How does any software vendor ensure that its developers don't use code they'd kept from their previous employer
This point often gets brought up. Didn't this happen to Claris Draw, where a programmer "took some code with him" from a previous job? I can't google anything on it, but it was offered as a reason why we only had one Mac supporting component drawings at a place I worked. They couldn't get another seat of Claris Draw, but migrating was tough because of the huge library of existing drawings in that format. Proprietary lock-in nearly orphaned a large store of data.
Orange Micro was in the business of making add-on cards for the Apple ][. I can't remember if they ever got mixed up with the motley fruit-monikered Taiwanese Apple ][ clones. (The Banana, the Pineapple, etc., many of which got blocked by customs when no one could show that the ROM's were "clean-room" developed. I guess the Laser II was clean, though.) I do seem to remember them hawking PC clones in the then-phonebook-sized Computer Shopper in the late 80's when everyone & his brother got in the clone business.
Nowadays they have a line of whacky peripherals, often prominently billing Mac support.
Tolkein's explorations aside, I suspect that, in a world of long-lived people, material wealth accumulates and a greater and greater fraction of human effort is devoted to the zero-sum game of power politics. You won't die, but you will lose.
A big seller, too. We made 40 million antennas for that model. In those days you could hardly walk around here without stepping on one that fell on the factory floor.
Engine size is a red herring anyway. GM uses tall gearing on their large V6 engines
I noticed that too. My theory is that improved engine control and multi-point injection (which is nearly universal now) permits more aggressive EGR (exhaust gas recirculation), a technique whose effect is similar to reducing displacement. Smaller engines (and manual transmissions, for that matter) run at a wider range of RPM's changing at a faster rate, so the EGR can't be as aggressive without risk of recirculating too much and stalling the engine out. Hence the efficiency gain from a smaller engine with manual transmission is less than what we traditionally expect.
whether the duplicates will also have copy limits.
Well, back in the 80's the TRS-80's TRSDOS operating system supported a scheme like this. Your floppy could be "backup limited" and the system would permit only, say, 3 or 5 copies, after which the OS's disk duplication software would flag an error. In that case the OS would not copy a back-up copy.
How much this copyright protection helped Tandy realize its destiny as a world-class computer maker is left as an exercise for the reader.
Locomotives are optimized for their 0-60 times, though that is more like 15 minutes rather than 15 seconds. Their highway-speed passing power sorta sux though. Of course, they don't pass, everything just gets out of their way.
But seriously, I have to agree, and have always been puzzled by the introduction of 50 MPG hybrid compacts (vs 30 MPG otherwise), when 30 MPG full-size hybrid pickups (vs 15 otherwise) would save much more fuel. The difference is more apparent if inverted like eurostyle L/100km, viz 2 gal/100mi vs 3.3 saves 1.3 gal/100mi, while 3.33 gal/100mi vs 6.77 saves 3.34 gal/100mi. It seems that cargo trucks that used regenerative braking on the downgrades would save enough to recover the capital costs of the hybrid equipment.
So far, these hybrids are sold as much for their environmental boutique value as any strict economic value of their fuel efficiency. (Hey the @$$hole in the SUV cut me off, [*honk*]. Hey the @$$hole in the envronmentally-responsible Prius cut me off, [*friendly, approving honk*].)
The post office is known for making bad decisions. They really should have investigated electric cars a LONG time ago.
The post office is also known for poor execution, and they did investigate electric vehicles, in the 80's. One company I worked for did some civilian contracts for the USPS (when Navy contracts were scarce I guess) developing an electric vehicle. It was long before my time there, but the development fiasco was left a deep impression on the collective memory. Unwelcome engineering ideas were often critisized by the mere comparison to a similar idea used on the electric vehicle project, and the obvious couter-argument was a parallel to Godwin's law.
The USPS has too much political interference in its management to successfully implement anyting but tried & true technologies, long after everyone else.
In your case, and for the guy in Kansas, look for an automotive adapter kit with external antenna. They will boost the transmit power to 3W and the antenna will have more gain than the handset's built-in. The 6 dB more transmit power and 3 or 4 dB antenna gain, not to mention the improvement by getting the antenna outside the metal car body, may just put your link margin into the positive.
They cost some $300 and have to be installed though. (The no-install kits without external antenna won't help you.) I suppose you could install one in your house, using a 12V supply, and put the antenna up in the attic, on the roof, or to be really hardcore, on a 120' mast. If you use the supplied auto antenna it may require a ground plane to subtitute for the car's metal roof/trunklid; otherwise you won't get as much gain.
Still not working? Get the biggest S-band dish you can find, mount it as high as you can, and point it at the cell tower. All the neighbors will think you are weird for pointing a "satellite" dish at the horizon.
True. You can have a strong signal and still have poor signal-to-noise ratio (an effect familliar to usenetters and/.ers). CDMA phones all transmit on top of each other, and all the competing phones on your channel contribute noise (technically, pseudonoise). So it is a matter of other phones having an even stronger signal than yours and drowning you out. I'm convinced that, due to normal manufacturing tolerances, some CDMA phones have max transmit power limits set higher than others, and routinely win out these shouting wars, while others have the limits set low and routinely lose out. (It is the mobile transmit link that always breaks first, not the receive.) So people say "Brand X phone sux, but Brand Y worked better" while really it was just a roll of the dice.
GSM/TDMA assign deterministic time slots so either you are on or you are off, but those networks can still drop calls if you are moving to a new cell tower and there is no available channel there to hand your call off to. Also, GSM/TDMA are narrowband so you could hit a multipath null, where a reflected wave destructively interferes with your signal. The null would be only a few inches wide so you would walk in & out of it before your meter responded. In this case, find a good spot and stand perfectly still.
It's not just population density but also distribution. Everywhere in Europe I have been, even the rural population clusters into small towns & villages. US population is more uniformly distributed on this scale, and the cities don't have edges; the population density just gradually drops as you move out from a big city, until you are halfway to the next major population center, and then it starts rising again. You can see this difference between Europe & North America from an airplane window.
There are several reasons. The lack of internal language & trade barriers makes the population more mobile, so former farming communities (or coal mining towns) were more easily de-populated vis-a-vis Europe. The Interstate highway system drills deep into the urban centers (in part to facilitate evacuation in case of nuclear war), paving the way (literally) for suburban commuters. The supplanting of mass transit by universal automobile use could be either a symptom or a cause; it's hard to tell.
But whatever the reason, an unclustered population distribution requires more towers to cover the same fraction of the population, even if the population density, averaged over a scale much larger then the coverage area of a single tower, is the same.
Of course, US cell coverage is further impeded by fractured standards (CDMA vs TDMA vs GSM vs iDEN), and slower consumer uptake because the competing land-line service isn't quite as sucky as the European telco monopolies.
I don't know if they make mobile antennas for that band
Look to Ramsey Electronics for a suitable antenna. The LPY-2 covers both bands, & it's $35 cheap! If you really want to be clever you can rig up reflector or director elements to enhance gain.
Keep your cable run short though, RG-58C loses 0.25 dB per foot at PCS frequencies. That means you gotta drill holes rather than go around obstacles. Low loss cable is bulky and expensive.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga unonusti? That's Latin in dactylic hexameter, by the way.
The 5th foot seems a bit of a stretch as a dactyl to me. (Though so do some of Vergil's verses, so what do I know?) And the Romans didn't have the letter "w" so I take that word as an English retrofit (as well as the prefix un- rather than the Latinate in-).
Quid festin|atio | swallonis | est aether | fuga un|onusti?
What haste of the unburdened swallows is air-flight?
You're allowed to use spondees here & there y'know. How about
Quid festin|atio | fugae | avis | liberae | est idem?
What haste of the free bird's flight is this? Sounds more like Vergil to me.
Plastic bags are made "biodegradeable" by mixing starch in with the resin, which decomposes in sunlight (but not in landfills, oops). The plastic resin persists but only as dust rather than a film. If this Dino is inflatable it is probably PVC, a resin that is easy to mold even if it isn't all that strong. PVC can be surprisingly durable if you add enough stabilizers/UV blockers/plasticizers to it, as would be common for an inflatable pool toy. But the air will perfuse through the plastic and Dino will deflate.
Early plastics incuded Bakelite, a very stable epoxy-like material that lasted forever, and celluloid, which doesn't last (much to the chagrin of film preservationists). The celluloid stuff is all long gone so when you look at old plastic objects the selection bias makes it look like they used to make everything long-lasting. The cheapest stuff always got brittle because anti-oxidants add to the cost.
A solution to the nuclear waste would be to store it until we can dump it somewhere off-planet.
The usual drawback cited for this approach is the need for containment during a launch failure. If a rocket blows up you don't want radioactive waste splattered all over the place. Even a space elevator can fail, dropping its payload 100 miles to Earth. If you can build a container strong enough to survive that, you may as well bury it.
But really, the high level wastes are not the problem. Existing mining technology (for gold & diamonds, for example) can burrow 2 miles into the Earth, into rock that has been undisturbed for billions of years. Bury it down there and it is never coming back. Any future civilization advanced enough to be digging down there will be advanced enough to realize what they have come upon.
It's the low-level waste (contaminated soil, construction rubble, etc) that is so hard to deal with. Because there is so much of it, it would be ruinously expensive to bury it in a deep shaft. That's why they are burrowing all those holes into the soft rock of the Nevada desert.
Yes, finally someone hits the mark. You cannot patent something unless it is useful, so the scope of a patent is for a particular use. (Disclaimer: that is US law, oh and IANAL.) Knowingly spraying gluphosphate on the resistant crop to facilitate agriculture infringes. Where the seed came from is irrelevant.
If you did the exact same thing just to find out if the gene drifted into your area, that is not infringing because you are not using it.
Conversely, if you spray gluphosphate with the intent to kill canola, no infringement. But if it doesn't work, let the lawsuits rip! Of course, with the patent on glusphosphate now expired, Monsanto doesn't have as much of a stake in its continued efficacy, so no wonder they sell resistant crops.
We get really good produce, with little wasted, as we tend to buy less each week. (I don't know why this is... It's as though you feel pressured to buy more in the brick and mortar grocery store. Is it because of the effective visual marketing, or because of the desire to eliminate a return trip next week? I hope I never find out.)
Well don't read this because I will tell you (heh heh). My belief is that, when you web shop, you can walk over and see, for example, how much lettuce is in the fridge, so you don't buy more when you already have plenty, no matter how good today's lettuce display looks. At the store you see good letuce and then you buy it, because you don't remember how much is in the fridge or if it has spoiled yet.
One thing I haven't seen is a grocer implemented like Circuit City's pick-up-at-store process. You make you selections on the web page and then an employee collates your order. You go to the store to pick up the regular bag, the refrigerated bag, and the frozen bag.
Or even simpler, much like your map, simply regenerating your shopping list sorted by aisle with shelf location codes. That is how warehouse fulfillment centers work.
NetGrocer will deliver just about anywhere in the US, but they are limited to non-perishables. They work around that limitation as much as they can, with UHT milk, for example. Prices are reasonably competitve, especially if you realistically account for the cost of a 20-mile round trip to the mega-mart.
For fresh vegetables, hey it's garden-planting season! I get fresh veggies from my back yard five months a year, and they're better & cheaper than the grocer's.
...the food [from Schwan's] is, to my mind, almost totally snack food.
Amen to that. We stopped using Schwan's when we noticed that everything we liked was loaded with high fat content. 60 grams of fat in the bagel-dog...Yikes! No wonder Scwhan's is the delivered food of choice for the fat people of rural America.
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How does any software vendor ensure that its developers don't use code they'd kept from their previous employer
This point often gets brought up. Didn't this happen to Claris Draw, where a programmer "took some code with him" from a previous job? I can't google anything on it, but it was offered as a reason why we only had one Mac supporting component drawings at a place I worked. They couldn't get another seat of Claris Draw, but migrating was tough because of the huge library of existing drawings in that format. Proprietary lock-in nearly orphaned a large store of data.
He must...five replies & "noone" has noticed that "Mispellings" is a misspelling!
Orange Micro was in the business of making add-on cards for the Apple ][. I can't remember if they ever got mixed up with the motley fruit-monikered Taiwanese Apple ][ clones. (The Banana, the Pineapple, etc., many of which got blocked by customs when no one could show that the ROM's were "clean-room" developed. I guess the Laser II was clean, though.) I do seem to remember them hawking PC clones in the then-phonebook-sized Computer Shopper in the late 80's when everyone & his brother got in the clone business.
Nowadays they have a line of whacky peripherals, often prominently billing Mac support.
people might lock themselves in a safe environment for hundreds of years at a time.
Or they might assemble a fleet to assault the Undying Lands of the Uttermost West.
Tolkein's explorations aside, I suspect that, in a world of long-lived people, material wealth accumulates and a greater and greater fraction of human effort is devoted to the zero-sum game of power politics. You won't die, but you will lose.
Hey, it worked for the Romans.
Imho the N3210 is one of the best mobiles
A big seller, too. We made 40 million antennas for that model. In those days you could hardly walk around here without stepping on one that fell on the factory floor.
Engine size is a red herring anyway. GM uses tall gearing on their large V6 engines
I noticed that too. My theory is that improved engine control and multi-point injection (which is nearly universal now) permits more aggressive EGR (exhaust gas recirculation), a technique whose effect is similar to reducing displacement. Smaller engines (and manual transmissions, for that matter) run at a wider range of RPM's changing at a faster rate, so the EGR can't be as aggressive without risk of recirculating too much and stalling the engine out. Hence the efficiency gain from a smaller engine with manual transmission is less than what we traditionally expect.
That's my theory, anyhow.
whether the duplicates will also have copy limits.
Well, back in the 80's the TRS-80's TRSDOS operating system supported a scheme like this. Your floppy could be "backup limited" and the system would permit only, say, 3 or 5 copies, after which the OS's disk duplication software would flag an error. In that case the OS would not copy a back-up copy.
How much this copyright protection helped Tandy realize its destiny as a world-class computer maker is left as an exercise for the reader.
Locomotives are optimized for their 0-60 times, though that is more like 15 minutes rather than 15 seconds. Their highway-speed passing power sorta sux though. Of course, they don't pass, everything just gets out of their way.
But seriously, I have to agree, and have always been puzzled by the introduction of 50 MPG hybrid compacts (vs 30 MPG otherwise), when 30 MPG full-size hybrid pickups (vs 15 otherwise) would save much more fuel. The difference is more apparent if inverted like eurostyle L/100km, viz 2 gal/100mi vs 3.3 saves 1.3 gal/100mi, while 3.33 gal/100mi vs 6.77 saves 3.34 gal/100mi. It seems that cargo trucks that used regenerative braking on the downgrades would save enough to recover the capital costs of the hybrid equipment.
So far, these hybrids are sold as much for their environmental boutique value as any strict economic value of their fuel efficiency. (Hey the @$$hole in the SUV cut me off, [*honk*]. Hey the @$$hole in the envronmentally-responsible Prius cut me off, [*friendly, approving honk*].)
The post office is known for making bad decisions. They really should have investigated electric cars a LONG time ago.
The post office is also known for poor execution, and they did investigate electric vehicles, in the 80's. One company I worked for did some civilian contracts for the USPS (when Navy contracts were scarce I guess) developing an electric vehicle. It was long before my time there, but the development fiasco was left a deep impression on the collective memory. Unwelcome engineering ideas were often critisized by the mere comparison to a similar idea used on the electric vehicle project, and the obvious couter-argument was a parallel to Godwin's law.
The USPS has too much political interference in its management to successfully implement anyting but tried & true technologies, long after everyone else.
In your case, and for the guy in Kansas, look for an automotive adapter kit with external antenna. They will boost the transmit power to 3W and the antenna will have more gain than the handset's built-in. The 6 dB more transmit power and 3 or 4 dB antenna gain, not to mention the improvement by getting the antenna outside the metal car body, may just put your link margin into the positive.
They cost some $300 and have to be installed though. (The no-install kits without external antenna won't help you.) I suppose you could install one in your house, using a 12V supply, and put the antenna up in the attic, on the roof, or to be really hardcore, on a 120' mast. If you use the supplied auto antenna it may require a ground plane to subtitute for the car's metal roof/trunklid; otherwise you won't get as much gain.
Still not working? Get the biggest S-band dish you can find, mount it as high as you can, and point it at the cell tower. All the neighbors will think you are weird for pointing a "satellite" dish at the horizon.
True. You can have a strong signal and still have poor signal-to-noise ratio (an effect familliar to usenetters and /.ers). CDMA phones all transmit on top of each other, and all the competing phones on your channel contribute noise (technically, pseudonoise). So it is a matter of other phones having an even stronger signal than yours and drowning you out. I'm convinced that, due to normal manufacturing tolerances, some CDMA phones have max transmit power limits set higher than others, and routinely win out these shouting wars, while others have the limits set low and routinely lose out. (It is the mobile transmit link that always breaks first, not the receive.) So people say "Brand X phone sux, but Brand Y worked better" while really it was just a roll of the dice.
GSM/TDMA assign deterministic time slots so either you are on or you are off, but those networks can still drop calls if you are moving to a new cell tower and there is no available channel there to hand your call off to. Also, GSM/TDMA are narrowband so you could hit a multipath null, where a reflected wave destructively interferes with your signal. The null would be only a few inches wide so you would walk in & out of it before your meter responded. In this case, find a good spot and stand perfectly still.
It's not just population density but also distribution. Everywhere in Europe I have been, even the rural population clusters into small towns & villages. US population is more uniformly distributed on this scale, and the cities don't have edges; the population density just gradually drops as you move out from a big city, until you are halfway to the next major population center, and then it starts rising again. You can see this difference between Europe & North America from an airplane window.
There are several reasons. The lack of internal language & trade barriers makes the population more mobile, so former farming communities (or coal mining towns) were more easily de-populated vis-a-vis Europe. The Interstate highway system drills deep into the urban centers (in part to facilitate evacuation in case of nuclear war), paving the way (literally) for suburban commuters. The supplanting of mass transit by universal automobile use could be either a symptom or a cause; it's hard to tell.
But whatever the reason, an unclustered population distribution requires more towers to cover the same fraction of the population, even if the population density, averaged over a scale much larger then the coverage area of a single tower, is the same.
Of course, US cell coverage is further impeded by fractured standards (CDMA vs TDMA vs GSM vs iDEN), and slower consumer uptake because the competing land-line service isn't quite as sucky as the European telco monopolies.
I don't know if they make mobile antennas for that band
Look to Ramsey Electronics for a suitable antenna. The LPY-2 covers both bands, & it's $35 cheap! If you really want to be clever you can rig up reflector or director elements to enhance gain.
Keep your cable run short though, RG-58C loses 0.25 dB per foot at PCS frequencies. That means you gotta drill holes rather than go around obstacles. Low loss cable is bulky and expensive.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga unonusti?
That's Latin in dactylic hexameter, by the way.
The 5th foot seems a bit of a stretch as a dactyl to me. (Though so do some of Vergil's verses, so what do I know?) And the Romans didn't have the letter "w" so I take that word as an English retrofit (as well as the prefix un- rather than the Latinate in-).
You're allowed to use spondees here & there y'know. How aboutQuid festin|atio | swallonis | est aether | fuga un|onusti?
What haste of the unburdened swallows is air-flight?
Quid festin|atio | fugae | avis | liberae | est idem?
What haste of the free bird's flight is this?
Sounds more like Vergil to me.
Does this post make me fascetor grammaticalis?
Plastic bags are made "biodegradeable" by mixing starch in with the resin, which decomposes in sunlight (but not in landfills, oops). The plastic resin persists but only as dust rather than a film. If this Dino is inflatable it is probably PVC, a resin that is easy to mold even if it isn't all that strong. PVC can be surprisingly durable if you add enough stabilizers/UV blockers/plasticizers to it, as would be common for an inflatable pool toy. But the air will perfuse through the plastic and Dino will deflate.
Early plastics incuded Bakelite, a very stable epoxy-like material that lasted forever, and celluloid, which doesn't last (much to the chagrin of film preservationists). The celluloid stuff is all long gone so when you look at old plastic objects the selection bias makes it look like they used to make everything long-lasting. The cheapest stuff always got brittle because anti-oxidants add to the cost.
That link doesn't work (and "dinosoaur" is a misspelling). Are you referring to the great-food-but-the-service-sux Dinosaur Barbeque?
A solution to the nuclear waste would be to store it until we can dump it somewhere off-planet.
The usual drawback cited for this approach is the need for containment during a launch failure. If a rocket blows up you don't want radioactive waste splattered all over the place. Even a space elevator can fail, dropping its payload 100 miles to Earth. If you can build a container strong enough to survive that, you may as well bury it.
But really, the high level wastes are not the problem. Existing mining technology (for gold & diamonds, for example) can burrow 2 miles into the Earth, into rock that has been undisturbed for billions of years. Bury it down there and it is never coming back. Any future civilization advanced enough to be digging down there will be advanced enough to realize what they have come upon.
It's the low-level waste (contaminated soil, construction rubble, etc) that is so hard to deal with. Because there is so much of it, it would be ruinously expensive to bury it in a deep shaft. That's why they are burrowing all those holes into the soft rock of the Nevada desert.
Yes, finally someone hits the mark. You cannot patent something unless it is useful, so the scope of a patent is for a particular use. (Disclaimer: that is US law, oh and IANAL.) Knowingly spraying gluphosphate on the resistant crop to facilitate agriculture infringes. Where the seed came from is irrelevant.
If you did the exact same thing just to find out if the gene drifted into your area, that is not infringing because you are not using it.
Conversely, if you spray gluphosphate with the intent to kill canola, no infringement. But if it doesn't work, let the lawsuits rip! Of course, with the patent on glusphosphate now expired, Monsanto doesn't have as much of a stake in its continued efficacy, so no wonder they sell resistant crops.
We get really good produce, with little wasted, as we tend to buy less each week. (I don't know why this is... It's as though you feel pressured to buy more in the brick and mortar grocery store. Is it because of the effective visual marketing, or because of the desire to eliminate a return trip next week? I hope I never find out.)
Well don't read this because I will tell you (heh heh). My belief is that, when you web shop, you can walk over and see, for example, how much lettuce is in the fridge, so you don't buy more when you already have plenty, no matter how good today's lettuce display looks. At the store you see good letuce and then you buy it, because you don't remember how much is in the fridge or if it has spoiled yet.
You need Net Grocer. Click the "Kosher" tab. They deliver nationwide but are limited to non-perishables.
One thing I haven't seen is a grocer implemented like Circuit City's pick-up-at-store process. You make you selections on the web page and then an employee collates your order. You go to the store to pick up the regular bag, the refrigerated bag, and the frozen bag.
Or even simpler, much like your map, simply regenerating your shopping list sorted by aisle with shelf location codes. That is how warehouse fulfillment centers work.
Perhaps not, but you can do the reverse. Make a customized web-coupon to use at a local store.
NetGrocer will deliver just about anywhere in the US, but they are limited to non-perishables. They work around that limitation as much as they can, with UHT milk, for example. Prices are reasonably competitve, especially if you realistically account for the cost of a 20-mile round trip to the mega-mart.
For fresh vegetables, hey it's garden-planting season! I get fresh veggies from my back yard five months a year, and they're better & cheaper than the grocer's.
Amen to that. We stopped using Schwan's when we noticed that everything we liked was loaded with high fat content. 60 grams of fat in the bagel-dog...Yikes! No wonder Scwhan's is the delivered food of choice for the fat people of rural America.