When we had a service here in Vancouver the initial problem was that if it was classified as a boat it was not allowed to go faster than 15 knots in the harbour -
and if classified as an airplane it was not allowed to fly under the Lions Gate bridge.
Some technologies simply don't fit in our pre-conceived systems.
Think of the problems we'll have when we finally crack the problem of personal anti-gravity for our vehicles;)
If you think about it, this search has already given us a payback - it has verified that a diverse set of miscelaneous computers can do real work over a long period - the basis of every new cloud computer system.
Has anyone checked to see if the CPU usage display is really correct?
Maybe Redmond in their infinite wisdom are hiding all the DRM processing in a way that doesn't show up on the CPU use graphs - but impacts the system performance because in reality the CPUs are all pegged doing DRM compares to see if heuristic signatures match copyright violations.
I too have not purchased a CD or other music device for years - but I have been to several live concerts. The musicians will just have to go back to performing in front of us - and making things that we WANT to pay for.
The publishing companies that are driving the move to DRM can die as far as I'm concerned. The artists will do just fine thank you - the good ones able to make a reasonable living, the really great ones able to put something aside for their retirement. There won't be too many "super-stars" but all in all the artists will survive.
For years I've chaffed at the requirement to stop at rail crossings in industrial areas where the odd switching engine comes by every day or two. Many of the places I go to are in such areas, and I have yet to see any train - after years in many cases, yet I've seen police merrily handing out tickets to those who don't stop.
In a recently constructed supermarket parking lot here in Pitt Meadows, I'm of the opinion that the designer got a "good deal" on stop signs. They have them in places where there is no cross traffic. They have them at a point where trucks sit in a loading zone maybe once or twice a week - and all the cars have to stop even though there is a gate that is down most of the time:(
Well, aside from the subject line, I agree completely with the post - It depends.
My workstation has 2 Gigs RAM and 200 Megs of swap - with a swap file sitting waiting for me to add it manually if I do something that actually requires swap - or do something stupid that eats it all up.
With the small swap I get 100% reliable context switching when I move from one virtual screen to another (and I run 90 desktops on 3 screens with access to more than 20 external systems, logging, watching, etc.)
The swap is at about 199M right now - so almost none left, but that 199M is just the stuff that really isn't actually active for long periods of time - and I've run with 10 Megs swap just fine too.
Response is excellent - just what I want.
On my database servers I run with a couple of Gigs on a 2 or large Gig machine - but a monitor on its use so I can tell the boss to put more RAM in and why.
Everyone knows a "Pluton" is a unit of currency based on plutonium - it says so right here in my copy of Robert Heinlein's Gulf!
I'm 55 and challenged every day - keeps you young
on
How Old is Too Old?
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· Score: 1
At 30 I still had not really chosen my career - had played with electronics and even computers from pre-teens to university - but took 10+ years "walkabout" (New Zealand, Australia, and back to Canada) at many different jobs to decide that the computer industry was my wide focus.
As for a narrow focus - sorry, can't say I've had one - except maybe the Internet - but that was kind of a timely thing.
What I've learned is that if I'm doing things I enjoy, it really doesn't matter what they are - I'm where I want to be. Doesn't matter if it is particularly profitable - just that I enjoy it.
Today I enjoy putting cameras up close to eagles - maybe next year it will be something else.
I read that he had a sign saying he had video surveylance...
I have a video camera - it happens to be at the top of an 80' crane and aimed at a some eagles.
So... you come along and do something illegal in the field below the nest/camera, but in the field of its view. I have video of it - are your rights violated? Probably, because there is no sign saying there is a camera there.
On the other hand, the camera and its full view is on private property - nothing that belongs to someone other than the property owner is in view of the camera - and the property owner has given permission for the camera.
On the gripping hand, the output of the camera is on the Internet and tens of thousands of people might have seen the event in real time - and captured the video!
Now what is the problem?
The problem is the veracity (look it up) of the evidence of any wrongdoing - it is irrefutable (look that up too) and in a reasonable society would it be evidence that would convict anyone who did something that was (via the evidence of the video) guilty of the crime - no matter what it was... trespass, murder, or anything in between.
But along comes the privacy advocates - who (maybe rightly - that is up to the courts) point out that if a person were sitting where the camera was, there might or might not be a conviction - since the person brings their own prejudices and perceptions to the forray - and of course the lawyers for the defense can manipulate that in many ways.
OK -- so let's set up the cameras in a similar fashion to the "unbiased" witness - give them some "forgettery" (less than perfect memory) and other hobbles that put them on par with the old 18th century bobbies (coppers, police, etc.)with their pencilled notebooks and imperfect memory.
Let's first give them a "copper" badge - put an identifying badge on every single publicly-focused camera - a license plate if you will... one that identifies the camera uniquly and gives a bit of information about it. That way we can know if we are near some(one/thing) that might take note of our presence (i.e. we would not the presence of cops, so we should be given the opportunity to note the presence of cameras that can be used by cops.)
The badge should identify if/where anyone can view the output of the camera - a web address.
It should also let anyone with half a brain know how long the image is stored... for a day, week, month, forever, etc.
If the camera's output is stored for a long time, the images stored should be forced to be degraded over time (somewhat like a person's memory).
Except that... if a police incident occurs and the police request copies of the camera output at a particular time, the output can be captured as is and not devolve further - somewhat like taking a statement from a witness.
This, and only this, will take away the potential for using archived, 100 year old video to prove that your mother could not have met/bedded your father and thereby deny your progeny of their heritage - or it might just keep your ass out of jail; same as the current questionability of recalled perceptions 20 years after the fact.
OK - the government(s) have allowed this patent fiasco to persist. Change the GPL so that any software that is the subject of a patent challenge may no longer be used by any government. It (the GPL) is after all a license and we can put whatever restrictions we want on it.
The Pope had more concurrent viewers - for 2 hours - hooray!!!
We've been streaming to more than 10,000 people for more than 2 months
google "eagle nest hornby" for what I'm talking about.
I've been around the Internet for longer than most people have known it existed - first Canadian ISP's CEO, etc... (that and $1.50 will get you a coffee, but I digress;)
It costs a lot to push 10,000+ 384kbps streams out the door. The servers are about as close to "the Gods" as they can be as far as getting good prices is concerned (for companies with less than $1billion in fibre assets)
If multicast worked as advertised (ok, it works - just nobody seems to allow it to work) then our costs would be next to nothing and most ISPs would carry the bulk of the bandwidth on their own infrastructure - at the amortized value of their hardware investment. They'd get one stream and hand it off to as many as necessary to make their customers happy.
The ISPs want to have a "walled garden" - where they provide all (or a substantial part of) the content - and the services. The problem is that they don't have the talent (they don't create TV programs/movies etc, or have the ability to index the rest of the world the way that the likes of Google does)
They don't understand which end of the stick they hold. They hold the delivery end, not the content end. They don't hold the end that holds the customer - they just think they do. The customer will find a way to get the content they want if their current ISP doesn't "get it" and provide what the customer wants.
I hate to repeat what the "experts" have said for the past 10+ years (and some consider me one of those experts) but... this is a new paradigm. It is not built upon scarcity - it is built upon access. The ISPs (and the RIAA and MPAA - but again, that is another story) can't create scarcity - they can only suffer because they think they are in control. The consumers are in control and the providers of content are trying to find ways to get the content they demand to them at a reasonable price (or with a reasonable profit all along the way)
The thing to recognize is that the INCREMENTAL COST of providing the next bit (or megabit) to the consumer is not enough to be worth accounting for if the technologies we have today are used in a sane and reasonable fashion. The incumbents (mostly telcos) are used to charging on a usage basis instead of on just a "connectivity" basis - and they want to keep this going even though their costs are mostly on a connectivity basis and usage hardly enters into the equation.
The final thought is... if it were not for the "other things" out on the rest of the Internet (when viewed from your ISP's network) it really wouldn't be worth getting connected at all. Their product is the connection to the rest of the world, not the connection to the rest of their own customers. Heck, I can talk to my neighbours over the back fence (or at the local bottle store where I met my neighbour tonight as we both picked up some booze) any time I want - why do I need my ISP?
On the other hand, I couldn't possibly have met all the eagleholics I've met in the past couple of months any other way than if my ISP connected to the rest of the Internet.
Redundant but necessary: The Internet is not your ISP - it is the fact that your ISP connects to all the other ISPs. Kick your ISP in the face (or other tender areas) until they understand this!!!
The point is that any VM will use the hardware's VM resources so that a second VM can't run on top of the "normal" OS (be it Windows or Linux)
so... if I run Windows normally, I can run VMWare on top of it (normally) and in that I can run anything (Windows, Linux, etc.) but if the bad-ugly slips his own VM underneath my normal Windows then the otherwise normal install of VMWare won't run and I'll know something is not right.
if I run Linux with Xen then when the bad-ugly adds his own VM under my normal base Linux then Xen won't run on top of my normal Linux and again I'll know there is something wrong.
So running your own install of VMWare or Xen (on Linux) will allow you to detect if/when someone subverts the VM machine instructions to their own purpose. I expect that some fairly simple binary check on whether the VM instructions return correctly (I'm not an OS programmer so am only presuming) could be used to check without actually trying to run Xen/VMWare.
The way to detect this is to run your own version of VMWare (or Xen) on your own "main" operating system and see if it will run. In my experience VMWare won't run on a VMWare virtual machine. I believe this is due to a limitation in the X86 instruction emulation on the chip.
Back in the days of IBM's VM it was in fact possible to run VM on top of VM to something like 8 or 10 levels IIRC - so this is very much hardware dependent.
Turn that around - why do you have a home theatre system at home? It sure isn't worth the amount you'd otherwise spend on movies instead!
Maybe its because the popcorn is a heck of a lot cheaper - fresher, and has butter on it instead of that crap they make you use at the theatre.
Maybe its because you can at least turn the sound down on the commercials they force you to watch at the beginning of the DVDs you buy, rather than having the sound at even more than normal in the theatre.
Mabye its because you can give your kids/wife/friends sh&*()T if they talk on the phone while you're trying to watch the movie instead of being kicked out of the theatre because you finally yelled at the idiot in the row in front of you to turn his &*^&* cell off!
Maybe its because you can actually lounge down in the seat and put your feet up on a stool instead of getting heck from the guy in the row in front for moving his seat
Maybe its because you can stop the movie and get up, go to the washroom, and restart the movie again without missing anything.
Maybe its because you can watch the same movie a couple of times without having to pay again and again - just so you can actually see how they did the effects or concentrate on the supporting cast or look for the continuity screw-ups.
I don't know - but those sure are the reasons I'd get a home theatre - if there was anything worth watching.
Back in the mid '60s the local electric company (BC Hydro) built one of the first long distance (and under sea) DC tranmission lines from Tsawassen to Vancouver Island. This line took advantage of the fact that a DC line uses 100% of the current carrying capacity of a line instead of the approximate 66% (RMS) of the equivallent AC line limited to the same PEAK voltage on a burried cable.
The same technology is used in many other places now - for a number of reasons not necessarily to do with current carrying (for instance - ability of a DC line to sync with otherwise out of phase transmissions that go via different distances of wires to the same place).
I've worked inside telco facilities where the bus bars were 2" x 4" and even larger - all at 48 volts. (back in the late '60s - fun swinging from the bus bars with DRY hands;)
The reason that AC won out in the past is that the technology to "fix" voltage drop due to transmission line losses was easy - a transformer - loops of wire around a soft-iron core in various types and flavors of windings (step-up, step-down, saturated-core constant voltage, etc.) They didn't require the types of technology we now have, high efficiency diodes, transistors, thyristors, etc. so we could do high efficiency (relativly) DC-DC voltage changes (actually they are DC-AC-AC-DC as in DC-> high-freq -> transformer -> rectifier -> filter -> DC)
By the same reasoning (lack of other technology) the telcos used 48 volts because it was easier to float the whole load across a bank of batteries and continuously charge them than it was to switch in the batteries if/when the main power failed. Today's UPS circuitry that can detect a drop within a single cycle of the 60Hz main and switch in the inverter from the otherwise minimally charging battery simply didn't exist.
The bottom line is that if the "extra" 33% current carrying capacity of a given wire size at a given voltage gives a cost/benefit, then DC makes sense - or, if the distribution system has some other necessary characteristic (float the whole thing across a bank of batteries so we don't have to switch them in if the power goes down for example) then DC distribution might win.
On the other hand, if you're in a facility where you don't control everyone and their addition of equipment to the pool, just one screw-up with power of the wrong type being applied to the wrong equipment at the wrong time will make the use of DC a giant pain in the ass.
The telecom industry has grown up with 48volts - their techs use it and understand it and their engineers know how to spec the wiring for it. If you've never wired a bank of Strouger switches using 000 wire (and a hammer to bend it into the right form) then I suggest you stick with "traditional" (this century) AC wiring.
Power in minus power lost in translation (from the input to the required voltages) is what you have to work with - but total power in including the losses in conversion are what you have to get rid of in the form of heat. The efficiency of the conversions to the necessary voltages determine what actual "work" you get from the whole setup. If doing a single major conversion to what is the major voltage required (12 volts? Maybe it should be 5?) and then dealing with the (in)efficiencies of the DC-DC conversion to the other voltages necessary might in some cases increase the total efficiency enough to justify the extra cost for the heavy current carrying wires at installation - and maybe even the cost of replacing the idiot's mis-plugged machine every couple of years
Back then, you could at least leave the act of staying on the road to the horse while you figured out just which road you should be on.
The problem today isn't all the gadgets we have to help us get where we're going, it is the fact that we simply don't have time to do a good job of going anywhere, any time, with any help (or none).
We're being inundated with ways of multi-tasking before we have established the abilities to off-load the major task - that of keeping ourselves and the rest of those around us alive to actually get where we're wanting/needing to be.
We should leave all these distractions (people in the next seat, cell-phones, books on tape, talk-radio, TV, fancy guidance systems, etc.) out of the vehicle until such time as the vehicle can do the driving while we do the rest.
Software released under the GPL, even by a company such as IBM or Oracle (or companies they've purchased) can always be forked at or just prior to the purchase or some other decision to limit its distribution. (charge money for all and sundry instead of just extra service or better versions)
This means that the business model of the purchaser must be at least reasonable with respect to the future of the product(s) they've purchased. Notwithstanding that, of course purchasing the original copyrights does mean they can put technologies that are in the GPL code into their proprietary code with impunity - and that may be the biggest "problem" with the purchase as far as the FOSS community is concerned.
Hmmm... off the top of my head, and note that it has been a long time since I've had to do any geometry lately - but circumfrence of a sphere 1 meter in diameter is pi x D which is something like 3.1415... X 1 meter = 3.1415... meters
At 1.5 million RPM this means a molecule on the surface of the sphere would be travelling something like 4.7 million meters/second.
Google kindly provided 299 792 458 m / s as the speed of light which means to me that the molecules of the sphere are already traveling faster than light.
So... to go trans-light you must have parts that can go trans-light. And for my next demonstration I'm going to show perpetual motion
Our computer system (wimsey.com, earlier known as !vanbc) was the portal through which over 400 local and regional BBSs sent/received e-mail to the rest of the world, including Fido-net.
They dialed in periodically - and if mail for them arrived at our location we stored it until they connected. Seems pretty straight forward to me as prior art. This was mid 1980s and the technology was fairly old at that time.
The fact that these patents cover wireless merely means that the "physical" network element was wireless, not landlines - but the technical purpose and basic methods are likely identical.
On another note - in the mid '90s we had similar multi-jurisdictional (Vancouver, Kelowna, Beijing China, sites in USA) e-mail and dial-up cooperation where a central LDAP database identified which of the several regional servers any users' e-mail was on and no matter whether they dialed into their home system or one of the remotes, allowed them to retreive it directly. Similar to the work-around.
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When we had a service here in Vancouver the initial problem was that if it was classified as a boat it was not allowed to go faster than 15 knots in the harbour -
;)
and if classified as an airplane it was not allowed to fly under the Lions Gate bridge.
Some technologies simply don't fit in our pre-conceived systems.
Think of the problems we'll have when we finally crack the problem of personal anti-gravity for our vehicles
Actually, even more - think Lisa + Xenix
If you think about it, this search has already given us a payback - it has verified that a diverse set of miscelaneous computers can do real work over a long period - the basis of every new cloud computer system.
Number of servers/admin (100 vs 10)
...
Number of servers up for more than 1 year (90% vs 1%)
Number of patches installed without reboot (1000 vs 0)
$$ of software in use ($0 vs $1million)
(Actually - value of $billions vs $0 - but the cost probably plays better)
Number of sleepless nights for senior management due to IT disasters (0 vs many)
Has anyone checked to see if the CPU usage display is really correct?
Maybe Redmond in their infinite wisdom are hiding all the DRM processing in a way that doesn't show up on the CPU use graphs - but impacts the system performance because in reality the CPUs are all pegged doing DRM compares to see if heuristic signatures match copyright violations.
I too have not purchased a CD or other music device for years - but I have been to several live concerts. The musicians will just have to go back to performing in front of us - and making things that we WANT to pay for.
The publishing companies that are driving the move to DRM can die as far as I'm concerned. The artists will do just fine thank you - the good ones able to make a reasonable living, the really great ones able to put something aside for their retirement. There won't be too many "super-stars" but all in all the artists will survive.
In a recently constructed supermarket parking lot here in Pitt Meadows, I'm of the opinion that the designer got a "good deal" on stop signs. They have them in places where there is no cross traffic. They have them at a point where trucks sit in a loading zone maybe once or twice a week - and all the cars have to stop even though there is a gate that is down most of the time :(
Get rid of the signs I say!
Well, aside from the subject line, I agree completely with the post - It depends.
My workstation has 2 Gigs RAM and 200 Megs of swap - with a swap file sitting waiting for me to add it manually if I do something that actually requires swap - or do something stupid that eats it all up.
With the small swap I get 100% reliable context switching when I move from one virtual screen to another (and I run 90 desktops on 3 screens with access to more than 20 external systems, logging, watching, etc.)
The swap is at about 199M right now - so almost none left, but that 199M is just the stuff that really isn't actually active for long periods of time - and I've run with 10 Megs swap just fine too.
Response is excellent - just what I want.
On my database servers I run with a couple of Gigs on a 2 or large Gig machine - but a monitor on its use so I can tell the boss to put more RAM in and why.
Everyone knows a "Pluton" is a unit of currency based on plutonium - it says so right here in my copy of Robert Heinlein's Gulf!
At 30 I still had not really chosen my career - had played with electronics and even computers from pre-teens to university - but took 10+ years "walkabout" (New Zealand, Australia, and back to Canada) at many different jobs to decide that the computer industry was my wide focus. As for a narrow focus - sorry, can't say I've had one - except maybe the Internet - but that was kind of a timely thing. What I've learned is that if I'm doing things I enjoy, it really doesn't matter what they are - I'm where I want to be. Doesn't matter if it is particularly profitable - just that I enjoy it. Today I enjoy putting cameras up close to eagles - maybe next year it will be something else.
I read that he had a sign saying he had video surveylance... I have a video camera - it happens to be at the top of an 80' crane and aimed at a some eagles. So... you come along and do something illegal in the field below the nest/camera, but in the field of its view. I have video of it - are your rights violated? Probably, because there is no sign saying there is a camera there. On the other hand, the camera and its full view is on private property - nothing that belongs to someone other than the property owner is in view of the camera - and the property owner has given permission for the camera. On the gripping hand, the output of the camera is on the Internet and tens of thousands of people might have seen the event in real time - and captured the video! Now what is the problem? The problem is the veracity (look it up) of the evidence of any wrongdoing - it is irrefutable (look that up too) and in a reasonable society would it be evidence that would convict anyone who did something that was (via the evidence of the video) guilty of the crime - no matter what it was... trespass, murder, or anything in between. But along comes the privacy advocates - who (maybe rightly - that is up to the courts) point out that if a person were sitting where the camera was, there might or might not be a conviction - since the person brings their own prejudices and perceptions to the forray - and of course the lawyers for the defense can manipulate that in many ways. OK -- so let's set up the cameras in a similar fashion to the "unbiased" witness - give them some "forgettery" (less than perfect memory) and other hobbles that put them on par with the old 18th century bobbies (coppers, police, etc.)with their pencilled notebooks and imperfect memory. Let's first give them a "copper" badge - put an identifying badge on every single publicly-focused camera - a license plate if you will... one that identifies the camera uniquly and gives a bit of information about it. That way we can know if we are near some(one/thing) that might take note of our presence (i.e. we would not the presence of cops, so we should be given the opportunity to note the presence of cameras that can be used by cops.) The badge should identify if/where anyone can view the output of the camera - a web address. It should also let anyone with half a brain know how long the image is stored... for a day, week, month, forever, etc. If the camera's output is stored for a long time, the images stored should be forced to be degraded over time (somewhat like a person's memory). Except that... if a police incident occurs and the police request copies of the camera output at a particular time, the output can be captured as is and not devolve further - somewhat like taking a statement from a witness. This, and only this, will take away the potential for using archived, 100 year old video to prove that your mother could not have met/bedded your father and thereby deny your progeny of their heritage - or it might just keep your ass out of jail; same as the current questionability of recalled perceptions 20 years after the fact.
OK - the government(s) have allowed this patent fiasco to persist. Change the GPL so that any software that is the subject of a patent challenge may no longer be used by any government. It (the GPL) is after all a license and we can put whatever restrictions we want on it.
The Pope had more concurrent viewers - for 2 hours - hooray!!!
;)
We've been streaming to more than 10,000 people for more than 2 months
google "eagle nest hornby" for what I'm talking about.
I've been around the Internet for longer than most people have known it existed - first Canadian ISP's CEO, etc... (that and $1.50 will get you a coffee, but I digress
It costs a lot to push 10,000+ 384kbps streams out the door. The servers are about as close to "the Gods" as they can be as far as getting good prices is concerned (for companies with less than $1billion in fibre assets)
If multicast worked as advertised (ok, it works - just nobody seems to allow it to work) then our costs would be next to nothing and most ISPs would carry the bulk of the bandwidth on their own infrastructure - at the amortized value of their hardware investment. They'd get one stream and hand it off to as many as necessary to make their customers happy.
The ISPs want to have a "walled garden" - where they provide all (or a substantial part of) the content - and the services. The problem is that they don't have the talent (they don't create TV programs/movies etc, or have the ability to index the rest of the world the way that the likes of Google does)
They don't understand which end of the stick they hold. They hold the delivery end, not the content end. They don't hold the end that holds the customer - they just think they do. The customer will find a way to get the content they want if their current ISP doesn't "get it" and provide what the customer wants.
I hate to repeat what the "experts" have said for the past 10+ years (and some consider me one of those experts) but... this is a new paradigm. It is not built upon scarcity - it is built upon access. The ISPs (and the RIAA and MPAA - but again, that is another story) can't create scarcity - they can only suffer because they think they are in control. The consumers are in control and the providers of content are trying to find ways to get the content they demand to them at a reasonable price (or with a reasonable profit all along the way)
The thing to recognize is that the INCREMENTAL COST of providing the next bit (or megabit) to the consumer is not enough to be worth accounting for if the technologies we have today are used in a sane and reasonable fashion. The incumbents (mostly telcos) are used to charging on a usage basis instead of on just a "connectivity" basis - and they want to keep this going even though their costs are mostly on a connectivity basis and usage hardly enters into the equation.
The final thought is... if it were not for the "other things" out on the rest of the Internet (when viewed from your ISP's network) it really wouldn't be worth getting connected at all. Their product is the connection to the rest of the world, not the connection to the rest of their own customers. Heck, I can talk to my neighbours over the back fence (or at the local bottle store where I met my neighbour tonight as we both picked up some booze) any time I want - why do I need my ISP?
On the other hand, I couldn't possibly have met all the eagleholics I've met in the past couple of months any other way than if my ISP connected to the rest of the Internet.
Redundant but necessary: The Internet is not your ISP - it is the fact that your ISP connects to all the other ISPs. Kick your ISP in the face (or other tender areas) until they understand this!!!
- xosview
and for all the EXIM systems (Sendmail? bah - Qmail - double bah):so... if I run Windows normally, I can run VMWare on top of it (normally) and in that I can run anything (Windows, Linux, etc.) but if the bad-ugly slips his own VM underneath my normal Windows then the otherwise normal install of VMWare won't run and I'll know something is not right.
if I run Linux with Xen then when the bad-ugly adds his own VM under my normal base Linux then Xen won't run on top of my normal Linux and again I'll know there is something wrong.
So running your own install of VMWare or Xen (on Linux) will allow you to detect if/when someone subverts the VM machine instructions to their own purpose. I expect that some fairly simple binary check on whether the VM instructions return correctly (I'm not an OS programmer so am only presuming) could be used to check without actually trying to run Xen/VMWare.
Back in the days of IBM's VM it was in fact possible to run VM on top of VM to something like 8 or 10 levels IIRC - so this is very much hardware dependent.
Maybe its because the popcorn is a heck of a lot cheaper - fresher, and has butter on it instead of that crap they make you use at the theatre.
Maybe its because you can at least turn the sound down on the commercials they force you to watch at the beginning of the DVDs you buy, rather than having the sound at even more than normal in the theatre.
Mabye its because you can give your kids/wife/friends sh&*()T if they talk on the phone while you're trying to watch the movie instead of being kicked out of the theatre because you finally yelled at the idiot in the row in front of you to turn his &*^&* cell off!
Maybe its because you can actually lounge down in the seat and put your feet up on a stool instead of getting heck from the guy in the row in front for moving his seat
Maybe its because you can stop the movie and get up, go to the washroom, and restart the movie again without missing anything.
Maybe its because you can watch the same movie a couple of times without having to pay again and again - just so you can actually see how they did the effects or concentrate on the supporting cast or look for the continuity screw-ups.
I don't know - but those sure are the reasons I'd get a home theatre - if there was anything worth watching.
The same technology is used in many other places now - for a number of reasons not necessarily to do with current carrying (for instance - ability of a DC line to sync with otherwise out of phase transmissions that go via different distances of wires to the same place).
I've worked inside telco facilities where the bus bars were 2" x 4" and even larger - all at 48 volts. (back in the late '60s - fun swinging from the bus bars with DRY hands ;)
The reason that AC won out in the past is that the technology to "fix" voltage drop due to transmission line losses was easy - a transformer - loops of wire around a soft-iron core in various types and flavors of windings (step-up, step-down, saturated-core constant voltage, etc.) They didn't require the types of technology we now have, high efficiency diodes, transistors, thyristors, etc. so we could do high efficiency (relativly) DC-DC voltage changes (actually they are DC-AC-AC-DC as in DC-> high-freq -> transformer -> rectifier -> filter -> DC)
By the same reasoning (lack of other technology) the telcos used 48 volts because it was easier to float the whole load across a bank of batteries and continuously charge them than it was to switch in the batteries if/when the main power failed. Today's UPS circuitry that can detect a drop within a single cycle of the 60Hz main and switch in the inverter from the otherwise minimally charging battery simply didn't exist.
The bottom line is that if the "extra" 33% current carrying capacity of a given wire size at a given voltage gives a cost/benefit, then DC makes sense - or, if the distribution system has some other necessary characteristic (float the whole thing across a bank of batteries so we don't have to switch them in if the power goes down for example) then DC distribution might win.
On the other hand, if you're in a facility where you don't control everyone and their addition of equipment to the pool, just one screw-up with power of the wrong type being applied to the wrong equipment at the wrong time will make the use of DC a giant pain in the ass.
The telecom industry has grown up with 48volts - their techs use it and understand it and their engineers know how to spec the wiring for it. If you've never wired a bank of Strouger switches using 000 wire (and a hammer to bend it into the right form) then I suggest you stick with "traditional" (this century) AC wiring.
Power in minus power lost in translation (from the input to the required voltages) is what you have to work with - but total power in including the losses in conversion are what you have to get rid of in the form of heat. The efficiency of the conversions to the necessary voltages determine what actual "work" you get from the whole setup. If doing a single major conversion to what is the major voltage required (12 volts? Maybe it should be 5?) and then dealing with the (in)efficiencies of the DC-DC conversion to the other voltages necessary might in some cases increase the total efficiency enough to justify the extra cost for the heavy current carrying wires at installation - and maybe even the cost of replacing the idiot's mis-plugged machine every couple of years
Or maybe not. It depends.
The problem today isn't all the gadgets we have to help us get where we're going, it is the fact that we simply don't have time to do a good job of going anywhere, any time, with any help (or none).
We're being inundated with ways of multi-tasking before we have established the abilities to off-load the major task - that of keeping ourselves and the rest of those around us alive to actually get where we're wanting/needing to be.
We should leave all these distractions (people in the next seat, cell-phones, books on tape, talk-radio, TV, fancy guidance systems, etc.) out of the vehicle until such time as the vehicle can do the driving while we do the rest.
With all that power I hope you at least use the waste heat to heat the hot-tub ;)
This means that the business model of the purchaser must be at least reasonable with respect to the future of the product(s) they've purchased. Notwithstanding that, of course purchasing the original copyrights does mean they can put technologies that are in the GPL code into their proprietary code with impunity - and that may be the biggest "problem" with the purchase as far as the FOSS community is concerned.
seconds, minutes, millions - bah - should have had another cup of coffee ;)
At 1.5 million RPM this means a molecule on the surface of the sphere would be travelling something like 4.7 million meters/second.
Google kindly provided 299 792 458 m / s as the speed of light which means to me that the molecules of the sphere are already traveling faster than light.
So... to go trans-light you must have parts that can go trans-light. And for my next demonstration I'm going to show perpetual motion
Our computer system (wimsey.com, earlier known as !vanbc) was the portal through which over 400 local and regional BBSs sent/received e-mail to the rest of the world, including Fido-net.
They dialed in periodically - and if mail for them arrived at our location we stored it until they connected. Seems pretty straight forward to me as prior art. This was mid 1980s and the technology was fairly old at that time.
The fact that these patents cover wireless merely means that the "physical" network element was wireless, not landlines - but the technical purpose and basic methods are likely identical.
On another note - in the mid '90s we had similar multi-jurisdictional (Vancouver, Kelowna, Beijing China, sites in USA) e-mail and dial-up cooperation where a central LDAP database identified which of the several regional servers any users' e-mail was on and no matter whether they dialed into their home system or one of the remotes, allowed them to retreive it directly. Similar to the work-around.