In DOS days, there were often 3 ways of doing things. For example, take writing to the screen: You could call the BIOS interrupt function. You could call the MSDOS Interrupt function. You could detect the hardware and write directly to the hardware address.
Both the BIOS and DOS mechanisms were slow and broken and did not follow the conventions of any programming language. For example terminating strings with the $ symbol, FFS.
All commercial programs (and most hobbiest ones) wrote directly to hardware for speed.
DOS was not really an OS at all. It did very rudimentary memory management. About the only thing you'd really use DOS for was disk access and application launching, otherwise DOS applications were basically "bare metal" applications that managed just about everything (screen, keyboard, serial ports, mouse,...) internally.
Worms are great soil reconditioners and recyclers. They breed well too: can achieve in excess of x1000 biomass increase in less than a year if kept in the correct conditions.
Worms condition the soil by reducing compaction and improving the water holding ability of the soil. Unfortunately a lot of human agricultural methods (insecticides and fertilisers) can harm them or kill them.
Apart from their natural soil conditioning function, they can also be harvested for use as high protein animal feed.
Intel is fighting the march of ARM CPUs in this space, but ARM is inevitable because it is cheaper and uses less power than x86. This means an ARM-based system can be smaller, lighter and have an extended battery life, which is why pretty much every cell phone and palmtop system use ARM.
Ubuntu has got into the early stages of doing ARM distros, so ARM based systems with Ubuntu ease of use are potentially just around the corner.
Linux is still emerging as the primary portable OS. Unlike WinCE (which is a very nobbled thing that tries to look like Windows), ARM Linux is the real thing - using the same kernel code as any other Linux.
I'm a long term Linux user (4 boxes here, 2xUbuntu + 2xFedora).
The user still struggles because of lack of uniformity. Too many Linux support pages are of the form: If Ubuntu or Debian, then do this. If Fedora do that.
For Joe and Jane Sixpack, uniformity is very important to get effective support. THis is one of the reasons Ubuntu loads only one app of a type by default.
The Lego NXT is very open. Accessable scematics, and firmware as well as an independent open source firmware (see http://lejos.sourceforge.net/ ). In true OSS fashion, the Lejos firmware has also served as a springboard for other alternative firmware too.
With a tankless system, you need to provide power on demand or the customer gets a cold shower. All those folks showering at 6:30 am need their water heated at the same time.
With a tank system you can spread the heating over the night (eg. turning on each tank for an hour means that you can service perhaps 6 times as many customers with the same peak load).
Most retail suppliers get charged some multiplier of their peak load so are very keen to keep peak loads down.
Many places already use ripple control to control water heaters. So it's a matter of just extending this idea.
Of course it is important to only control the right loads. Water heating is a good candidate, so might be charging electric vehicles overnight. Basically loads that need juice but not necessarily constantly.
Probably a good idea not to do this to TV sets or medical equipment.
Th RF levels of GPS signals are so low that you cannot detect them without despreading, for which you need the spreading codes. The signal levels are way below the ambient noise floor. Spreading also gives security.
But spreading limits the bandwidth of a signal and would make high def video a challenge.
TV programs, even documentaries, have to attract eyeballs for advertising revenue. Therefore entertainment has priority over education. Magic School Bus and Discovery Channel get dumbed down and hyped up until they're just shows with an "education" handle so that parents let the kids watch them. Perhaps you can find some reasonable BBC stuff, but I would expect not.
As parent says, get the kid interested in books and magazines. Take them to public lectures. These are all typically higher quality than TV/video. Read up yourself and do some of that quality time stuff.
I'm a homeschooling parent and spend a lot of time having discussions on a wide variety of subjects with the kids. Sure, this is a bit more effort (I have to read up on stuff I don't know about), but that gives you a second chance at an interesting education too.
... And don't give me that "I don't have the time" BS. It does not take a lot of effort to read up on stuff, instead of watching crap on TV. If you don't have the time to interact with kids, get yourself sterilized.
Yes, light (of any sort) changes the thresholds etc of the gates (particularly the floating gates in flash memory). If you have an EPROM behaving like that then reprogramming will often make it better.
I once had the inverse problem: a circuit that worked fine under normal light and crashed as soon as someone turned on the florescent lights. We at first thought it must be some poer surge thing and put scopes on the power etc etc. Eventually someone inadvertently covered the circuit and the problem went away, but scrashed as soon as we took the cover off. Of course the florescent tubes are actually blinking at 100Hz or so (double mains frequency) and that was causing a 100 Hz ripple on the gate thresholds, really screwing up memory accesses. Had us going for a while!
That stuff that comes from the sun? Don't want to take your valuable printings outside then.
Back in the 1980s we used UV erasable EPROMS. With the correct UV lamps you could erase them in seconds or minutes. If you had natural light coming onto your desk then they'd get erased, but it would take a few days. Many an engineer was stumped as to why his circuit that worked fine yesterday was behaving badly today.
It is easy to make a whole lot of might and could style predictions for some discovery that works in a controlled lab environment, but it is a lot harder to deliver them in product form: reliable enough and low cost enough to be useful. The tecno development hiway is littered with technologies such as bubble memory that just never worked out.
We've had Non-volatile state storage for ages (eg. FeRAM and floating gates (as used in flash) and battery backed up RAM). State storage is only part of the picture.
Whatever the mechanism, freezing state is not sufficient to instantly boot a modern computer. Pretty much all modern computers have some communication with an external device that needs to be renegotiated and reconnected, be that a mouse, disk or network.
We have better understanding of far away stars etc than we do of our own oceans, yet the oceans are far more important to our existence. Hat's off to Google!
Computer companies need the flexibility to change their offerings to meet changing market conditions. The Eee PC has made consumers aware of Linux. Here in New Zealand, Linux-loaded Acer laptops are available at some retail stores and sell quite quickly - I'm using one right now. Even Apple has had a beneficial effect for Linux because they have encouraged people to look beyond Windows. Of course MS have helped too by shipping Vista and building a negative perception (whether warranted or not is beside the point - only perception matters).
The rise of Apple must be worrying for the PC vendors since they cannot sell Mac OSX. They need to build flexibility to give them alternatives and right now Linux is the only viable choice. Dell etc see these changes and realise that they need to be able to respond quickly with Linux products, should the need arise. Thus, they need drivers.
Dell etc already screw their hardware vendors hard. The hardware vendors will bend over backwards to get Dell etc business. If that means delivering a Linux driver too - well so be it.
Firstly, the type of organisation using retail management systems tend to be conservative and not bleeding edge because downtime costs money. They would not be playing with beta SP releases and would not be seeing problems.
Secondly, Microsoft is not one monolithic entity, as many believe, but a group of different business units. The DRMS folk aren't going to drop their current activities to check whether a different business unit's updates work.
Thirdly, so what! Why not ship it anyway with a release note saying "Don't use with DRMS!". SP2 broke some MS developer tools and that did not stop them shipping it. Some organisations had to wait months for updates before they could migrate to SP2.
Recent economic worries tend to make people risk adverse and tends to pop the bubble of any high PE stock. Being able to trade away high PE stock for a good price gives YHOO shareholders a nice sleep and that is all that is keeping the YHOO stock from crashing.
Slashdot Mirror
I quite like to see MS going down the tubes.
You could call the BIOS interrupt function.
You could call the MSDOS Interrupt function.
You could detect the hardware and write directly to the hardware address.
Both the BIOS and DOS mechanisms were slow and broken and did not follow the conventions of any programming language. For example terminating strings with the $ symbol, FFS.
All commercial programs (and most hobbiest ones) wrote directly to hardware for speed.
DOS was not really an OS at all. It did very rudimentary memory management. About the only thing you'd really use DOS for was disk access and application launching, otherwise DOS applications were basically "bare metal" applications that managed just about everything (screen, keyboard, serial ports, mouse,...) internally.
Worms condition the soil by reducing compaction and improving the water holding ability of the soil. Unfortunately a lot of human agricultural methods (insecticides and fertilisers) can harm them or kill them.
Apart from their natural soil conditioning function, they can also be harvested for use as high protein animal feed.
Ubuntu has got into the early stages of doing ARM distros, so ARM based systems with Ubuntu ease of use are potentially just around the corner.
Linux is still emerging as the primary portable OS. Unlike WinCE (which is a very nobbled thing that tries to look like Windows), ARM Linux is the real thing - using the same kernel code as any other Linux.
The user still struggles because of lack of uniformity. Too many Linux support pages are of the form: If Ubuntu or Debian, then do this. If Fedora do that.
For Joe and Jane Sixpack, uniformity is very important to get effective support. THis is one of the reasons Ubuntu loads only one app of a type by default.
Two wrongs don't make a right... or do they?
The Lego NXT is very open. Accessable scematics, and firmware as well as an independent open source firmware (see http://lejos.sourceforge.net/ ). In true OSS fashion, the Lejos firmware has also served as a springboard for other alternative firmware too.
With a tank system you can spread the heating over the night (eg. turning on each tank for an hour means that you can service perhaps 6 times as many customers with the same peak load).
Most retail suppliers get charged some multiplier of their peak load so are very keen to keep peak loads down.
Of course it is important to only control the right loads. Water heating is a good candidate, so might be charging electric vehicles overnight. Basically loads that need juice but not necessarily constantly.
Probably a good idea not to do this to TV sets or medical equipment.
That's causing it!
But spreading limits the bandwidth of a signal and would make high def video a challenge.
As parent says, get the kid interested in books and magazines. Take them to public lectures. These are all typically higher quality than TV/video. Read up yourself and do some of that quality time stuff.
I'm a homeschooling parent and spend a lot of time having discussions on a wide variety of subjects with the kids. Sure, this is a bit more effort (I have to read up on stuff I don't know about), but that gives you a second chance at an interesting education too.
... And don't give me that "I don't have the time" BS. It does not take a lot of effort to read up on stuff, instead of watching crap on TV. If you don't have the time to interact with kids, get yourself sterilized.
I once had the inverse problem: a circuit that worked fine under normal light and crashed as soon as someone turned on the florescent lights. We at first thought it must be some poer surge thing and put scopes on the power etc etc. Eventually someone inadvertently covered the circuit and the problem went away, but scrashed as soon as we took the cover off. Of course the florescent tubes are actually blinking at 100Hz or so (double mains frequency) and that was causing a 100 Hz ripple on the gate thresholds, really screwing up memory accesses. Had us going for a while!
I have tried it on my small-screened laptop and found the candy annoying and pixel hogging. Yes, I know I can turn it off...
As my 16 year old son said of the jello-wobble screens: Cute, but what's the point!
Hat's off to Google == Hat is off to Google == [My] hat is off to Google.
Back in the 1980s we used UV erasable EPROMS. With the correct UV lamps you could erase them in seconds or minutes. If you had natural light coming onto your desk then they'd get erased, but it would take a few days. Many an engineer was stumped as to why his circuit that worked fine yesterday was behaving badly today.
Now the same problem will extend to accountants!
We've had Non-volatile state storage for ages (eg. FeRAM and floating gates (as used in flash) and battery backed up RAM). State storage is only part of the picture.
Whatever the mechanism, freezing state is not sufficient to instantly boot a modern computer. Pretty much all modern computers have some communication with an external device that needs to be renegotiated and reconnected, be that a mouse, disk or network.
We have better understanding of far away stars etc than we do of our own oceans, yet the oceans are far more important to our existence. Hat's off to Google!
But you're right to focus on those Canonical bastards. They don't even post all their bank account and password details!
Contrary to your egocentric beliefs, nobody owes you anything.
The rise of Apple must be worrying for the PC vendors since they cannot sell Mac OSX. They need to build flexibility to give them alternatives and right now Linux is the only viable choice. Dell etc see these changes and realise that they need to be able to respond quickly with Linux products, should the need arise. Thus, they need drivers.
Dell etc already screw their hardware vendors hard. The hardware vendors will bend over backwards to get Dell etc business. If that means delivering a Linux driver too - well so be it.
Secondly, Microsoft is not one monolithic entity, as many believe, but a group of different business units. The DRMS folk aren't going to drop their current activities to check whether a different business unit's updates work.
Thirdly, so what! Why not ship it anyway with a release note saying "Don't use with DRMS!". SP2 broke some MS developer tools and that did not stop them shipping it. Some organisations had to wait months for updates before they could migrate to SP2.
Recent economic worries tend to make people risk adverse and tends to pop the bubble of any high PE stock. Being able to trade away high PE stock for a good price gives YHOO shareholders a nice sleep and that is all that is keeping the YHOO stock from crashing.
A couple of years later I met her when she was simultaneously dating three other guys. Again I requested IO but that time I got ENOSPC.
By the time I left college I was still ENOMOUNT.
Plus minibar, out of town expenses and an excuse to take the shaggable assistant to an out-of-town location for a few days.