I think there is little point in using anything more advanced than, say, a TI 30x in maths class. TI-89's are nifty because they can plot functions and solve some integrals, but if you want to really understand maths you should learn to do this by hand.
okay, you may be right, I never tried in the countries you mentioned, but I know for sure that its is required in Austria and possibly also in Germany and Switzerland.
Maybe the need to register for using prepaid cards gives an indication of the extent of surveillance in a particular country. I know of encrypted e-mails and the like, but if I were a criminal, I'd fear that the amount of secure communication I send and receive would direct the attention of law enforcement agencies towards me. Steganography, however, would look quite appealing to me.
A lot of mobile operators already rent out phones to customers who wish to use their contract when they travel to the US. However, I think that renting out phones would require a lot more logistics than the "return phone for rebate"-approach. It is just stupid to tell people they can discard the phone if they like.
European network operators require you to register before you can start placing calls with prepaid cards. I doubt that something similar could be done with disposable phones.
Note that Germany as such did not exist until the mid of the 19th century. Most of the territory of Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire which was ruled by the Habsburg family and is the predecessor of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
When looking into an ethymologic dictionary, remember that it does not state the country but rather the language from which the word originates, thus a word marked as "German" could as well have an origin in Austria, as we are speaking German.
I suppose that money laundering would be a huge problem. The company running the game would be required to log all transactions between players and to verify their identity. Plus, what happens when the database server with the financial information gets hacked?
You won't need to store everything you have on your hard drive on paper. It would be sufficient to store the data that you produce yourself, and just the important part of it, in a couple of locations. If space is crucial, you could as well use microfilm. You don't really need to archive all the mp3's and movies-someone else is taking care of it. The same applies to large commercial software packages and OSes.
You are right that in most cases the printed source code will not really be of importance. However, as computers play an increasingly important part in everyone's life, they are also becoming a documentation of our current lifestyle. I am sure that the museums and archives of tomorrow will contain the computers and programs of today. The problem is that, unlike books, computer programs and data like articles, letters etc. are trashed with the click of a button, often for economic reasons. At some point in the future, we might be looking back a few decades and realize that a lot of the stuff that shaped our life back then is no more accessible to us (maybe also because of Palladium). As you mentioned, there are already some emulations for older computer systems around. If the documentation and the sources of a system are available, I believe it would at least in some cases be possible to emulate it on whatever system is around. Then, the easiest and most future-proof way to obtain a digital version of the source code would be to scan it from paper...
CD's degrade over time, their lifetime is estimated to be 100 years maximum.
CD-R's can become unusable after a couple of days of being exposed to mountain sun, and will probably not last more than 15 years.
In the meantime, the computer equipment will develop to a point where CD's are not needed any more, because there is better technology available. So it will become necessary to store the devices that were used to read them (i.e. whole computers). But these devices are partly made of stuff that decomposes over time, like rubber in bearings etc.
Conserving data is not as easy as it seems. I wonder whether it'd be more efficient to print out the source codes on acid-free paper and store them like books - or perhaps microfiches - in a number of locations around the world.
The bureaucracy is not the problem, the mobile phone network operators (here in Europe) have already realized that they're more competitive if there is less bureaucracy. The pricing is the problem. As an example, a hotspot operator in Vienna (with over 100 hotspots) charges 12 Euros a month and 60 cents per MB. (6 Euros/30 cents for students). The local 3G network operator charges 19 Euros a month and 1.50 Euros per MB, there are a couple of minutes of telephony included, but it is an introductory offer (-24 Euros) and you have to buy a 3G phone which costs 576 (sic!) Euros. The coverage for 3G phone services is also moreless restricted to 8 of the largest cities, and even there it doesn't work flawlessly. So, I'd say there is a future for hotspots.
No, ATS cannot be used any more for payment. They can, however, still be exchanged for Euros at the Austrian National Bank. The only sense of quoting the price in ATS is that some people might still be more familiar with prices in ATS (although I suppose this part of society usually doesn't surf the web;-)).
Greedy Algorithm ate proposal
on
Making Change
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· Score: 1
The introduction of an 18-cent coin does not really make sense, because, as described in the article, people mostly use the "greedy algorithm" to calculate change.
The 18-cent coin (or the 1.33 Euro-coin or whatsoever) would only make sense if the denominations of coins given as change were to be determined by a computer, which in 99% of all situations is not the case. I think cashiers would nearly always use 18-cent coins together with 2 pennies because it is easier to do the math with multiples of five.
Being from Europe, I still have a couple of older $1-$50 bills lying around.
When I come to the US in, say, a few years, will these bills still be accepted by stores or will I need to exchange them for newer bills?
The point I was making is that Knoppix can be used on machines that cannot boot from cd. Of course, with it's heavy graphic interface, it is targeted at modern PCs. I do not know how well it performs on older PCs when run in text-only mode.
On the other side, I'd say that a good percentage of all PCs he'll encounter won't have a CD drive at all. Hey, I've witnessed Apple 2's still in use in 1998, and that was in the US! I'd seriously recommend that he takes DOS and a couple of DOS utilities with him. Maybe he'll even need some stuff on 5 1/4" disks.
Yeah, like: "Mom, our teachers don't like it when a phone starts ringing during class. So I switched it off." or "It ran out of power.". Plus, how can you tell whether someone runs out of battery or has been kidnapped. Surely the kidnapper won't be as stupid as to take the phone with him.
I wonder where they got their terrain data from. AFAIK, Nasa's SRTM data is not yet publicly available. Anyway, it must be a huge effort to merge all these databases into accurate maps.
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I prefer the professor.
Bill Gates would also be an idea, if they implemented an agression-relief feature in the Office Assistant, like weapons etc.
I think there is little point in using anything more advanced than, say, a TI 30x in maths class. TI-89's are nifty because they can plot functions and solve some integrals, but if you want to really understand maths you should learn to do this by hand.
And yes, I used a TI-89 in school.
I hope this doesn't mean George will win the elections again!
I'm pretty sure Icelanders are looking forward to this. After all, who doesn't want to live in a nuclear bomb test area? ;-)
okay, you may be right, I never tried in the countries you mentioned, but I know for sure that its is required in Austria and possibly also in Germany and Switzerland.
Maybe the need to register for using prepaid cards gives an indication of the extent of surveillance in a particular country. I know of encrypted e-mails and the like, but if I were a criminal, I'd fear that the amount of secure communication I send and receive would direct the attention of law enforcement agencies towards me. Steganography, however, would look quite appealing to me.
A lot of mobile operators already rent out phones to customers who wish to use their contract when they travel to the US. However, I think that renting out phones would require a lot more logistics than the "return phone for rebate"-approach. It is just stupid to tell people they can discard the phone if they like.
European network operators require you to register before you can start placing calls with prepaid cards. I doubt that something similar could be done with disposable phones.
NACK
The unification of Germany occurred later.
Note that Germany as such did not exist until the mid of the 19th century. Most of the territory of Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire which was ruled by the Habsburg family and is the predecessor of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
When looking into an ethymologic dictionary, remember that it does not state the country but rather the language from which the word originates, thus a word marked as "German" could as well have an origin in Austria, as we are speaking German.
I suppose that money laundering would be a huge problem. The company running the game would be required to log all transactions between players and to verify their identity. Plus, what happens when the database server with the financial information gets hacked?
You won't need to store everything you have on your hard drive on paper. It would be sufficient to store the data that you produce yourself, and just the important part of it, in a couple of locations. If space is crucial, you could as well use microfilm. You don't really need to archive all the mp3's and movies-someone else is taking care of it. The same applies to large commercial software packages and OSes.
then the drives can become unusable ;-)
You are right that in most cases the printed source code will not really be of importance. However, as computers play an increasingly important part in everyone's life, they are also becoming a documentation of our current lifestyle. I am sure that the museums and archives of tomorrow will contain the computers and programs of today.
The problem is that, unlike books, computer programs and data like articles, letters etc. are trashed with the click of a button, often for economic reasons. At some point in the future, we might be looking back a few decades and realize that a lot of the stuff that shaped our life back then is no more accessible to us (maybe also because of Palladium).
As you mentioned, there are already some emulations for older computer systems around. If the documentation and the sources of a system are available, I believe it would at least in some cases be possible to emulate it on whatever system is around. Then, the easiest and most future-proof way to obtain a digital version of the source code would be to scan it from paper...
CD's degrade over time, their lifetime is estimated to be 100 years maximum. CD-R's can become unusable after a couple of days of being exposed to mountain sun, and will probably not last more than 15 years. In the meantime, the computer equipment will develop to a point where CD's are not needed any more, because there is better technology available. So it will become necessary to store the devices that were used to read them (i.e. whole computers). But these devices are partly made of stuff that decomposes over time, like rubber in bearings etc. Conserving data is not as easy as it seems. I wonder whether it'd be more efficient to print out the source codes on acid-free paper and store them like books - or perhaps microfiches - in a number of locations around the world.
The bureaucracy is not the problem, the mobile phone network operators (here in Europe) have already realized that they're more competitive if there is less bureaucracy.
The pricing is the problem.
As an example, a hotspot operator in Vienna (with over 100 hotspots) charges 12 Euros a month and 60 cents per MB. (6 Euros/30 cents for students). The local 3G network operator charges 19 Euros a month and 1.50 Euros per MB, there are a couple of minutes of telephony included, but it is an introductory offer (-24 Euros) and you have to buy a 3G phone which costs 576 (sic!) Euros. The coverage for 3G phone services is also moreless restricted to 8 of the largest cities, and even there it doesn't work flawlessly.
So, I'd say there is a future for hotspots.
If it does not contain any caffeine, why should we drink it then?
I hope they're more careful about what they type when they program their probe. And stay with metric units, too.
No, ATS cannot be used any more for payment. They can, however, still be exchanged for Euros at the Austrian National Bank. The only sense of quoting the price in ATS is that some people might still be more familiar with prices in ATS (although I suppose this part of society usually doesn't surf the web ;-)).
The introduction of an 18-cent coin does not really make sense, because, as described in the article, people mostly use the "greedy algorithm" to calculate change.
The 18-cent coin (or the 1.33 Euro-coin or whatsoever) would only make sense if the denominations of coins given as change were to be determined by a computer, which in 99% of all situations is not the case.
I think cashiers would nearly always use 18-cent coins together with 2 pennies because it is easier to do the math with multiples of five.
Being from Europe, I still have a couple of older $1-$50 bills lying around. When I come to the US in, say, a few years, will these bills still be accepted by stores or will I need to exchange them for newer bills?
I'm just waiting for someone to try to patent the patent system itself. [This idea is (c) me.]
The point I was making is that Knoppix can be used on machines that cannot boot from cd. Of course, with it's heavy graphic interface, it is targeted at modern PCs. I do not know how well it performs on older PCs when run in text-only mode.
On the other side, I'd say that a good percentage of all PCs he'll encounter won't have a CD drive at all. Hey, I've witnessed Apple 2's still in use in 1998, and that was in the US!
I'd seriously recommend that he takes DOS and a couple of DOS utilities with him. Maybe he'll even need some stuff on 5 1/4" disks.
It is possible to create a boot disk for Knoppix.
I hope this processor will not sell well, as a lot of companies cater to overclockers.
Yeah, like: "Mom, our teachers don't like it when a phone starts ringing during class. So I switched it off." or "It ran out of power.". Plus, how can you tell whether someone runs out of battery or has been kidnapped. Surely the kidnapper won't be as stupid as to take the phone with him.
I wonder where they got their terrain data from. AFAIK, Nasa's SRTM data is not yet publicly available. Anyway, it must be a huge effort to merge all these databases into accurate maps.