I just bought a lightly used Panasonic 30" widescreen HD tube TV to replace the older 4:3 tube TV that finally croaked after fifteen years. You are certainly right about the weight, that is a disadvantage, and the bulk also means that the nature of where one places one is more difficult than the newer wall-hanging devices.
On the other hand, I don't really move my TVs around, and with the built-in cabinet and desk assembly in my house, the depth is not an issue. Furthermore in my case, since the TV is visible when the window blinds are drawn, having an obviously heavy, 126lb tube TV will probably discourage theft attempts. It's not that these are advantages, but they're not disadvantages for me either, and as ubiquitous as cabinets for TVs are/were, changing one's tech to thin TVs actually has had a cost beyond just the device itself in many cases.
Daimler Benz made good cars before this, but they were all good, expensive cars. Volkswagen is the German company that makes good, inexpensive cars. VW, however, already had a market presence selling their inexpensive cars in the US, and didn't need to buy a company already with a market hold.
To take it away from computers, in 1998 a very strong Chrysler Corporation with a popular line of products merged with a German company to form DaimlerChrysler, and over the next decade the German side of the company almost completely ruined the American side's products. The Caliber replaced the Neon and was less successful. The Avenger replaced the Stratus and was less successful, as was the revised Sebring. The new Dakota replaced the old Dakota and was less successful. The Durango's redesign was an outright flop until it was quickly revised, and still wasn't as successful. The Sprinter replaced the B-series van and was less successful. Even the minivan replacement was less successful than its predecessor. Really the only truly successful successor was the LX chassis, replacing the LH chassis.
Daimler wanted to own the designs and didn't value what was there previously, and it almost destroyed Chrysler. It killed off one brand (Plymouth) and reduced the number of models dramatically, and they're only now starting to sunset the Daimler-designed cars, as it's extremely expensive to develop a new car. Had they evolved the design for the Neon, the Clouds, the vans, and the like, they probably would have done better in both the short term and the long term.
Unfortunately no one remembered the A-body to F/J/M body fiasco, and how aging Valiants and Darts were outliving their Aspen and Volare cousins, when the two chassis were for the same market.
I think that people may say that they miss the old days, but based on people's fickleness when it comes to how they communicate (letter, phone, e-mail, myspace, facebook, etc), how they want new TVs even though tubes are arguably superior in both contrast and refresh rate (not to mention multiresolution capable), and that they sell millions upon millions of cars annually, they don't actually believe that the old days were better.
The old days were simpler, not better. When one has less choices it's often easier to choose. When old technologies are cobbled on to, like all of the additions to the otherwise-ancient Otto-cycle internal combustion engine, those additions are what make some old things more complicated and arguably worse in at least the maintenance aspect. If we see actual technological revolution though, not only is the base technology replaced, but all of the other cobbled-on parts are too.
I I'm sure there's solder in the computer of the B-52. There might be no integrated-circuit memory, but components still need to be connected somehow.
My guess as to why the AP-101 is still in use is that with it being expensive to certify new equipment in flight, when the device performs as needed, replacing it is not practical or strictly necessary. On the other hand, if the Air Force determined that it really, really did need a new computer in the B-52, it would happen, despite obstacles to the process.
I used to work on an Alphanumeric paging system. We used 2400 baud because the time necessary to negotiate a higher-speed connection was far longer than the time to negotiate and then transmit ~240 characters at 2400 baud.
Fast forward to 2001 or so, and the general decline of paging. We were attempting to migrate from physical serial port expanders connected to physical modems, connected to a breakout cable from a T1 CSU/DSU, and we tried Equinox digital modem emulators- that integrated a single connection to a T1 CSU/DSU without all of the physical. The problem was the the Equinox gear wouldn't reliably negotiate that slow, and often would lock up the virtual serial port, rendering it useless until the card was reinitialized through a cold reboot. Equinox was more interested in giving us our money back than they were in fixing their hardware, but we did finally manage to convince them, after much effort, to put work into fixing it.
...I don't want it replaced before it's no longer doing its job effectively. The Navy system, for example, was finally replaced when the actual PDP11 hardware was no longer viable, and given the expense of the control software to develop, it probably was more cost effective to simply emulate a PDP11 to keep the existing code viable.
Reinventing the wheel only because a technology has been around for a long time is not cost effective, and replacing technology because viable machines are simply old is also not cost effective. This same logic makes me dislike programs like Cash for Clunkers, as the cost to develop and build a car, plus deliver, is high enough that taking cars off the road that are still viable, almost without regard to fuel economy, is not cost effective. Use it until repairing it is financially impractical, especially considering the expense of buying another new one.
Couldn't that argument be made for Windows? If it comes preinstalled with Windows then you should be able to wipe it, reinstall anew, and have everything work? Of course that's not the case: you frequently have to hit up the manufacturer's website for assorted drivers (especially for wireless devices).
Thanks for twisting my argument. I meant equipment that can be supported, not just equipment that works instantly out of the box. If the hardware maker provides functional, workable support even via download, or if the kernel has the modules for it then it's supported.
what the fuck hardware are you running? or are you just stuck in the 90's
I had a problem with my Gateway MX7525 laptop- the kernel had problems with the realtime clock and it advanced a minute in about 35 seconds at the slowest, and sometimes as fast as a minute every few seconds. This was 2006 or so. At the time there was no solution to the problem. I never bothered to get it working, and some day I should either update it or reclaim the partition space for Windows.
I had a problem with 802.11a devices in 2002 or so.
Matrox never really had good 3d acceleration drivers for X11. Got burned by that one too.
...isn't that a preconfigured OS is installed on the computer. It's that a computer is sold with all of its hardware functional in Linux, so when one buys one of these, one can wipe the vanilla install off, if one chooses, and install one's own favorite distribution and know everything will work.
The other obvious benefit is no Microsoft tax. Even if Ubuntu gets some money, as opposed to the OS being truly fiscally free, at least that money goes to an entity that has a vested interest in improving Linux.
Fact of the matter is, basically all computing requires more trust than should really be granted. We trust Microsoft to patch their vulnerabilities now that malware manages to find ways in through ever more creative means. We trust Apple to have an OS that was never really vulnerable to start with, and we trust GNU/Linux distributions and other free operating systems to have clean repositories and to be free of backdoors. We rely on non-OS, internet-connected software companies to produce software that isn't vulnerable to bringing problems in from the Internet.
All of these are essentially untrue, or are relying on means of security that can't be verified or well tested until something comes out in the wild. We instead rely on updates after the fact, and on feeble attempts by some to make programs to remove malware.
Even in the privileged/unprivileged user landscape that modern OSes are capable of using, too many users desire more credentials on their local computers than they need in order to perform the very basic tasks that a computer user does on a daily basis. In the early days I too was guilty of this, but learned. Unfortunately when there are combinations of vectors to infect the local user and then local root exploits even a good privileges model won't work.
We should demand more out of our browser developers and more out of our plugin developers. That is the single biggest category of infection route, and I'm sorry, but software that voluntarily brings in and deploys the exploit simply by visiting a markup-language page is completely unacceptable. Fix the bugs before worrying about new features.
On the other hand, if the core base of Firefox is also a group that's heavy into Slashdot, that could help direct development or to at least avoid having an equivalent of DOS 4...
Granted, I have a buddy still on the FF 2.0 bandwagon because he doesn't like the changes made to 3.0+ and doesn't like the orphaned plugins, and I'm sure that there are plenty of others with similar positions, but finding out that the vast majority of commentary on an idea is negative will probably give one pause to further consider one's direction.
Yeah, there are many UI changes that they could make, like letting us put tabs sideways on the side of the window instead of across the top, allow toolbars to be vertical on the side of the window, and basically give us the vertical screen real estate back that we lost when the world decided it had to go 16:9...
I would rather have my forward/back/URL/search fields on the title bar with the window control buttons, and my tabs, capable of being sorted into more than one row, sideways up the left side of the window. Or, allow me to do the opposite. Also, allow the notifier that switches sides at the bottom be able to be vertical, as it's annoying when it blocks part of the text of a webpage.
if your short range fiber gbics cost thousands of dollars each, you're buying from the wrong vendor.
I had assumed an LX range with mode conditioning, and on top of that I had assumed that something that could work through a medium as imperfect as ambient air with ambient light and still achieve speeds of half a gigabit could achieve much faster speeds over the controlled conditions of cable, like say, 10gb over laser-optimized OM3... Which are currently thousands of dollars.
Now I have another thing to implement for Bring Your Own Device...
This does make me wonder, however, if we could see fiber optic gbics that don't cost thousands of dollars each if the technology that makes this free-air communication possible can be adapted to fiber optic applications.
That said, it's still a horribly stupid thing to do as there are countries in the area that might take a shot at the plane(s). Flying to Afghanistan does bring you fairly close to Iran, as an example. And all they have to do is claim "oops", it was a rebel faction (wink wink) if it fails.
If the President, the Vice President, or any of the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, or the Attorney General were attacked in a State aircraft and were killed, I would fully expect that the country involved would have a very, very bad time about it, and they know it, even if they don't like us and would outright savor an opportunity to do something to us like this.
Iran's leaders know that their lives wouldn't be worth a wooden nickel if they attacked us, and even their populace would have to think long and hard before supporting their leaders in this circumstance. If we attacked a Russian state aircraft carrying Dimitri Medvedev or Vladimir Putin we'd be at war with Russia. International diplomatic protocols, even among nemeses must be maintained when countries are not at war, or else those countries end up at war.
I have to wonder, in Afganistan, does the President's successful arrival and depart demonstrate that the US can operate with impunity and that the Taliban can only wreak havoc, or is some other conclusion drawn?
On top of that, It's unlikely that an actual plan to threaten the President could be designed and implemented in such a short amount of time, especially with no other itinerary. It doesn't sound like this information was disseminated until he was already on the ground, and my guess is that he didn't remain in place for very long. He would have quickly headed to the first secure location, probably arrived unannounced to all but a handful of staff sworn to secrecy, and would have left equally unannounced to the next similar stop.
The hardest part would be the coordination of the meeting with Karzai, as that part can't be made random in location or time, but can still remain unannounced. All assassinations and nearly all assassination attempts against Presidents or Presidents-Elect happened during scheduled events- either the schedule was advertised or else the assassin managed to obtain the itinerary. The President is most at risk when people know where to expect him to be. He's probably safer showing up to a random college bar like he did last week in Colorado than he is when he's at home, or when he's attending a meeting or a fundraiser. Those that would seek to harm him simply do not have time to act when they only learn of his location because he's already arrived.
...to say that the project has been stopped before it opened? I don't see how it could close if it had never opened in the first place, and since this was to be a journal about computer science, and arguably about logic, this makes no sense as stated...
They wouldn't place proxies at the ISP level. They'd place them at the backbone provider level, if they were going to do it at all. Placing them at the ISP level would be stupid, as there'd be way too many people who'd have to know about them in order to keep them under wraps. Backbone providers are already a lot more secretive than ISPs, and there wouldn't need to be nearly as many people to somehow keep silent on the matter, plus there's a lot more access to the total communications in only a few points of contact that way.
Slashdot Mirror
I just bought a lightly used Panasonic 30" widescreen HD tube TV to replace the older 4:3 tube TV that finally croaked after fifteen years. You are certainly right about the weight, that is a disadvantage, and the bulk also means that the nature of where one places one is more difficult than the newer wall-hanging devices.
On the other hand, I don't really move my TVs around, and with the built-in cabinet and desk assembly in my house, the depth is not an issue. Furthermore in my case, since the TV is visible when the window blinds are drawn, having an obviously heavy, 126lb tube TV will probably discourage theft attempts. It's not that these are advantages, but they're not disadvantages for me either, and as ubiquitous as cabinets for TVs are/were, changing one's tech to thin TVs actually has had a cost beyond just the device itself in many cases.
Daimler Benz made good cars before this, but they were all good, expensive cars. Volkswagen is the German company that makes good, inexpensive cars. VW, however, already had a market presence selling their inexpensive cars in the US, and didn't need to buy a company already with a market hold.
But IE6 was broken from the day it shipped...
To take it away from computers, in 1998 a very strong Chrysler Corporation with a popular line of products merged with a German company to form DaimlerChrysler, and over the next decade the German side of the company almost completely ruined the American side's products. The Caliber replaced the Neon and was less successful. The Avenger replaced the Stratus and was less successful, as was the revised Sebring. The new Dakota replaced the old Dakota and was less successful. The Durango's redesign was an outright flop until it was quickly revised, and still wasn't as successful. The Sprinter replaced the B-series van and was less successful. Even the minivan replacement was less successful than its predecessor. Really the only truly successful successor was the LX chassis, replacing the LH chassis.
Daimler wanted to own the designs and didn't value what was there previously, and it almost destroyed Chrysler. It killed off one brand (Plymouth) and reduced the number of models dramatically, and they're only now starting to sunset the Daimler-designed cars, as it's extremely expensive to develop a new car. Had they evolved the design for the Neon, the Clouds, the vans, and the like, they probably would have done better in both the short term and the long term.
Unfortunately no one remembered the A-body to F/J/M body fiasco, and how aging Valiants and Darts were outliving their Aspen and Volare cousins, when the two chassis were for the same market.
I think that people may say that they miss the old days, but based on people's fickleness when it comes to how they communicate (letter, phone, e-mail, myspace, facebook, etc), how they want new TVs even though tubes are arguably superior in both contrast and refresh rate (not to mention multiresolution capable), and that they sell millions upon millions of cars annually, they don't actually believe that the old days were better.
The old days were simpler, not better. When one has less choices it's often easier to choose. When old technologies are cobbled on to, like all of the additions to the otherwise-ancient Otto-cycle internal combustion engine, those additions are what make some old things more complicated and arguably worse in at least the maintenance aspect. If we see actual technological revolution though, not only is the base technology replaced, but all of the other cobbled-on parts are too.
I I'm sure there's solder in the computer of the B-52. There might be no integrated-circuit memory, but components still need to be connected somehow.
My guess as to why the AP-101 is still in use is that with it being expensive to certify new equipment in flight, when the device performs as needed, replacing it is not practical or strictly necessary. On the other hand, if the Air Force determined that it really, really did need a new computer in the B-52, it would happen, despite obstacles to the process.
I used to work on an Alphanumeric paging system. We used 2400 baud because the time necessary to negotiate a higher-speed connection was far longer than the time to negotiate and then transmit ~240 characters at 2400 baud.
Fast forward to 2001 or so, and the general decline of paging. We were attempting to migrate from physical serial port expanders connected to physical modems, connected to a breakout cable from a T1 CSU/DSU, and we tried Equinox digital modem emulators- that integrated a single connection to a T1 CSU/DSU without all of the physical. The problem was the the Equinox gear wouldn't reliably negotiate that slow, and often would lock up the virtual serial port, rendering it useless until the card was reinitialized through a cold reboot. Equinox was more interested in giving us our money back than they were in fixing their hardware, but we did finally manage to convince them, after much effort, to put work into fixing it.
...I don't want it replaced before it's no longer doing its job effectively. The Navy system, for example, was finally replaced when the actual PDP11 hardware was no longer viable, and given the expense of the control software to develop, it probably was more cost effective to simply emulate a PDP11 to keep the existing code viable.
Reinventing the wheel only because a technology has been around for a long time is not cost effective, and replacing technology because viable machines are simply old is also not cost effective. This same logic makes me dislike programs like Cash for Clunkers, as the cost to develop and build a car, plus deliver, is high enough that taking cars off the road that are still viable, almost without regard to fuel economy, is not cost effective. Use it until repairing it is financially impractical, especially considering the expense of buying another new one.
Thanks for twisting my argument. I meant equipment that can be supported , not just equipment that works instantly out of the box. If the hardware maker provides functional, workable support even via download, or if the kernel has the modules for it then it's supported.
I had a problem with my Gateway MX7525 laptop- the kernel had problems with the realtime clock and it advanced a minute in about 35 seconds at the slowest, and sometimes as fast as a minute every few seconds. This was 2006 or so. At the time there was no solution to the problem. I never bothered to get it working, and some day I should either update it or reclaim the partition space for Windows.
I had a problem with 802.11a devices in 2002 or so.
Matrox never really had good 3d acceleration drivers for X11. Got burned by that one too.
...isn't that a preconfigured OS is installed on the computer. It's that a computer is sold with all of its hardware functional in Linux, so when one buys one of these, one can wipe the vanilla install off, if one chooses, and install one's own favorite distribution and know everything will work.
The other obvious benefit is no Microsoft tax. Even if Ubuntu gets some money, as opposed to the OS being truly fiscally free, at least that money goes to an entity that has a vested interest in improving Linux.
Fact of the matter is, basically all computing requires more trust than should really be granted. We trust Microsoft to patch their vulnerabilities now that malware manages to find ways in through ever more creative means. We trust Apple to have an OS that was never really vulnerable to start with, and we trust GNU/Linux distributions and other free operating systems to have clean repositories and to be free of backdoors. We rely on non-OS, internet-connected software companies to produce software that isn't vulnerable to bringing problems in from the Internet.
All of these are essentially untrue, or are relying on means of security that can't be verified or well tested until something comes out in the wild. We instead rely on updates after the fact, and on feeble attempts by some to make programs to remove malware.
Even in the privileged/unprivileged user landscape that modern OSes are capable of using, too many users desire more credentials on their local computers than they need in order to perform the very basic tasks that a computer user does on a daily basis. In the early days I too was guilty of this, but learned. Unfortunately when there are combinations of vectors to infect the local user and then local root exploits even a good privileges model won't work.
We should demand more out of our browser developers and more out of our plugin developers. That is the single biggest category of infection route, and I'm sorry, but software that voluntarily brings in and deploys the exploit simply by visiting a markup-language page is completely unacceptable. Fix the bugs before worrying about new features.
On the other hand, if the core base of Firefox is also a group that's heavy into Slashdot, that could help direct development or to at least avoid having an equivalent of DOS 4...
Granted, I have a buddy still on the FF 2.0 bandwagon because he doesn't like the changes made to 3.0+ and doesn't like the orphaned plugins, and I'm sure that there are plenty of others with similar positions, but finding out that the vast majority of commentary on an idea is negative will probably give one pause to further consider one's direction.
Yeah, there are many UI changes that they could make, like letting us put tabs sideways on the side of the window instead of across the top, allow toolbars to be vertical on the side of the window, and basically give us the vertical screen real estate back that we lost when the world decided it had to go 16:9...
I would rather have my forward/back/URL/search fields on the title bar with the window control buttons, and my tabs, capable of being sorted into more than one row, sideways up the left side of the window. Or, allow me to do the opposite. Also, allow the notifier that switches sides at the bottom be able to be vertical, as it's annoying when it blocks part of the text of a webpage.
I had assumed an LX range with mode conditioning, and on top of that I had assumed that something that could work through a medium as imperfect as ambient air with ambient light and still achieve speeds of half a gigabit could achieve much faster speeds over the controlled conditions of cable, like say, 10gb over laser-optimized OM3... Which are currently thousands of dollars.
Now I have another thing to implement for Bring Your Own Device...
This does make me wonder, however, if we could see fiber optic gbics that don't cost thousands of dollars each if the technology that makes this free-air communication possible can be adapted to fiber optic applications.
If the President, the Vice President, or any of the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, or the Attorney General were attacked in a State aircraft and were killed, I would fully expect that the country involved would have a very, very bad time about it, and they know it, even if they don't like us and would outright savor an opportunity to do something to us like this.
Iran's leaders know that their lives wouldn't be worth a wooden nickel if they attacked us, and even their populace would have to think long and hard before supporting their leaders in this circumstance. If we attacked a Russian state aircraft carrying Dimitri Medvedev or Vladimir Putin we'd be at war with Russia. International diplomatic protocols, even among nemeses must be maintained when countries are not at war, or else those countries end up at war.
I have to wonder, in Afganistan, does the President's successful arrival and depart demonstrate that the US can operate with impunity and that the Taliban can only wreak havoc, or is some other conclusion drawn?
On top of that, It's unlikely that an actual plan to threaten the President could be designed and implemented in such a short amount of time, especially with no other itinerary. It doesn't sound like this information was disseminated until he was already on the ground, and my guess is that he didn't remain in place for very long. He would have quickly headed to the first secure location, probably arrived unannounced to all but a handful of staff sworn to secrecy, and would have left equally unannounced to the next similar stop.
The hardest part would be the coordination of the meeting with Karzai, as that part can't be made random in location or time, but can still remain unannounced. All assassinations and nearly all assassination attempts against Presidents or Presidents-Elect happened during scheduled events- either the schedule was advertised or else the assassin managed to obtain the itinerary. The President is most at risk when people know where to expect him to be. He's probably safer showing up to a random college bar like he did last week in Colorado than he is when he's at home, or when he's attending a meeting or a fundraiser. Those that would seek to harm him simply do not have time to act when they only learn of his location because he's already arrived.
...to say that the project has been stopped before it opened? I don't see how it could close if it had never opened in the first place, and since this was to be a journal about computer science, and arguably about logic, this makes no sense as stated...
Yes he is!
(Even further inspired by a Monty Python skit about an argument... "Oh, this is abuse!")
Sounds like it's time to build the B Ark. We just have to make sure that we sanitize our own telephones.
...the article is dealing with a gene for Autism Spectrum Disorder, not Tourette Syndrome.
You're in the wrong discussion!
(Inspired by a Monty Python skit about an argument... "Oh, this is abuse!")
Thank you, Miss Fleming, you call me when the shuttle lands...
They wouldn't place proxies at the ISP level. They'd place them at the backbone provider level, if they were going to do it at all. Placing them at the ISP level would be stupid, as there'd be way too many people who'd have to know about them in order to keep them under wraps. Backbone providers are already a lot more secretive than ISPs, and there wouldn't need to be nearly as many people to somehow keep silent on the matter, plus there's a lot more access to the total communications in only a few points of contact that way.