It was interesting to see that a student's justification for a laptop was that is handwritten notes were incomplete and unorganized.
That is one of those critical skills for higher learning. You better get organized or you are going to flunk out.
A computer does not make anyone more organized. You need those skills for any type of profession and you cannot always depend upon a computer to make you smarter.
The input from the fans has little to do with what gets programmed. What makes the listing are shows that attract specific demographic groups that the advertisers want to go after.
Programs that would still be around today if it was up to the fans; "Dead Like Me", "Firefly", "Rome", "Babylon 5". The list grows ever longer.
This has been true since the early days of radio when Barbersol sold shaving soap.
The smartest programming still seems to be on PBS and they only have a fraction of the budgets of major networks or studios.
It's amazing how far off the mark he is with this latest comment.
My first computer, a Sinclair ZX-80 was not the most useful machine but it got me writing machine code to so the RF encoder to my television showed "HELLO WORLD".
Hello World, from the land of $10,000 hammers. Don't you know that if you don't have the latest multi-core processor with giant flat screen displays you just might as well give up now.
The $100 laptop will probably only be a passing phase, in 20 years the world can outsource programming to small villages in Uganda or Uzbekistan. No matter how much some here may look down our noses at the $100 laptop it will be a prized possession for a twelve year old.
Give it a chance, Bill, get an enema to clear up that nasty blockage that seems to get you shrill when someone else comes up with a good idea.
A similar thing happened in the telco industry a few years ago. The heady days of working for a CLEC, all of the promise of a bright future. Then when the revenues were not sustainable and the ILEC's (incumbent bells) got a little more competitive the CLEC's went into a freefall.
In retrospect the pattern was clear. One of the first moves was to get chickenshit with evaluations and to use that to justify why you weren't going to get a pay increase. Then "the Bob's" came in and had everyone track their "value added" activities in 15 minute increments. Then wave after wave of layoffs happened, stock reverse split 1600:1 and options were not even good toilet paper.
As an employee you need to watch out for yourself. The days of lifetime employment are past and we are all just contractors of life.
Paper won't last more than a few hundred years. Papyrus, in hermetically sealed containers is readable for 1000-3000 years at the outside. Pressing letters into clay tablets has been around since the Sumerians and is only permanent if someone burns down your library and the clay turns to ceramic.
Shooting for 100,000 years, heck, even half of that. Our current languages will be totally unrecognizable.
If the calamity is going to be so great I wonder if it would even be homo-sapiens reading our collected works. More likely it will be an evolved version of the rat.
Maybe putting a word processor on a competing OS that runs on the same hardware is an issue.
You don't see the Mac OS X running on many Intel/AMD platforms.
Right now to make the jump from Windows Office to MAC OS X office means buying a new computer. I suspect that is why Microsoft doesn't see it as a direct threat. Putting out an Office version on Linux would just encourage Windows users to move their OS'es over to a Linux distro.
You missed it, a few months ago one of the probes got stuck in the sand. NASA engineers were sighted on the moon, with their thumb out, looking for a tow.
Finally the probe got unstuck (ever rock a car out of a snow bank?).
The power is going to need to be dissipated in some way. The heat loading on this system is going to be tremendous. At 1.4 KW the heat demand is 7880 Btu/hr. In air conditioning load this would be.4 Ton, running continuously.
Maybe the computer needs to be encapsulated and sunk to the bottom of a lake of a swimming pool just to bleed off excess heat.
I agree totally, I was up in Schaumburg a year ago to evaluate Canopy (I work for a VAR of theirs). I found the product to be balky, overly sensnsitive to multipath interference, using an antiquated modulation scheme and requiring rather large reflector antennas to get the signal more than a few miles.
The technology is there. I also work with similar products from other manufacturers who can give a good 10-20 mile radio shot up to 155 Mbps.
Motorola has been doing it's best to come up with more marketing and applications uses for Canopy. In the building, talking to their folks you can feel their desperation.
The FCC allocates spectrum, to a large part, based upon available bandwidth. Narrowband, licensed frequencies below 1 GHz (with the exception of broadcast) are allocated with channels a few KHz apart. Shannon's Theorem dictates that data rate is limited by bandwidth and Signal/Noise ratio.
On a voice channel with 7.5 KHz or 6/25 KHz of seperation to the adjacent channel the digital data rate is very limited (600-9600 bps).
With the unlicened spectrum there are ways to increase the bandwidth to hundrends of KHz (spread spectrum), jump across many channels to avoid interference (frequency hopping) or to use many channels together in a multiplexed design (orthagonal frequency division multiplex)
Unlicensed spectrum has done a great deal for innovation with 900 MHz radios with 1 Mbps data rates and 802.11 stuff with 108 Mbps data rate. Without changes like this a significant amount of spectrum would still be public safety and business with analog only voice systems.
The days of telnetting into university servers, using ARCHIE to dig through text files, even using 3270 emulation to log into mainframes. I cut my teeth on that stuff (broke a nail too). They quietly faded away 10-12 years ago.
When the web came out I was really down on it. How "dare" someone make the internet easier! Gradually I gave in to it and learned to like certain aspects of it too.
How is this going to work? The majority of internet users have never even seen the command line on their XP boxes. This is one of the big stumbling blocks to getting Linux distro's that the uninitated will install and use. One of the common complaints is that the command line stuff is "too hard".
I work with other engineers who still do not know how to narrow down a search in google for phrases by using the "quotes".
Let's call it CLI (command line interface) so it has a snazzy name that will draw people to it.
Oh, the same way. At the destination since it would be in orbit around a distant star it could use it's sail (coated with a radio reflective material) as a radio-telescope and look for signs of civilization (assuming they use radio)or even some more esoteric means like looking for the water spectrum, oxygen etc...
Then, it would reverse course, head back to earth (or some other star on a grand tour).
I don't think this would really be a very efficient means of moving people. The acceleration would be in the hundreth or thousanth or ten thousanth of a G and would take many many years to even reach our nearest star.
It's cool because it's a low energy and fairly low tech way of going places, if you have a long time to get there.
If this is to "orbit" the earth it faces alot of challenges.
Out atmosphere extends quite a distance to the moon. Sure it is atoms per cubic meter but it's appreceable . I suspect there will some frictional losses that will constrain the top end velocity.
If it orbits that means that it has to go back around the other side, while the front surface is facing to the sun. Sure you can play tricks where maybe one side is reflective and the other approaches an ideal black body object and just absorbs. Or maybe when it is on it's orbit facing to the sun and while it is "tacking the wind" you retract the solar sail to reduce drag. Lots of challenges there to consider.
You probably could get better performance if it had a highly elliptical orbit, in other words, more acceleration as it has the "wind in it's sails" and then when it reaches apogee you close the sails and let it accelerate back to earth using gravitational attraction.
As this thing accelerates the orbit would become even more elliptical and as it does a swing by the earth (to go back into space) it faces frictional heating, geomagnetic forces where the electric charges on the instrumentation packages begin to wear on the electronics packages. Remember what happens when you move a piece of metal rapidly through a magnetic field, it induces voltages into the object being moved.
It would be cooler, probably easier and more impressive if you sent it into deep space. Then when in mid course to another star, once it senses decelleration caused by the star it's heading to it would either close or eject the sail.
Think of a solar sail built like a umbrella. Put the instrumentation package in the "handle" and also a microwave transmitter and feed horn. Face the feed horn right at the surface of the solar sail and this thing can do double duty as a giant microwave antenna (50-100 meters across). This would have a greater communication range than any deep space probe out there that are limited by the gain that their antennas can produce because of their relatively small size (a few meters across).
Let's say you want to decellerate at the other end. Use a small thruster to turn the thing around mid-course and re-deploy the sail. The probe would slow down the closer it gets to the distant star.
Possibilities, possibilities, my mind is awash.
The FAA had a top flight (my pun) system 30 years ago. It's still running and they want to spend billions to upgrade it. The programmers have all retired (or jumped off of buildings in the dot.com bust).
Exactly. It seems to be a tendency for parents to shift responsibility for raising their children upon everyone else.
Kids don't come with an owners manual. It's hard work and means that you need to devote some time to doing it right. Before the internet there still was porn. There still were bad ideas and bad influences.
I have been playing Gal Civ for about four years from when it was one of the few decent games on OS/2. Along with Stellar Frontier (shoot-em-up) and the no longer sold "Trials of Battle" it is very addictive.
I wish they would re-release TOB (Trials of Battle). It became the only reason on why I had kept OS/2 on a computer.
If you haven't tried the Stardock games give them a spin.
This is right up my alley. We retain three months for traffic engineering purposes but I could go back two years of archival data. This is the only way we can do traffic engineering to determine if trunk groups are properly sized and if overflows among groups is working correctly. It's amazing how an innocious change in one trunk group can save tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Telcos have been keeping this data for years. Why all of a sudden does everyone get surprised? We don't record your conversations. All of the data is for use on our internal networks to track where call volumes come from and go to. Your single phone call is the same to us as a grain of sand is to a beach.
There appear to be three major challenges to solar...
1. Cost. I can't afford the $50,000 to solar-ize my yard to power my house.
2. DC instead of AC, inverter technology just takes all that hard earned solar power and converts it back to heat.
3. Life expectancy of an array. (everything has an environmental cost. It just depends if the product lasts long enough to make it worthwile)
How about telecommuting now that we suddenly have all of this excess fiber capacity?
.
Oh, sorry, management (I be one) has to grind the workforce under the thumb of injustice.
.
If I could work from home you would NEVER see me on the roads during peak travel time (aka, rush hour(s)).
When I graduated from College in 1985 with a BS EET I was proud of my 3.14 GPA. A few months ago while giving a walk-through familiarization to a new hire (also a EET) the matter of grades came up. He gave me a look as if I was a dunderhead (as if I was a shirker who went to a party school) when I told him my GPA. I don't think his talents are anything special. (can't tell the difference between a grid or a plate (HA! Gotya There!))
How can there be so many perfect 4.0 GPA's graduating from high school or college? From what I recall, even the super-geeks of my day were doing a great job if they were 3.8's.
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So, let me get this straight... The Piersons Puppeteer is the ideal biological form.
Larry Niven had it right all along.
I feel slimed.
I wondered how Peter Venkman and Igon used to move so fast.
It was interesting to see that a student's justification for a laptop was that is handwritten notes were incomplete and unorganized.
That is one of those critical skills for higher learning. You better get organized or you are going to flunk out.
A computer does not make anyone more organized. You need those skills for any type of profession and you cannot always depend upon a computer to make you smarter.
The input from the fans has little to do with what gets programmed. What makes the listing are shows that attract specific demographic groups that the advertisers want to go after.
Programs that would still be around today if it was up to the fans; "Dead Like Me", "Firefly", "Rome", "Babylon 5". The list grows ever longer.
This has been true since the early days of radio when Barbersol sold shaving soap.
The smartest programming still seems to be on PBS and they only have a fraction of the budgets of major networks or studios.
It's amazing how far off the mark he is with this latest comment.
My first computer, a Sinclair ZX-80 was not the most useful machine but it got me writing machine code to so the RF encoder to my television showed "HELLO WORLD".
Hello World, from the land of $10,000 hammers. Don't you know that if you don't have the latest multi-core processor with giant flat screen displays you just might as well give up now.
The $100 laptop will probably only be a passing phase, in 20 years the world can outsource programming to small villages in Uganda or Uzbekistan. No matter how much some here may look down our noses at the $100 laptop it will be a prized possession for a twelve year old.
Give it a chance, Bill, get an enema to clear up that nasty blockage that seems to get you shrill when someone else comes up with a good idea.
A similar thing happened in the telco industry a few years ago. The heady days of working for a CLEC, all of the promise of a bright future. Then when the revenues were not sustainable and the ILEC's (incumbent bells) got a little more competitive the CLEC's went into a freefall.
In retrospect the pattern was clear. One of the first moves was to get chickenshit with evaluations and to use that to justify why you weren't going to get a pay increase. Then "the Bob's" came in and had everyone track their "value added" activities in 15 minute increments. Then wave after wave of layoffs happened, stock reverse split 1600:1 and options were not even good toilet paper.
As an employee you need to watch out for yourself. The days of lifetime employment are past and we are all just contractors of life.
Paper won't last more than a few hundred years. Papyrus, in hermetically sealed containers is readable for 1000-3000 years at the outside. Pressing letters into clay tablets has been around since the Sumerians and is only permanent if someone burns down your library and the clay turns to ceramic. Shooting for 100,000 years, heck, even half of that. Our current languages will be totally unrecognizable. If the calamity is going to be so great I wonder if it would even be homo-sapiens reading our collected works. More likely it will be an evolved version of the rat.
Maybe putting a word processor on a competing OS that runs on the same hardware is an issue. You don't see the Mac OS X running on many Intel/AMD platforms. Right now to make the jump from Windows Office to MAC OS X office means buying a new computer. I suspect that is why Microsoft doesn't see it as a direct threat. Putting out an Office version on Linux would just encourage Windows users to move their OS'es over to a Linux distro.
You missed it, a few months ago one of the probes got stuck in the sand. NASA engineers were sighted on the moon, with their thumb out, looking for a tow. Finally the probe got unstuck (ever rock a car out of a snow bank?).
The power is going to need to be dissipated in some way. The heat loading on this system is going to be tremendous. At 1.4 KW the heat demand is 7880 Btu/hr. In air conditioning load this would be .4 Ton, running continuously.
Maybe the computer needs to be encapsulated and sunk to the bottom of a lake of a swimming pool just to bleed off excess heat.
I agree totally, I was up in Schaumburg a year ago to evaluate Canopy (I work for a VAR of theirs). I found the product to be balky, overly sensnsitive to multipath interference, using an antiquated modulation scheme and requiring rather large reflector antennas to get the signal more than a few miles. The technology is there. I also work with similar products from other manufacturers who can give a good 10-20 mile radio shot up to 155 Mbps. Motorola has been doing it's best to come up with more marketing and applications uses for Canopy. In the building, talking to their folks you can feel their desperation.
The FCC allocates spectrum, to a large part, based upon available bandwidth. Narrowband, licensed frequencies below 1 GHz (with the exception of broadcast) are allocated with channels a few KHz apart. Shannon's Theorem dictates that data rate is limited by bandwidth and Signal/Noise ratio. On a voice channel with 7.5 KHz or 6/25 KHz of seperation to the adjacent channel the digital data rate is very limited (600-9600 bps). With the unlicened spectrum there are ways to increase the bandwidth to hundrends of KHz (spread spectrum), jump across many channels to avoid interference (frequency hopping) or to use many channels together in a multiplexed design (orthagonal frequency division multiplex) Unlicensed spectrum has done a great deal for innovation with 900 MHz radios with 1 Mbps data rates and 802.11 stuff with 108 Mbps data rate. Without changes like this a significant amount of spectrum would still be public safety and business with analog only voice systems.
The days of telnetting into university servers, using ARCHIE to dig through text files, even using 3270 emulation to log into mainframes. I cut my teeth on that stuff (broke a nail too). They quietly faded away 10-12 years ago. When the web came out I was really down on it. How "dare" someone make the internet easier! Gradually I gave in to it and learned to like certain aspects of it too. How is this going to work? The majority of internet users have never even seen the command line on their XP boxes. This is one of the big stumbling blocks to getting Linux distro's that the uninitated will install and use. One of the common complaints is that the command line stuff is "too hard". I work with other engineers who still do not know how to narrow down a search in google for phrases by using the "quotes". Let's call it CLI (command line interface) so it has a snazzy name that will draw people to it.
Oh, the same way. At the destination since it would be in orbit around a distant star it could use it's sail (coated with a radio reflective material) as a radio-telescope and look for signs of civilization (assuming they use radio)or even some more esoteric means like looking for the water spectrum, oxygen etc... Then, it would reverse course, head back to earth (or some other star on a grand tour). I don't think this would really be a very efficient means of moving people. The acceleration would be in the hundreth or thousanth or ten thousanth of a G and would take many many years to even reach our nearest star. It's cool because it's a low energy and fairly low tech way of going places, if you have a long time to get there.
If this is to "orbit" the earth it faces alot of challenges. Out atmosphere extends quite a distance to the moon. Sure it is atoms per cubic meter but it's appreceable . I suspect there will some frictional losses that will constrain the top end velocity. If it orbits that means that it has to go back around the other side, while the front surface is facing to the sun. Sure you can play tricks where maybe one side is reflective and the other approaches an ideal black body object and just absorbs. Or maybe when it is on it's orbit facing to the sun and while it is "tacking the wind" you retract the solar sail to reduce drag. Lots of challenges there to consider. You probably could get better performance if it had a highly elliptical orbit, in other words, more acceleration as it has the "wind in it's sails" and then when it reaches apogee you close the sails and let it accelerate back to earth using gravitational attraction. As this thing accelerates the orbit would become even more elliptical and as it does a swing by the earth (to go back into space) it faces frictional heating, geomagnetic forces where the electric charges on the instrumentation packages begin to wear on the electronics packages. Remember what happens when you move a piece of metal rapidly through a magnetic field, it induces voltages into the object being moved. It would be cooler, probably easier and more impressive if you sent it into deep space. Then when in mid course to another star, once it senses decelleration caused by the star it's heading to it would either close or eject the sail. Think of a solar sail built like a umbrella. Put the instrumentation package in the "handle" and also a microwave transmitter and feed horn. Face the feed horn right at the surface of the solar sail and this thing can do double duty as a giant microwave antenna (50-100 meters across). This would have a greater communication range than any deep space probe out there that are limited by the gain that their antennas can produce because of their relatively small size (a few meters across). Let's say you want to decellerate at the other end. Use a small thruster to turn the thing around mid-course and re-deploy the sail. The probe would slow down the closer it gets to the distant star. Possibilities, possibilities, my mind is awash.
I guess it's a good thing you haven't programmed any interplanetary probes recently.
The FAA had a top flight (my pun) system 30 years ago. It's still running and they want to spend billions to upgrade it. The programmers have all retired (or jumped off of buildings in the dot.com bust).
Exactly. It seems to be a tendency for parents to shift responsibility for raising their children upon everyone else. Kids don't come with an owners manual. It's hard work and means that you need to devote some time to doing it right. Before the internet there still was porn. There still were bad ideas and bad influences.
I have been playing Gal Civ for about four years from when it was one of the few decent games on OS/2. Along with Stellar Frontier (shoot-em-up) and the no longer sold "Trials of Battle" it is very addictive. I wish they would re-release TOB (Trials of Battle). It became the only reason on why I had kept OS/2 on a computer. If you haven't tried the Stardock games give them a spin.
It sounds like he is miffed that the FCC required the LEC's to provide a service that actually works! I hope those nasty penalties really hurt.
This is right up my alley. We retain three months for traffic engineering purposes but I could go back two years of archival data. This is the only way we can do traffic engineering to determine if trunk groups are properly sized and if overflows among groups is working correctly. It's amazing how an innocious change in one trunk group can save tens of thousands of dollars a year. Telcos have been keeping this data for years. Why all of a sudden does everyone get surprised? We don't record your conversations. All of the data is for use on our internal networks to track where call volumes come from and go to. Your single phone call is the same to us as a grain of sand is to a beach.
There appear to be three major challenges to solar... 1. Cost. I can't afford the $50,000 to solar-ize my yard to power my house. 2. DC instead of AC, inverter technology just takes all that hard earned solar power and converts it back to heat. 3. Life expectancy of an array. (everything has an environmental cost. It just depends if the product lasts long enough to make it worthwile)
How about telecommuting now that we suddenly have all of this excess fiber capacity? . Oh, sorry, management (I be one) has to grind the workforce under the thumb of injustice. . If I could work from home you would NEVER see me on the roads during peak travel time (aka, rush hour(s)).
Sure the original comment was probably meant as a jest but there are a few valid reasons for TP to have sensors in it.
Like detecting the presence of BLOOD in the stool. That's a major warning sign that something bad is happening in your colon.
When I graduated from College in 1985 with a BS EET I was proud of my 3.14 GPA. A few months ago while giving a walk-through familiarization to a new hire (also a EET) the matter of grades came up. He gave me a look as if I was a dunderhead (as if I was a shirker who went to a party school) when I told him my GPA. I don't think his talents are anything special. (can't tell the difference between a grid or a plate (HA! Gotya There!))
How can there be so many perfect 4.0 GPA's graduating from high school or college? From what I recall, even the super-geeks of my day were doing a great job if they were 3.8's.