Cringely had a lot of interesting things to say in his prime. But now he's moved out of the valley, and many of his columns trumpet the Next Big Thing when it's not really.
Here, he seems to have missed the fact that Google Accelerator has already failed and is being withdrawn. The world is not going to redesign their web pages so that GETs have no side effect.
A couple of weeks ago, he waved his hands and explained that airline scheduling is just like network scheduling and you can speed up the net by eliminating the hubs and running traffic directly from one host to another. Then he waved his hands again and said that hubs are servers.
Last December after the tsunami, he told us how to build a warning system that could be deployed by putting a networked PC "on every populated beach a month from now." Never mind that third-world populated beaches usually don't have electricity, much less an internet connection.
Last July he designed a scheme to compress video for broadcast by encoding only what the retina was focusing on. But it would work only if every person receiving the broadcast always pointed their retinas to the same place as everyone else.
Cringely is at his best when describing a funky experiment that he's actually done, like when he was one of the first to put a WiFi antenna in a Pringles can. But his blue-sky predictions just don't fly anymore.
The interesting thing is this isn't Hyper-Threading only - it's possible on normal procs too that don't flush the cache between context switches.
Not really. The scheduler would have to run every few microseconds to let the "spy" process see what the "trojan" process is doing, and the scheduler would have to operate without modifying the L1 cache.
And I reported on a 12-hour period when Google was evilly trampolining all links through themselves to monitor our clicks. But fifty April Fools posts were more important.
I'm talking about voltage, not current. I measure voltage sag when drawing only a few milliamps of current, far less than the rating of the cheapest supply. Try it yourself.
If the device requires more current than the PSU, you need a bigger power supply. If the device requires less, it will be fine. You don't need to put a bunch of extra load on the power supply for it to work right.
Logically, that makes sense, but ten years of experience has shown this to be untrue.
For example, I have here a "JGE ATX-250W PC-12V" power supply from "A+GPB INC.". It's the cheapest ATX supply my purchasing department found one day. It's rated to produce 20A at +3.3V, 22A at +5V, 10A at +12V. When I connect the 3.3V and 5V but not the 12V, I measure 3.1V on the the 3.3V line. A big 7.5ohm resistor on the 12V eliminates the sag.
Your typical PC AT or ATX power supply will fall on its face if your power network doesn't resemble a PC's.
In my lab, we power a lot of 3.3V and 5V systems with COTS ATX supplies. We have to put big resistive loads on the 12V lines to get adequate current.
Parent confuses setuid-executable with setuid-shell-script. Shell script setuid is a botch in general because shells are not designed to protect security when run with privileges and so are hoaxed into permitting a breakin.
I work for a Fortune 500 company at their Oregon campus. The main campus is in New York. If I fly back to spend a week consulting at the New York site, I'm required to file a W-4 form so they can withhold my New York state income tax.
Yes, we know how to file taxes. If you live in Washington (no income tax, huge sales tax) and work across the line in Oregon (no sales tax, huge income tax), you pay big taxes to both states.
If you learn you have this problem, then you can no longer check "no health problems" when applying for life insurance. Otherwise it's fraud -- if the insurer discovers it, they might not pay when you die.
Breach of contract is not illegal. The other party's remedy is through a civil lawsuit, not a criminal prosecution. Otherwise you could go to jail for defaulting on your cell phone contract.
"throughput has become more important than absolute speed in the enterprise"
I've been seeing this quote in press releases for three decades. It has always meant "we can't compete on performance so we're going to explain why performance isn't important anymore." The few times my management bought that story, they came to regret it.
It's all pointy-haired boss stuff. Starts out with an incorrect premise:
We [engineers] don't do development well: More than half of embedded designs are completed 3-4 months behind schedule; 24 percent -- nearly a quarter -- get cancelled
In my twenty-mumble years of engineering, pretty much every time these problems have occurred it's because the requirements were changed in mid-project. Often for excellent reasons, but the consequences do not reflect an engineering deficiency.
Don't write new code, leverage existing software. Buy it from us.
I bus/bike to work. My kids bike to school. My wife can't bike, so she bought a Prius hybrid car and drives three miles to work. She fills the tank about once a month.
Then I burn a tankful of gas on weekends driving my minivan to hikes and geocaches.
The gadget driver operates a USB *peripheral* port. It's meant for use in embedded systems like printers. Your PC does not have a USB peripheral port, it has only host ports. The USB protocol is asymmetric; you're not going to connect an Apple and a PC using their USB host ports.
I don't know why this is news -- I played this disk over a year ago. It's a package of two disks, one conventional DVD that works just as you would expect and a second with a high-definition version of the movie. This second disk was an experiment with new Microsoft codecs that hadn't yet made general distribution. On my 1600x1200 CRT, it looked pretty good.
The five-day license works like this: if you want to play it five days later, the software will insist on using the internet to get a fresh license. This will keep working as long as the license server is alive. I use software tools in my job that operate this way, but I don't think consumers will ever buy in to this model.
I think the important fact here is that, a year later, this is apparently the only DVD that's been released with these conditions. As we have all pointed out, the barriers to playing this content are too big for any but hard-core geeks, and most of us object for philosophical reasons.
Your argument would make sense only if the farmers and cities were distilling the water and returning the solids to the river. They're not, so there's no "tragedy of the commons" here.
It's an urban legend. If you track down those sources, they point to the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations." But this state IQ data never appeared in that book (see http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/2004/05/ among others.)
Anybody who's gone near a statistics book knows it's ludicrous to think an entire state could have an average IQ that's one sigma away from nominal mean.
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Here, he seems to have missed the fact that Google Accelerator has already failed and is being withdrawn. The world is not going to redesign their web pages so that GETs have no side effect.
A couple of weeks ago, he waved his hands and explained that airline scheduling is just like network scheduling and you can speed up the net by eliminating the hubs and running traffic directly from one host to another. Then he waved his hands again and said that hubs are servers.
Last December after the tsunami, he told us how to build a warning system that could be deployed by putting a networked PC "on every populated beach a month from now." Never mind that third-world populated beaches usually don't have electricity, much less an internet connection.
Last July he designed a scheme to compress video for broadcast by encoding only what the retina was focusing on. But it would work only if every person receiving the broadcast always pointed their retinas to the same place as everyone else.
Cringely is at his best when describing a funky experiment that he's actually done, like when he was one of the first to put a WiFi antenna in a Pringles can. But his blue-sky predictions just don't fly anymore.
Not really. The scheduler would have to run every few microseconds to let the "spy" process see what the "trojan" process is doing, and the scheduler would have to operate without modifying the L1 cache.
And I reported on a 12-hour period when Google was evilly trampolining all links through themselves to monitor our clicks. But fifty April Fools posts were more important.
Your typical PC AT or ATX power supply will fall on its face if your power network doesn't resemble a PC's. In my lab, we power a lot of 3.3V and 5V systems with COTS ATX supplies. We have to put big resistive loads on the 12V lines to get adequate current.
Why link to the article copy-with-ads at answers.com instead of the original at wikipedia.org?
Parent confuses setuid-executable with setuid-shell-script. Shell script setuid is a botch in general because shells are not designed to protect security when run with privileges and so are hoaxed into permitting a breakin.
It would be surprising if leakage.apache.org were on the list. But leakage.org is just a random site in Malaysia.
If the phone were a USB host, it would have to supply 500 mA of power through that connector.
The hardware is well thought out, except for the whole concept of putting the wireless antenna inside a Faraday cage. PowerBooks are notorious for bad wireless performance.
I work for a Fortune 500 company at their Oregon campus. The main campus is in New York. If I fly back to spend a week consulting at the New York site, I'm required to file a W-4 form so they can withhold my New York state income tax.
Yes, we know how to file taxes. If you live in Washington (no income tax, huge sales tax) and work across the line in Oregon (no sales tax, huge income tax), you pay big taxes to both states.
If you learn you have this problem, then you can no longer check "no health problems" when applying for life insurance. Otherwise it's fraud -- if the insurer discovers it, they might not pay when you die.
Breach of contract is not illegal. The other party's remedy is through a civil lawsuit, not a criminal prosecution. Otherwise you could go to jail for defaulting on your cell phone contract.
Then I burn a tankful of gas on weekends driving my minivan to hikes and geocaches.
The gadget driver operates a USB *peripheral* port. It's meant for use in embedded systems like printers. Your PC does not have a USB peripheral port, it has only host ports. The USB protocol is asymmetric; you're not going to connect an Apple and a PC using their USB host ports.
Math check. The project manager would have to add 25%, not 20%.
The five-day license works like this: if you want to play it five days later, the software will insist on using the internet to get a fresh license. This will keep working as long as the license server is alive. I use software tools in my job that operate this way, but I don't think consumers will ever buy in to this model.
I think the important fact here is that, a year later, this is apparently the only DVD that's been released with these conditions. As we have all pointed out, the barriers to playing this content are too big for any but hard-core geeks, and most of us object for philosophical reasons.
The salt in the Dolores River comes from natural underground salt formations. Ground water passes through a collapsed salt anticline and becomes brine. You can read the technical report at http://water.usgs.gov/pubs/wri/wri02-4275/ and see photos at http://www.geo.mtu.edu/~jeh/Photos/Captions/capday 4.html.
Natural salt water is not uncommon in this region. The Great Salt Lake formed long before the Industrial Age.
It's an urban legend. If you track down those sources, they point to the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations." But this state IQ data never appeared in that book (see http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/2004/05/ among others.)
Anybody who's gone near a statistics book knows it's ludicrous to think an entire state could have an average IQ that's one sigma away from nominal mean.
You posted half an hour before local sunrise (7:09am PDT.) I just climbed that mountain two weeks ago. Guess I did something to irritate it.