I'll bet you anything you like that at least three people will follow up this post to confirm that they're installing Gentoo on an old 486DX/33 and that they're expecting it to finish compiling and be able to start up X in just another week or two...
I once had Linux running on a 4MB 386SX/16. I wanted to run one block of distributed.net, just so I could get the bottom entry in their stats page, but worked out after a while that it would take about three months.
Alas, I don't have that any more; my bottom-end 386 laptop is a 386SX/16 with 2MB, which isn't enough to run any Linux (usefully). It will run Minix, however, which prods buttock like nobody's business, and will recompile its kernel in 15 seconds. Alas, that laptop doesn't have any networking capabilities, otherwise I'd run a server on it, purely out of principle.
My current lowest-spec machine is an Amstrad NC200 laptop. 128kB of RAM upgradable to 1152kB; 720kB FDD; a beautiful keyboard with 480x128 mono screen; and the processor is a Z80 at, I think, 4MHz... it runs a custom Amstrad OS, but there is a CP/M port. One day I want to port UZI.
Would you rather someone be accountable for an accident or people to just go around and say "uhhh I don't know whose fault it was or what caused the problem because we didn't do any paperwork on it"
Frankly, I would rather people spent less effort on trying to find a scapegoat when something goes wrong, and instead spend more effort on stopping things going wrong in the first place.
If the shuttle blows up on the launch pad, finding someone who you can point at and say 'It's all his fault!' won't suddenly make things better again.
I'm not an EE, but it's something I've always wondered about. I don't have a datacentre, but I do have far too many computers: why does my machine room contain about fifteen wall warts, all producing slightly different DC voltages and plugged in to their various appliances via fifteen different non-standard connectors? Why not just have one low-voltage standard and have all these things plug into that?
One possible reason is that (IIRC) power losses vary according to current, not voltage. By increasing the voltage, you can push the same amount of energy down a wire using a smaller current, which limits losses. This is why power lines use very high voltages.
This means that if you produce regulated 5V at one side of your datacentre, by the time it's reached the other side it's not 5V any more. But it should be easy to get round this by producing 6V and having DC regulators; they're very small and extremely efficient these days.
However, I suspect that the main reason why this kind of thing isn't done is inertia. There's so much infrastructure in place for dealing with high-voltage AC supplies that you wouldn't get off the ground using DC.
To eny electricians, the MIDI/Game port is available on most computer sound cards and has an 8-bit ADC built in. Calibrated to 0-5VDC I believe.
Calibrated? Game port? Muhahaha!
The 'ADC' in the game ports of traditional PC hardware is nothing more than a pulse generator modulated on the input voltage. The PC triggers the pulse, and then keeps polling until the pulse finishes. By timing how long the pulse was, the PC can estimate the voltage.
The result of this is that polling the game port is extremely inaccurate and very processor-intensive, because the output of the pulse generator needs to be polled continuously.
(If you've ever used gpm, you might notice it supports joysticks under Linux. Yep, that was my fault. I had to put in code to slow down the polling rate because otherwise the machine just ground to a halt, spending all its time busy waiting on the joystick I/O port.)
...but here in the UK we have two types of phone; those that are guaranteed to work with 999 (our emergency number), and those that are not guaranteed to work (but may).
The main reason for this is that any mains-powered phone won't work when the power goes out --- of course. However, phones that are powered from the telephone line will still work.
Non-guaranteed phones typically come with big warnings saying that they should not be used as your primary telephone because you may not be able to make emergency calls from them.
I seriously don't want to hurt this guy's feelings and I don't mean any offense by my comments here, but this interview is stupid.
I know nothing about rap, have never heard of the guy, have watched some Aqua Teen Hunger Force and thinks it's amusing but not particularly special, and I found the interview interesting.
Maggots (or some other little parasitic vermiform beastie) would seem to be an excellent starting point for medical biobots. They have all the machinery for motion inside a living body and a neat little tool for slurping up flesh.
Actually, most maggots will only eat dead flesh, which is why this technique works so well. If your patient has a gangrenous wound, you stick some (very clean, lab-grown, guaranteed sterile) maggots in and they'll hunt out ever piece of decomposing flesh, leaving you with a nice, clean wound. It's a nice, cheap, effective low-tech solution, although you have to be damned careful that your maggots really have come from the lab and not from some disease-ridden blowfly that happened to be passing. Plus there's the ick factor.
Of course, you don't want to pick the wrong kind --- screwfly larvae, for example, eat living tissue. There's an old urban legend about someone who had a screwfly lay eggs in his nose and by the time they figured out what was wrong they'd eaten half his brain. Ew.
And anybody who actually knew anything about computers would know this. TFA doesn't mention what this guy is a professor of --- I bet it's not electronics.
Basically, the problem is this. With mechanical and analogue devices, most of the time you know that if you change the inputs a small amount, the outputs will change a small amount.
But digital devices are chaotic. Change one bit in the input, and the output is likely to be radically different. One bit in the wrong place on a Windows system can make the difference between Counterstrike and a BSOD.
You can use substandard devices for some applications; dodgy RAM, for example, can be used to store audio on, and it would work just as well for video framebuffers. But you could never put anything programmatic on it; that has to be perfect.
(IIRC, they do recycle faulty wafers. One of the ways is to scrape the doped layer off and turn them into solar cells. I don't know if they can use them again for ICs, though.)
Yeah, and it's completely unwatchable. Not only does it not fit on my screen, but watching a movie about text is such a bad way of putting across your point. Not only that, but I have to sit here and listen to the guy talk, which means I'm constrained to do things on his timetable (which basically involves listening to him going 'um' a lot, I'm afraid).
I'm sure the content is interesting, but the presentation is just too annoying for words... does anybody have a transcript I can read?
If you wrote it, you own it. (If you're working for hire, they own it.)
If you own it, you can do whatever the hell you like with it.
You may not distribute someone else's code, under any circumstances, unless they say you can.
The GPL says: I, the author of this code, allow you to make unchanged copies of the code at will. I also allow you to make changed copies, provided your changes (which you own) are also GPLd.
So, since:
The original software is owned by a bunch of people, and is GPLd.
The changes he wrote, while at the company, are owned by the company, and proprietry.
Therefore:
The modified version may not be distributed at all.
The company has two options: they can either license their changes under the GPL, or they can distribute the original, unmodified program and a bunch of diffs. (Or not distribute it at all.) Claiming that the now own the original code is compeletely nonsensical.
As for the patent issue, I'd say that it's a dead duck because prior art obviously exists, but I don't know much about patents.
The question about making money is referring to the present - the same point at which the products are hypothetically available for free. English isn't a language where every 'if' clause takes a subjunctive. This sentence isn't expressing doubt or disbelief; it's a condition posed as a question.
Hmm... is it? (The fact that were looks like the perfect form is a red herring.)
Postulate: The company releases its products for free. Conclusion: The company could not make money. Combined form (using subjunctive): If the company were to release its products for free, it could not make money. Inverted form of the above: The company could not make money if it were to release its products for free. Conditional form of the above: Can the company make money if it were to release its products for free?
Is that valid?
I think you could reform it without the subjunctive, but I don't have time to do it now... (honestly! That's not a copout!)
"How company can make money, if its products are available for free?" 4th grade grammar anybody?
Yeah, but can anybody spot the other problem?
"How can a company make money if its products were available for free?"
The if...were is a hypothetical subjunctive; the writer is making a statement contrary to fact. The company's products are not available for free; the case is being postulated where they are.
...which has been covered here before, back in June 2004, in this and this article (both submitted by Roland Piquepaille. YHBW.)
Hmm. June. I'm surprised this hasn't moved along a bit more since then, it looks like a nice little device. However, it does actually seem possible to order the thing, now, from their rather naff website, although the price ranges from 600 USD for the cheapest version to a staggering 3500 USD if you want all the accessories.
There's a good collection of add-ons, though --- anybody actually thinking of ordering one?
The NHS is good enough for most purposes: waiting times are down, staff recruitment is up. I went into my local hospital with a broken arm on a busy afternoon, was seen straight away and was on my way home within a couple of hours.
One interesting side effect of the NHS is that because they're not concerned about charging you for the treatment, the process of getting that treatment is vastly simplified --- no billing, no registration, no lengthy identification process to ensure that you are actually entitled to treatment. Getting a doctor's appointment is as simple as walking into a surgery and asking for one... they'll ask you your name, and that's about it. (They will check to see if you're on their records, because you're supposed to go to one particular surgery, but you can see a doctor anywhere if you have to.) This means that the NHS saves a vast amount of money when compared to a private health care system, simply on administration fees and process.
The state of dental care is another matter, of course...
Yeah, public dental care here is a farce, and does everything wrong that the NHS as a whole gets right. I basically don't bother any more; I go to a private dentist. (I get so little help from the NHS for dental care that it's not worth going through the paperwork.)
Really, you can't watch any single news channel if you want to get anything like a balanced sense of what's going on. As a US news junkie, this is how I see the various news organizations that I check into at least occasionally:
The other big UK news agency is ITN, Interpendent Television News, which is used by our commercial channels (ITV, Channel 4 and Five). They're supposed to have a very good reputation --- do they get to the US?
And does the BBC appear to have any left/right leaning to you? (I'm sure it does, I'm just interested in knowing what it is...)
Slashdot Mirror
I once had Linux running on a 4MB 386SX/16. I wanted to run one block of distributed.net, just so I could get the bottom entry in their stats page, but worked out after a while that it would take about three months.
Alas, I don't have that any more; my bottom-end 386 laptop is a 386SX/16 with 2MB, which isn't enough to run any Linux (usefully). It will run Minix, however, which prods buttock like nobody's business, and will recompile its kernel in 15 seconds. Alas, that laptop doesn't have any networking capabilities, otherwise I'd run a server on it, purely out of principle.
My current lowest-spec machine is an Amstrad NC200 laptop. 128kB of RAM upgradable to 1152kB; 720kB FDD; a beautiful keyboard with 480x128 mono screen; and the processor is a Z80 at, I think, 4MHz... it runs a custom Amstrad OS, but there is a CP/M port. One day I want to port UZI.
All These Bugs Are Yours --- Except .net. Attempt No Coding There.
*cough* sorry.
Frankly, I would rather people spent less effort on trying to find a scapegoat when something goes wrong, and instead spend more effort on stopping things going wrong in the first place.
If the shuttle blows up on the launch pad, finding someone who you can point at and say 'It's all his fault!' won't suddenly make things better again.
Neither --- it's a Republic...
I got it!
God, I have no life.
What? I'm sorry, that's just plain wrong.
This is Morph. As any fule kno.
I'm not an EE, but it's something I've always wondered about. I don't have a datacentre, but I do have far too many computers: why does my machine room contain about fifteen wall warts, all producing slightly different DC voltages and plugged in to their various appliances via fifteen different non-standard connectors? Why not just have one low-voltage standard and have all these things plug into that?
One possible reason is that (IIRC) power losses vary according to current, not voltage. By increasing the voltage, you can push the same amount of energy down a wire using a smaller current, which limits losses. This is why power lines use very high voltages.
This means that if you produce regulated 5V at one side of your datacentre, by the time it's reached the other side it's not 5V any more. But it should be easy to get round this by producing 6V and having DC regulators; they're very small and extremely efficient these days.
However, I suspect that the main reason why this kind of thing isn't done is inertia. There's so much infrastructure in place for dealing with high-voltage AC supplies that you wouldn't get off the ground using DC.
Calibrated? Game port? Muhahaha!
The 'ADC' in the game ports of traditional PC hardware is nothing more than a pulse generator modulated on the input voltage. The PC triggers the pulse, and then keeps polling until the pulse finishes. By timing how long the pulse was, the PC can estimate the voltage.
The result of this is that polling the game port is extremely inaccurate and very processor-intensive, because the output of the pulse generator needs to be polled continuously.
(If you've ever used gpm, you might notice it supports joysticks under Linux. Yep, that was my fault. I had to put in code to slow down the polling rate because otherwise the machine just ground to a halt, spending all its time busy waiting on the joystick I/O port.)
More documentation than you ever wanted to know can be found here.
Modern game ports, of course, use real ADCs.
You do realise that as soon as your SO sees this, you're going to be screwed?
And I do not mean that in a good way...
The main reason for this is that any mains-powered phone won't work when the power goes out --- of course. However, phones that are powered from the telephone line will still work.
Non-guaranteed phones typically come with big warnings saying that they should not be used as your primary telephone because you may not be able to make emergency calls from them.
Why not simply do something like that?
I know nothing about rap, have never heard of the guy, have watched some Aqua Teen Hunger Force and thinks it's amusing but not particularly special, and I found the interview interesting.
YMMV.
Actually, most maggots will only eat dead flesh, which is why this technique works so well. If your patient has a gangrenous wound, you stick some (very clean, lab-grown, guaranteed sterile) maggots in and they'll hunt out ever piece of decomposing flesh, leaving you with a nice, clean wound. It's a nice, cheap, effective low-tech solution, although you have to be damned careful that your maggots really have come from the lab and not from some disease-ridden blowfly that happened to be passing. Plus there's the ick factor.
Of course, you don't want to pick the wrong kind --- screwfly larvae, for example, eat living tissue. There's an old urban legend about someone who had a screwfly lay eggs in his nose and by the time they figured out what was wrong they'd eaten half his brain. Ew.
Ah, right --- that makes a difference. (Do you remember the days when Wired had articles with actual technical content? <nostalge/>)
Hmm... I wonder if eventually we'll get processors with custom microcode to reroute around faulty subsystems?
Basically, the problem is this. With mechanical and analogue devices, most of the time you know that if you change the inputs a small amount, the outputs will change a small amount.
But digital devices are chaotic. Change one bit in the input, and the output is likely to be radically different. One bit in the wrong place on a Windows system can make the difference between Counterstrike and a BSOD.
You can use substandard devices for some applications; dodgy RAM, for example, can be used to store audio on, and it would work just as well for video framebuffers. But you could never put anything programmatic on it; that has to be perfect.
(IIRC, they do recycle faulty wafers. One of the ways is to scrape the doped layer off and turn them into solar cells. I don't know if they can use them again for ICs, though.)
Yeah, and it's completely unwatchable. Not only does it not fit on my screen, but watching a movie about text is such a bad way of putting across your point. Not only that, but I have to sit here and listen to the guy talk, which means I'm constrained to do things on his timetable (which basically involves listening to him going 'um' a lot, I'm afraid).
I'm sure the content is interesting, but the presentation is just too annoying for words... does anybody have a transcript I can read?
The GPL says: I, the author of this code, allow you to make unchanged copies of the code at will. I also allow you to make changed copies, provided your changes (which you own) are also GPLd.
So, since:
Therefore:
The company has two options: they can either license their changes under the GPL, or they can distribute the original, unmodified program and a bunch of diffs. (Or not distribute it at all.) Claiming that the now own the original code is compeletely nonsensical.
As for the patent issue, I'd say that it's a dead duck because prior art obviously exists, but I don't know much about patents.
Hmm, yes, I think you're right. The alternative, subjunctiveless form (using can) would then be:
Can the company make money if it releases its products for free?
I think if it was to release its products is definitively wrong, but it's been far, far too long since I actually studied this stuff.
Damn, English is an annoying language.
Hmm... is it? (The fact that were looks like the perfect form is a red herring.)
Postulate: The company releases its products for free.
Conclusion: The company could not make money.
Combined form (using subjunctive): If the company were to release its products for free, it could not make money.
Inverted form of the above: The company could not make money if it were to release its products for free.
Conditional form of the above: Can the company make money if it were to release its products for free?
Is that valid?
I think you could reform it without the subjunctive, but I don't have time to do it now... (honestly! That's not a copout!)
Yeah, but can anybody spot the other problem?
"How can a company make money if its products were available for free?"
The if...were is a hypothetical subjunctive; the writer is making a statement contrary to fact. The company's products are not available for free; the case is being postulated where they are.
Lots more details in Wikipedia, of course.
(No, I'm not a card-carrying pedant. It's made out of plastic.)
Hmm. June. I'm surprised this hasn't moved along a bit more since then, it looks like a nice little device. However, it does actually seem possible to order the thing, now, from their rather naff website, although the price ranges from 600 USD for the cheapest version to a staggering 3500 USD if you want all the accessories.
There's a good collection of add-ons, though --- anybody actually thinking of ordering one?
No, they want to attract users.
Damn them! Damn them all to Hell! They finally did it! They grew it all up!
(100 - 9.8) / 2 = 45, which is nowhere near my blood temperature...
One interesting side effect of the NHS is that because they're not concerned about charging you for the treatment, the process of getting that treatment is vastly simplified --- no billing, no registration, no lengthy identification process to ensure that you are actually entitled to treatment. Getting a doctor's appointment is as simple as walking into a surgery and asking for one... they'll ask you your name, and that's about it. (They will check to see if you're on their records, because you're supposed to go to one particular surgery, but you can see a doctor anywhere if you have to.) This means that the NHS saves a vast amount of money when compared to a private health care system, simply on administration fees and process.
The state of dental care is another matter, of course...
Yeah, public dental care here is a farce, and does everything wrong that the NHS as a whole gets right. I basically don't bother any more; I go to a private dentist. (I get so little help from the NHS for dental care that it's not worth going through the paperwork.)
The other big UK news agency is ITN, Interpendent Television News, which is used by our commercial channels (ITV, Channel 4 and Five). They're supposed to have a very good reputation --- do they get to the US?
And does the BBC appear to have any left/right leaning to you? (I'm sure it does, I'm just interested in knowing what it is...)