Linux/ Mac/ whatever savvy than compared to Joe-user, who isn't buying the product.
When any company doesn't take into account what their true target market is, they offer crappy products, and then inevitably, they shake their heads and wonder why people aren't buying. Typically they then wash themselves of the operation, fold, or sell off, claiming that "there's no money in xxxx." What it really takes is a company that understands the product/ market.
Really....supporting only Windows users on such a tech savvy gadget is equivalent to Ford telling Mustang buyers that they can no longer have a V8.