Most of that weight is the 6.3 volt filament transformer. If you can have them remove that, and then replace it when you get it, then that will save most of the weight. But if the filament transformer is combined with all the high-voltage windings in one big custom-wound transformer (as found in TV's, monitors, and such) then you will have to find an equivalent (or wind your own!), which will be much harder to do.
Nobody would wipe a new install of Windows server, but many might decide to wipe NT4 off an older server & install Linux or BSD. These cases will make Linux appear less prevalent, & Windows moreso, than they actually are, to someone looking at sales figures.
How much? Beats me. But it does seem that, to find out, you have to kick some dirt, go out there and ask people what they are doing (though even then they may not be particuarly forthcoming). I don't think it is safe to draw any sort of conclusions from sales figures.
Plus, the marketdriods won't be able to expand the expression, so using it confers a bit of geek cred. As a plus, it doesn't match berklix.
BSD is a problem though. Maybe we need {*n?x|*BSD}. Though to be that inclusive for that we can just say Posix, unless we want to leave out QNX and BeOS.
*nix does seem to capture all the commercial unices, while leaving out the open source (& QNX/Be). But I don't think that is how the term is typically used.
I can concur with that, though I would be more inclined to attribute such a statement to oversimplification for the sake of brevity. I'd say the assertion is more properly posed as, "You must have a car to live and work in the US, unless you specifically plan your living arrangements otherwise."
Which is to say, very few US dwellers have the option of waking up one morning, thinking that bicycling is cool/recreational/a good way to lose weight, and then start bicycling to work after merely consulting a map and scoping out a few requisite facilities (bike racks, a place to change, etc). You have to be enough of a fan to think of it while choosing a place to live. Though in my case, I still chose a house where biking isn't practical, because other considerations overwhelmed the decision.
I think sometimes the statement that we must have cars carries with it a bit of a veiled complaint about the poor livability of American cities, and the "necessity" of living in the suburbs. I risk setting off a flamewar on the merits of American-flavored lassiez-faire vs. European-style socialism, but it does appear to me that, because American social programs are more concentrated on the local level, when the large cities set up big social service programs, the money escapes into the suburbs, which then depresses property values, lowering the average income of the city residents, who require more social services, driving up the costs, which drives even more capital flight, in a positive-feedback downward spiral. European socialism, however, is mostly on the national level, so you don't escape the taxes & regulations by moving out to the burbs. The Europeans can pull this off partly because the countries are smaller: socialism doesn't scale well--humaneness & gratitude, writ large, becomes bureacracy & entitlement. And European states are more culturally cohesive; if you wanted to take your capitalist-$$$ out of more-socialist France & into Thatcher's UK, you had to learn a new language, whereas US of Canada has much less of a migration barrier to Jesusland.
I hope you can pardon us for not sharing a ride in yesterday's breeze.
Now, I'm all for not buying more vehicle than necessary, but expecting the masses to convert to bicycle is not realistic. Sure, I'll pull the bike out for a trip to the convenience store, but I cannot commute to work without traversing a glaciated valley on a high-speed arterial; a bicycle commute would take 4 hours a day. I would very much like the option, but any home within a practical bicycle commute would subject my family to high crime rates and abysmal schools.
My wife's job (and less often, mine) frequently requires meeting people at the airport, so less than a mid-size sedan is simply not practical for us. I favored compact cars before, but now drive my wife's high-odometer cast-offs when they are too superannuated for her use, but not quite junkers yet.
The market is free with the exception of copyright law, which is a classic mercantile regulation that enables the pursuit of monopoly rents. The fact that Jefferson tolerated it (grudingly) does not make it a free market principle. That is not to say that it is wise to attempt to mitigate the deleterious effect of one regulation (copyright) with another (anti-trust). Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, and certainly some approaches are better than others. But don't confuse the market for software with a free market.
Not every such event is predictable. But on those occasions the caller can make extra effort. For example, when I had news of a murder in the family, I called my wife's office and asked her co-workers to tell her to call me back; that's not the sort of thing I would put in an SMS. Prosiac tidbits can go by SMS so I don't interrupt a meeting.
Many people point out the rudeness of cellphones ringing in unwanted places, but if callers practiced a little bit of common sense, that would help immensely. I have a co-worker whose wife will call his cell phone if she gets cut off in traffic.
So when pointing out mobilettiquette, everyone should remember to remind people to send messages by the least-interruptive mode that is still adequate for the importance of the message.
Does the ringer still operate when a headset is plugged in? Most will redirect the ring to the headset. So if you plug headset (or just an empty plug from Radio Shack) whenever you charge, that will quash the ring, albeit in a hackish way.
If you really want to hack, unsolder the ringer element, or put on hardware switch.
From that Bloomberg article: James Wallace, an NTP lawyer, disputed that the new software would work as well as the current system...
Wallace said he hadn't read the details of the workaround. He said Research In Motion has told U.S. District Judge James Spencer in Richmond, Virginia, that the fix isn't very good.
So he doesn't know what the workaround is, but he knows that it doesn't work...based on hearsay from his opponent, who now says it is ready. Yeah, that's really credible there.
Well there are the electronic gold currencies. E-gold is the original and the most popular so far, but there is also pecunix which can issue cryptographically non-repudiable reciepts. There are also a couple others, e-bullion, (which claims more rigorous reserve auditing), and maybe one or two I can't remember offhand.
The biggest weakness, IMO, of these services is that they are entirely dependent on the security of the user password, and therefore the client machine, to keep the stored value safe. So don't even think of accessing your account through a Windows machine. Transactions are non-repudiable.
They are a working implementation of micro-payments. I can send 5 cents on e-gold and the fee is about a fifth of a cent. The fact that they haven't cought on as such seems to me to be an indication that nobody really wants micropayments.
Have to wonder though...is that because they are using FF and don't get infected, or using IE and are too embarassed to call back? Hmmm...imponderable.
Re:Fuzzing and Obfuscation
on
Mitnick on OSS
·
· Score: 1
Do any UNIX-style systems ship with the current directory in $PATH for root?
Slackware doesn't, but apparently someone does. The Linux version of Matlab (a commercial product) uses install scripts that assume precisely that. I couldn't install it as root without futzing around. Rather than that, I installed from my usual user account since I don't need to be able to run it from any other login.
I think we largely agree here. It is possible to make statistical conclusions on aggregate systems, even ones governed by nonlinear micro behavior. But Asimov's plot device was a committee of super-planners who would tweak the development of history by dropping a clue here, introducing a technology there, and so on, stabilizing the politics of the galaxy by making every move Gary-Kasparov-class. That was plausible within 1950's knowledge of system theory, but not today.
It would be nice, though, to be able to, for example, stabilize Iraq with 100 special ops forces following instructions from super-enlightened Washingtonian foreign policy analysts (or better yet, mere subliminal suggestion on key people). But unfortunately were stuck spending 1000 times that effort.
A phase diagram shows gas/liquid/solid over temperature & pressure. I don't think that was what the GP wanted to say.
A phase plane plots quantity vs. rate of change, and from that we can visually examine contours that represent dynamic behavior. Oscillations look like swirls, equilibrium points look like focal points, chaos looks, well, chaotic. It is a more general techinique than LaPlace Transform analysis, which is limited to linear differential equations, (or Eigenfunction transforms, for Sturm-Liouville problems generally, of which LaPlace transforms are for the subset of S-L systems that have a constant as the sigma function, and therefore have sinusoidal eigenfunctions).
Getting back to Asimov's psychohistory, the analogy with physical systems is flawed. Physical systems are well-behaved and modelable by reasonably tractable laws because, on a micro scale, the behavior is linear. Human behavior (and much natural behavior like snowflake formation and turbulent gas flow) tends to be non-linear.
That's not to say there is nothing useful in this analysis. We can make statistical conclusions about climate, like 99% of the time the annual snowfall will not exceed X, so we need this many snowplows, and so on. But Asimov's plot device, being able to plan future history with an intelligent tweak here & there, is no more realistic than Jules Verne's moon cannon. Economists can't get instantly rich on the stock market, chemists can't control the shape a snowflake will take, and metorologists can't control predict the long-term weather.
You don't have to step into the realm of Sci-Fi to see how a perpetual trust can deviate from its founder's intent. Do you think Henry Ford would approve of what the Ford Foundation is doing today? More recently deceased rugged individualistic-type philanthropists (John M Olin, for example) have reacted by requiring thier charitable trusts to spend themselves out of existence after a period of time.
Leaky coax (or leaky waveguides generally) will do the trick, though, for striaght tunnels, it is also possible to point a directional antenna straight down the axis of the tunnel. If it is off-axis the multipath reflections will garble the signal.
The problem of scaling for a gazillion phones in a very small space has been solved, and is deployed in most large airports: the so-called pico-cells have coverage that is entirely within another macro-cell. The trick is to have network software that tells the macro-cell to hand off calls the pico-cells whenever the pico-cells are in range, regardless of whether the pico-cell has a stronger signal.
There does finally seem to be a bit of groping around on this question. California has decided to issue "non-resident" driver licenses, that would be accepted for driving, but not by the feds to get on a plane. The feds forced the issue, by announcing their intended refusal to accept Calif licences at airport security because illegal aliens oculd get them. But Calif doesn't want to certify immigration status for drivers licenses (or all those aliens will be driving around with no license at all, probably).
So finally, finally, even the bonehead politicians figured out that ID for driving and ID for $EVERYTHING_ELSE_IN_THE_WORLD have--guess what--different requirements. And that we use driver licenses for everything, not because they are suitable, but simply because that is the ID everyone already had.
Actually the reverse. The primary extant sources for the Shakespearean plays (the folios & quartos) were assembled by fan groups years afterwards and would have been copyright infringement by today's standards. If working DRM existed then, his plays would all have been lost. Maybe he coculd have written more, but, in the end, progress of the arts would have suffered a grievous loss.
Re:Great...Now I Don't Need a 7.1 Surround System
on
Scanjet Music
·
· Score: 1
Tree wave may find it useful. I think they do use dot matrix printers for some of their percussion sounds. Music with hack value.
TRS-80 click
on
Scanjet Music
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A similar techinique was used by the LeScript word processor in the TRS-80 model 3/4. The cassette relay clicked on the keystroke to simulate typewiter sound. If I remember correctly, the device independent I/O on the model 4 (TRSDOS 6) permitted inserting a filter on the keyboard input so you could click in any program, or insert the click-filter on the serial port and have your Compuserve input click like a TTY. A cool but useless hack.
But those people are not buying $300 game consoles, $49 games every month, $X per year online gaming subscriptions, and so on. So sure there are casual gamers, but no significant casual gaming market. At least not until someone figures out a
long tail
strategy to make 10 cents off each of a billion people.
FWIW, I have had to dispute two CC transactions. Discover was quite helpful while MasterCard was, if not complicit, at least incompetent and unhelpful with even the elements of a fraud investigation.
Well, those are the reasons the railroad exec's gave;)
1) Is a result of the fact that GM was able to leverage its capital & technological investment on truck engines on locomotives, whereas railroads and steam locomotive builders were not nearly as well-capitalized.
2) Could be solved, and later was, and still is in process today, by improving the loading gauge of the railroads. But that requires investment capital.
3) Can be solved by simply having a larger fleet of steam locomotives to cover the same job as a slightly smaller fleet of diesels. But standardized diesels could be more easily re-sold and therefore more easily financed, making them easier on the capital budget.
So dieselization occurred because the railroads were 1)undercapitalized, 2)undercapitalized, & 3)undercapitalized. N&W, who persisted with steam as long as they could, gave its stockholders a better return than the rapidly-dieselized (& later bankrupt) Pennsy & the NY Central. So it's not like steam couldn't be profitable.
But, like wondering what would have happened if Gary Kildall had beat MS on the contract for PC-DOS, without rewinding history, we can never really know...
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Most of that weight is the 6.3 volt filament transformer. If you can have them remove that, and then replace it when you get it, then that will save most of the weight. But if the filament transformer is combined with all the high-voltage windings in one big custom-wound transformer (as found in TV's, monitors, and such) then you will have to find an equivalent (or wind your own!), which will be much harder to do.
How much? Beats me. But it does seem that, to find out, you have to kick some dirt, go out there and ask people what they are doing (though even then they may not be particuarly forthcoming). I don't think it is safe to draw any sort of conclusions from sales figures.
Plus, the marketdriods won't be able to expand the expression, so using it confers a bit of geek cred. As a plus, it doesn't match berklix.
BSD is a problem though. Maybe we need {*n?x|*BSD}. Though to be that inclusive for that we can just say Posix, unless we want to leave out QNX and BeOS.
*nix does seem to capture all the commercial unices, while leaving out the open source (& QNX/Be). But I don't think that is how the term is typically used.
Which is to say, very few US dwellers have the option of waking up one morning, thinking that bicycling is cool/recreational/a good way to lose weight, and then start bicycling to work after merely consulting a map and scoping out a few requisite facilities (bike racks, a place to change, etc). You have to be enough of a fan to think of it while choosing a place to live. Though in my case, I still chose a house where biking isn't practical, because other considerations overwhelmed the decision.
I think sometimes the statement that we must have cars carries with it a bit of a veiled complaint about the poor livability of American cities, and the "necessity" of living in the suburbs. I risk setting off a flamewar on the merits of American-flavored lassiez-faire vs. European-style socialism, but it does appear to me that, because American social programs are more concentrated on the local level, when the large cities set up big social service programs, the money escapes into the suburbs, which then depresses property values, lowering the average income of the city residents, who require more social services, driving up the costs, which drives even more capital flight, in a positive-feedback downward spiral. European socialism, however, is mostly on the national level, so you don't escape the taxes & regulations by moving out to the burbs. The Europeans can pull this off partly because the countries are smaller: socialism doesn't scale well--humaneness & gratitude, writ large, becomes bureacracy & entitlement. And European states are more culturally cohesive; if you wanted to take your capitalist-$$$ out of more-socialist France & into Thatcher's UK, you had to learn a new language, whereas US of Canada has much less of a migration barrier to Jesusland.
Now, I'm all for not buying more vehicle than necessary, but expecting the masses to convert to bicycle is not realistic. Sure, I'll pull the bike out for a trip to the convenience store, but I cannot commute to work without traversing a glaciated valley on a high-speed arterial; a bicycle commute would take 4 hours a day. I would very much like the option, but any home within a practical bicycle commute would subject my family to high crime rates and abysmal schools.
My wife's job (and less often, mine) frequently requires meeting people at the airport, so less than a mid-size sedan is simply not practical for us. I favored compact cars before, but now drive my wife's high-odometer cast-offs when they are too superannuated for her use, but not quite junkers yet.
Clearly, you don't live in the Great Lakes area.
The market is free with the exception of copyright law, which is a classic mercantile regulation that enables the pursuit of monopoly rents. The fact that Jefferson tolerated it (grudingly) does not make it a free market principle. That is not to say that it is wise to attempt to mitigate the deleterious effect of one regulation (copyright) with another (anti-trust). Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, and certainly some approaches are better than others. But don't confuse the market for software with a free market.
Many people point out the rudeness of cellphones ringing in unwanted places, but if callers practiced a little bit of common sense, that would help immensely. I have a co-worker whose wife will call his cell phone if she gets cut off in traffic.
So when pointing out mobilettiquette, everyone should remember to remind people to send messages by the least-interruptive mode that is still adequate for the importance of the message.
If you really want to hack, unsolder the ringer element, or put on hardware switch.
James Wallace, an NTP lawyer, disputed that the new software would work as well as the current system...
Wallace said he hadn't read the details of the workaround. He said Research In Motion has told U.S. District Judge James Spencer in Richmond, Virginia, that the fix isn't very good.
So he doesn't know what the workaround is, but he knows that it doesn't work...based on hearsay from his opponent, who now says it is ready. Yeah, that's really credible there.
Actually I think the Psion 3-series predated the Newtons. But, oh well, those devices seem to share the fate of the Xerox Star...
The biggest weakness, IMO, of these services is that they are entirely dependent on the security of the user password, and therefore the client machine, to keep the stored value safe. So don't even think of accessing your account through a Windows machine. Transactions are non-repudiable.
They are a working implementation of micro-payments. I can send 5 cents on e-gold and the fee is about a fifth of a cent. The fact that they haven't cought on as such seems to me to be an indication that nobody really wants micropayments.
Have to wonder though...is that because they are using FF and don't get infected, or using IE and are too embarassed to call back? Hmmm...imponderable.
Slackware doesn't, but apparently someone does. The Linux version of Matlab (a commercial product) uses install scripts that assume precisely that. I couldn't install it as root without futzing around. Rather than that, I installed from my usual user account since I don't need to be able to run it from any other login.
It would be nice, though, to be able to, for example, stabilize Iraq with 100 special ops forces following instructions from super-enlightened Washingtonian foreign policy analysts (or better yet, mere subliminal suggestion on key people). But unfortunately were stuck spending 1000 times that effort.
A phase plane plots quantity vs. rate of change, and from that we can visually examine contours that represent dynamic behavior. Oscillations look like swirls, equilibrium points look like focal points, chaos looks, well, chaotic. It is a more general techinique than LaPlace Transform analysis, which is limited to linear differential equations, (or Eigenfunction transforms, for Sturm-Liouville problems generally, of which LaPlace transforms are for the subset of S-L systems that have a constant as the sigma function, and therefore have sinusoidal eigenfunctions).
Getting back to Asimov's psychohistory, the analogy with physical systems is flawed. Physical systems are well-behaved and modelable by reasonably tractable laws because, on a micro scale, the behavior is linear. Human behavior (and much natural behavior like snowflake formation and turbulent gas flow) tends to be non-linear.
That's not to say there is nothing useful in this analysis. We can make statistical conclusions about climate, like 99% of the time the annual snowfall will not exceed X, so we need this many snowplows, and so on. But Asimov's plot device, being able to plan future history with an intelligent tweak here & there, is no more realistic than Jules Verne's moon cannon. Economists can't get instantly rich on the stock market, chemists can't control the shape a snowflake will take, and metorologists can't control predict the long-term weather.
You don't have to step into the realm of Sci-Fi to see how a perpetual trust can deviate from its founder's intent. Do you think Henry Ford would approve of what the Ford Foundation is doing today? More recently deceased rugged individualistic-type philanthropists (John M Olin, for example) have reacted by requiring thier charitable trusts to spend themselves out of existence after a period of time.
The problem of scaling for a gazillion phones in a very small space has been solved, and is deployed in most large airports: the so-called pico-cells have coverage that is entirely within another macro-cell. The trick is to have network software that tells the macro-cell to hand off calls the pico-cells whenever the pico-cells are in range, regardless of whether the pico-cell has a stronger signal.
So finally, finally, even the bonehead politicians figured out that ID for driving and ID for $EVERYTHING_ELSE_IN_THE_WORLD have--guess what--different requirements. And that we use driver licenses for everything, not because they are suitable, but simply because that is the ID everyone already had.
Actually the reverse. The primary extant sources for the Shakespearean plays (the folios & quartos) were assembled by fan groups years afterwards and would have been copyright infringement by today's standards. If working DRM existed then, his plays would all have been lost. Maybe he coculd have written more, but, in the end, progress of the arts would have suffered a grievous loss.
Tree wave may find it useful. I think they do use dot matrix printers for some of their percussion sounds. Music with hack value.
A similar techinique was used by the LeScript word processor in the TRS-80 model 3/4. The cassette relay clicked on the keystroke to simulate typewiter sound. If I remember correctly, the device independent I/O on the model 4 (TRSDOS 6) permitted inserting a filter on the keyboard input so you could click in any program, or insert the click-filter on the serial port and have your Compuserve input click like a TTY. A cool but useless hack.
But those people are not buying $300 game consoles, $49 games every month, $X per year online gaming subscriptions, and so on. So sure there are casual gamers, but no significant casual gaming market. At least not until someone figures out a long tail strategy to make 10 cents off each of a billion people.
FWIW, I have had to dispute two CC transactions. Discover was quite helpful while MasterCard was, if not complicit, at least incompetent and unhelpful with even the elements of a fraud investigation.
1) Is a result of the fact that GM was able to leverage its capital & technological investment on truck engines on locomotives, whereas railroads and steam locomotive builders were not nearly as well-capitalized.
2) Could be solved, and later was, and still is in process today, by improving the loading gauge of the railroads. But that requires investment capital.
3) Can be solved by simply having a larger fleet of steam locomotives to cover the same job as a slightly smaller fleet of diesels. But standardized diesels could be more easily re-sold and therefore more easily financed, making them easier on the capital budget.
So dieselization occurred because the railroads were 1)undercapitalized, 2)undercapitalized, & 3)undercapitalized. N&W, who persisted with steam as long as they could, gave its stockholders a better return than the rapidly-dieselized (& later bankrupt) Pennsy & the NY Central. So it's not like steam couldn't be profitable.
But, like wondering what would have happened if Gary Kildall had beat MS on the contract for PC-DOS, without rewinding history, we can never really know...