It is shameful to admit that rafelbev has a valid point. I started with M$ in 1985, and found it simple to learn and use. The only flaw found was during an experiment with Coherent in the early 1990's, which showed me how much a multitasking Unix-based system could offer. The only multitasking offered by Microsoft then was background printing, which slowed things to a crawl on a 286. Coherent did many background tasks, including printing, with no apparent effect on speed. I stayed with M$ for years, dual booting and triple booting with Coherent and OS/2. At the time of Windows 95 and Windows NT4 Microsoft made itself so flawed and so obnoxious I finally gave up. I ditched NT4 as impossible to maintain and kept Windows 95 for occasional use. Coherent died and Linux has not been easy to learn, but it keeps improving and providing the drivers I need. I now have a three-machine Linux network at home, with Windows 95 dual booting on one machine for helping my relatives. M$ has made its last unreasonable demand, unnecessary warning message, blue-screen shutdown, and sale in this house.
There is no need to leave the car unlocked. Thieves in Pittsburgh would race locked cars around the block in the early 1950's. Unlocked cars are for amateurs. The pros are slowed very little by locked doors.
Heat is just one form of radiation. He would already be down if that was a problem. Before building one of these in the USA be sure to check RF radiation. You need not worry, there will be plenty. The FCC will want answers to some pointed questions very quickly. This will be a good project for US citizens that want free room and board from the government for many years.
Re:This is a trojan horse, plain and simple.
on
Spy v. Spy
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· Score: 1
It all sounds like a foo fight to me. Both sides should go to a foo bar and get plastered. They need not return to their jobs, which should no longer exist.
In addition to others, Stoeger Arms sold this type of self-heating foods and beverages in _The Shooter's Bible_ many years ago. It is another good idea still waiting for a market. Small alcohol, gasoline, and Sterno stoves have always been more popular. Today, travel trailers and motor homes let the hunter take his whole air-conditioned home to the hunting grounds.
Sorry to disappoint the US citizens, but the computer mouse was a Swedish invention. Hakan Lans invented the mouse back in the 1970's, then did not patent it. Do not worry about this loss of money, because he also invented a working method for color graphics that he sold it to IBM. Scandinavians have made several important contributions to computer science, notably that Finnish student that posted an operating system on the Internet, a fine fellow named Linus Torvalds. Development of a commercially successful mouse by the team working for Apple is a US success story, and a wonderful accomplishment. Commercial development is what stopped Hakan Lans. He couldn't get anyone interested in the idea.
"The bells have been broken up for years and the only result has been the degradation of technology." This statement clearly demonstrates the ignorance of meggito, the poster. I have dealt with telephone since the days of hand cranked ringer codes and the upgrade to operator placed calls. Technology took off like a skyrocket with the end of the ATT monopoly, and attempts by Ma Bell to stall progress suffered ignominious defeat in all three branches of the federal government. Plain Old Telephone Service might have suffered (I don"t think so), but technology has zoomed from 110 baud teletype to ADSL and from operator switch boards to sophisticated computers and equipment able to interface across international borders and their widely differing standards, including voltages, frequencies, coding, and impedances. I like the new order.
An article posted by PBS some time ago said the Chinese ships were not only huge, they also used off-center masts. This would be ideal for sailing before the wind, and these outer sails could also be trimmed to help with steering. The Chinese junk may no longer be a factor in oceanic commerce, but the same is true of the Viking longboat and the English clipper. All of them were important at some point in history.
I fear your optimism is misplaced. The idea that the company that produced Windows 1/2/286/3/386/3.1/95/CE/ME/NT/98/XP cannot think up another (incompatible) version is ludicrous. Ballmer said he could not produce a new version that would comply with court imposed restrictions. As usual, he is wrong. Gates and Microsoft will continue as long as Gates wants, and a single court case will not destroy it. Also, all of this wil not get me to buy any more Microsoft products.
Rob Flickenger confuses a few numbers in his article, but this should not discourage anyone from trying to make an antenna. Remember, a db (decibel) figure is simply a ratio. positive dB means gain, negative dB means loss. He uses the sample of 9dB equalling a power gain of about eight. The actual figure is closer to 7.94, the antilog of.9, and anyone who points this out should be shot. -9dB would be a power attenuation of 8 to 1. He also talks about dBm, which is the ratio of power to one milliwatt and dBi, which is gain or loss relative to a perfect lossless antenna (isotropic). You can buy one of these at the same store that sells frictionless bearings and perfect insulators. That being said, you may safely ignore it. Rob gives tables of figures showing that some designs have better performance than others. His measurements are crude, and hardly suited to a college thesis. The reader who complained about not seeing noise temperature did not understand the tables or the measurements. Noise temperature was lumped with other noise, a perfectly acceptable way to get data for quick comparisons. I was involved in building telemetry antennas on a government project once. We had the guidance of an experienced professional engineer who taught us the basics and had proper test equipment for checking voltage standing wave ratios at any frequency we wanted. The antennas were built from scrap metal, broken connectors, welding rods, scrap coaxial cable, and anything else we found useful. We could prove them to perform equally to commercial antennas costing hundreds of dollars. Rob is telling you how to build good antennas cheaply. If you want parabolic antennas with hyperbolic reflection to the base of the parabola, feeding a low noise preamplifier to your network card, then build it. If you can do so cheaply, publish. Others may want their own. But don't snipe at the man who has a cheap working solution until you can show how to improve it.
The second laser performs as an energy pump. A photon of the correct configuration could raise an electron to a new energy state. A second laser, emitting photons of another configuration, could raise the new energy state to a higher level. It might be the means used to keep the electron from falling immediately to the base energy level. If all of this sounds like the process is somewhat more complex than the simple description in the article, that is correct. If the developers have succeeded in stopping, then restarting light after a measurable time delay, even a very short one, they have made progress. Getting atoms and electrons to stabilize in desired states at room temperature is not a simple lab exercise, and achieving it is a major accomplishment.
B. Foster has missed one of the points about free softwae that escapes many. Programmer L. User is hired by Bigbucks Megacorp to write a program for internal use. The programmer, being a cheapskate and idealist, does everything GPL. The company owns the program they bought from him, including the terms of the GPL license. If they share the code, or sell it, to anyone, they must Include all of the source and allow free use, modification, and redistribution. Nothing in the GPL says they must offer their specialized, in-house program to anyone. They can load it on their own computers, file the source, and tell corporate spies to take a flying leap. L. User can write a similar program for the competitor, and charge whatever the market will bear. What cannot be done is force the code to be secret. That is a buyer decision, and L. User has no right to tell a customer to release a purchased program, only that if released, it must be GPL.
The IBM Aptiva sold well in Europe. The market there is completely different from the USA market.
When I bought one in Sweden for my married niece, her husband checked on warranty service and technical support before I was allowed to consider purchase. Four years later, he now does his own hardware and software upgrades, and still likes the Aptiva, a completely dependable machine.
This is an English article, and "computor" is probably correct per the Chambers English Dictionary. I thought somebody from Dallas had written it in the last few weeks until I saw the reference to valves. Hollerith punch cards are still used for mounting film negatives. The 1954 date on the article explains a great deal. 1024 byte memories were expensive and 16K was a huge investment. Tape held stored data and Hollerith cards were punched with batch programs. Users and programmers were kept separate. Speed was measured in milliseconds, and cooling made computer engineers wish they had Niagara Falls available. Today pocket calculators have more computing power. Don't get carried away with nostalgia remembering this expensive equipment, considered very reliable only by 1954 standards. These are the good old days.
I have no real problem with sites like Slashdot that leave a cookie. It saves me the effort of remembering a lot of passwords. What does bother me is the mental incompetents not associated with a site that try to leave their cookies, too. I have seen as many as a dozen sites try to leave cookies when I visit a popular site. This can be stopped with Netscape, and is. Only the primary site can leave cookies. Others are rudely declined. Don't like my attitude? See a chaplain. I also have another setup that blocks all cookies. I use it for those obnoxious sites that would flood me with spam if I relented. Sites that insist I accept a cookie are reviewed carefully. They still cannot post cookies from other sites, and sites that abuse or irritate me are ignored. The web is too big to worry about the rectums of the universe.
There is an infamous firm in Redmond, WA, USA, that does react to customer complaints. They also make it clear that it annoys them greatly when someone complains. Their denials, accusations and FUD get old quickly. Applause to AMD for positive reaction, and for quickly supplying a working fix to a nasty problem. A chip design change would be welcome, and will probably happen, but you do not need to risk burning your house down waiting for it to happen.
I have read Nick Petreley for years, and say he is not a moron. His complaints about poor error handling in open source code are backed by samples. I feel that the messages I get with open source are much more helpful than the dumb messages from Bill's bloatware that tell me that my program has performed an illegal operation and will shut down. He did not speak of the shoddy and missing error handling in commercial bloatware, only showed where open source programmers need to clean up their act. He also did not point out the obvious, that error messages are still light years ahead of the blue screen of death and boxes that accuse users of being criminals without telling the programming cause of the problem.
XP is the end of whose world? I greeted the original announcement of Windoze eXPired with one hand clapping. Seeing that the price is more than I paid for my computer, and they want yet another memory/cpu upgrade, the hand is crippled. When held vertically, only one finger remans erect. My open source boxed set serves me cheaply and well.
The six nurses in my family tell me that it is impossible for any people except hermaphrodites to have sexual relations with themselves. Nevertheless, I do expect the people in Microsoft that wrote, promoted, or agreed with this EULA to try diligently.
There is a simple test simulation for any program that is supposed to predict climate or weather. Just post the data from 100 years ago, then see how long the model accurately portrays conditions. Then, if you are no more successful than all other climate modelers, try again. Remember, all data and formulae must be available when the prediction is made, not corrected for things that happened later.
Dr. Pournelle was pinpointing the nations whose governments are controlled by extremists. The individual has no independent voice in these countries, and will be hung for blasphemy for even speaking out. The radical governments are following what they feel is the example of the Prophet Muhammed (Peace Be Unto Him) in fighting non-Muslims, without the minor bother of exhausting all other remedies, as he did before reluctantly going to war.
Our own government immediately instituted all of these new restrictions at airports. Has anyone else noticed that the US citizen passengers are now greatly inconvenienced by regulations that would have had zero effect on the hijackers had they been in place September 11?
I do not know what the government knew about the terrorists. The FBI did raid an ISP in Richardson TX that was operated by Muslims and physically located in or near the main Dallas TX area Mosque. Several Muslim families protested this raid of what they called a pure business ISP, with no connection to terrorists. The Mosque has been there some time, and I, a Baptist, have bought books from the associated book store, which is a convenient source of Islamic literature operated by Mulism ladies. Neither the Mosque nor the bookstore present even a hint of association with Muslim radicals.
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It is shameful to admit that rafelbev has a valid point. I started with M$ in 1985, and found it simple to learn and use. The only flaw found was during an experiment with Coherent in the early 1990's, which showed me how much a multitasking Unix-based system could offer. The only multitasking offered by Microsoft then was background printing, which slowed things to a crawl on a 286. Coherent did many background tasks, including printing, with no apparent effect on speed. I stayed with M$ for years, dual booting and triple booting with Coherent and OS/2. At the time of Windows 95 and Windows NT4 Microsoft made itself so flawed and so obnoxious I finally gave up. I ditched NT4 as impossible to maintain and kept Windows 95 for occasional use. Coherent died and Linux has not been easy to learn, but it keeps improving and providing the drivers I need. I now have a three-machine Linux network at home, with Windows 95 dual booting on one machine for helping my relatives. M$ has made its last unreasonable demand, unnecessary warning message, blue-screen shutdown, and sale in this house.
There is no need to leave the car unlocked. Thieves in Pittsburgh would race locked cars around the block in the early 1950's. Unlocked cars are for amateurs. The pros are slowed very little by locked doors.
Heat is just one form of radiation. He would already be down if that was a problem. Before building one of these in the USA be sure to check RF radiation. You need not worry, there will be plenty. The FCC will want answers to some pointed questions very quickly. This will be a good project for US citizens that want free room and board from the government for many years.
It all sounds like a foo fight to me. Both sides should go to a foo bar and get plastered. They need not return to their jobs, which should no longer exist.
In addition to others, Stoeger Arms sold this type of self-heating foods and beverages in _The Shooter's Bible_ many years ago. It is another good idea still waiting for a market. Small alcohol, gasoline, and Sterno stoves have always been more popular. Today, travel trailers and motor homes let the hunter take his whole air-conditioned home to the hunting grounds.
Sorry to disappoint the US citizens, but the computer mouse was a Swedish invention. Hakan Lans invented the mouse back in the 1970's, then did not patent it. Do not worry about this loss of money, because he also invented a working method for color graphics that he sold it to IBM. Scandinavians have made several important contributions to computer science, notably that Finnish student that posted an operating system on the Internet, a fine fellow named Linus Torvalds. Development of a commercially successful mouse by the team working for Apple is a US success story, and a wonderful accomplishment. Commercial development is what stopped Hakan Lans. He couldn't get anyone interested in the idea.
"The bells have been broken up for years and the only result has been the degradation of technology." This statement clearly demonstrates the ignorance of meggito, the poster. I have dealt with telephone since the days of hand cranked ringer codes and the upgrade to operator placed calls. Technology took off like a skyrocket with the end of the ATT monopoly, and attempts by Ma Bell to stall progress suffered ignominious defeat in all three branches of the federal government. Plain Old Telephone Service might have suffered (I don"t think so), but technology has zoomed from 110 baud teletype to ADSL and from operator switch boards to sophisticated computers and equipment able to interface across international borders and their widely differing standards, including voltages, frequencies, coding, and impedances. I like the new order.
An article posted by PBS some time ago said the Chinese ships were not only huge, they also used off-center masts. This would be ideal for sailing before the wind, and these outer sails could also be trimmed to help with steering. The Chinese junk may no longer be a factor in oceanic commerce, but the same is true of the Viking longboat and the English clipper. All of them were important at some point in history.
I fear your optimism is misplaced. The idea that the company that produced Windows 1/2/286/3/386/3.1/95/CE/ME/NT/98/XP cannot think up another (incompatible) version is ludicrous. Ballmer said he could not produce a new version that would comply with court imposed restrictions. As usual, he is wrong. Gates and Microsoft will continue as long as Gates wants, and a single court case will not destroy it. Also, all of this wil not get me to buy any more Microsoft products.
Rob Flickenger confuses a few numbers in his article, but this should not discourage anyone from trying to make an antenna. Remember, a db (decibel) figure is simply a ratio. positive dB means gain, negative dB means loss. He uses the sample of 9dB equalling a power gain of about eight. The actual figure is closer to 7.94, the antilog of .9, and anyone who points this out should be shot. -9dB would be a power attenuation of 8 to 1. He also talks about dBm, which is the ratio of power to one milliwatt and dBi, which is gain or loss relative to a perfect lossless antenna (isotropic). You can buy one of these at the same store that sells frictionless bearings and perfect insulators. That being said, you may safely ignore it. Rob gives tables of figures showing that some designs have better performance than others. His measurements are crude, and hardly suited to a college thesis. The reader who complained about not seeing noise temperature did not understand the tables or the measurements. Noise temperature was lumped with other noise, a perfectly acceptable way to get data for quick comparisons. I was involved in building telemetry antennas on a government project once. We had the guidance of an experienced professional engineer who taught us the basics and had proper test equipment for checking voltage standing wave ratios at any frequency we wanted. The antennas were built from scrap metal, broken connectors, welding rods, scrap coaxial cable, and anything else we found useful. We could prove them to perform equally to commercial antennas costing hundreds of dollars. Rob is telling you how to build good antennas cheaply. If you want parabolic antennas with hyperbolic reflection to the base of the parabola, feeding a low noise preamplifier to your network card, then build it. If you can do so cheaply, publish. Others may want their own. But don't snipe at the man who has a cheap working solution until you can show how to improve it.
The second laser performs as an energy pump. A photon of the correct configuration could raise an electron to a new energy state. A second laser, emitting photons of another configuration, could raise the new energy state to a higher level. It might be the means used to keep the electron from falling immediately to the base energy level. If all of this sounds like the process is somewhat more complex than the simple description in the article, that is correct. If the developers have succeeded in stopping, then restarting light after a measurable time delay, even a very short one, they have made progress. Getting atoms and electrons to stabilize in desired states at room temperature is not a simple lab exercise, and achieving it is a major accomplishment.
B. Foster has missed one of the points about free softwae that escapes many. Programmer L. User is hired by Bigbucks Megacorp to write a program for internal use. The programmer, being a cheapskate and idealist, does everything GPL. The company owns the program they bought from him, including the terms of the GPL license. If they share the code, or sell it, to anyone, they must Include all of the source and allow free use, modification, and redistribution. Nothing in the GPL says they must offer their specialized, in-house program to anyone. They can load it on their own computers, file the source, and tell corporate spies to take a flying leap. L. User can write a similar program for the competitor, and charge whatever the market will bear. What cannot be done is force the code to be secret. That is a buyer decision, and L. User has no right to tell a customer to release a purchased program, only that if released, it must be GPL.
The IBM Aptiva sold well in Europe. The market there is completely different from the USA market.
When I bought one in Sweden for my married niece, her husband checked on warranty service and technical support before I was allowed to consider purchase. Four years later, he now does his own hardware and software upgrades, and still likes the Aptiva, a completely dependable machine.
This is an English article, and "computor" is probably correct per the Chambers English Dictionary. I thought somebody from Dallas had written it in the last few weeks until I saw the reference to valves. Hollerith punch cards are still used for mounting film negatives. The 1954 date on the article explains a great deal. 1024 byte memories were expensive and 16K was a huge investment. Tape held stored data and Hollerith cards were punched with batch programs. Users and programmers were kept separate. Speed was measured in milliseconds, and cooling made computer engineers wish they had Niagara Falls available. Today pocket calculators have more computing power. Don't get carried away with nostalgia remembering this expensive equipment, considered very reliable only by 1954 standards. These are the good old days.
Response was slow, but other /.ed sites won't even work on my slow K6-2 system. These people have a winner, and the /. community is proving it.
I have no real problem with sites like Slashdot that leave a cookie. It saves me the effort of remembering a lot of passwords. What does bother me is the mental incompetents not associated with a site that try to leave their cookies, too. I have seen as many as a dozen sites try to leave cookies when I visit a popular site. This can be stopped with Netscape, and is. Only the primary site can leave cookies. Others are rudely declined. Don't like my attitude? See a chaplain. I also have another setup that blocks all cookies. I use it for those obnoxious sites that would flood me with spam if I relented. Sites that insist I accept a cookie are reviewed carefully. They still cannot post cookies from other sites, and sites that abuse or irritate me are ignored. The web is too big to worry about the rectums of the universe.
There is an infamous firm in Redmond, WA, USA, that does react to customer complaints. They also make it clear that it annoys them greatly when someone complains. Their denials, accusations and FUD get old quickly. Applause to AMD for positive reaction, and for quickly supplying a working fix to a nasty problem. A chip design change would be welcome, and will probably happen, but you do not need to risk burning your house down waiting for it to happen.
I am indebted to a Kung Fu actor for the correct answer to Safe Surf: When I want an opinion from Safe Surf I will beat it out of them.
I have read Nick Petreley for years, and say he is not a moron. His complaints about poor error handling in open source code are backed by samples. I feel that the messages I get with open source are much more helpful than the dumb messages from Bill's bloatware that tell me that my program has performed an illegal operation and will shut down. He did not speak of the shoddy and missing error handling in commercial bloatware, only showed where open source programmers need to clean up their act. He also did not point out the obvious, that error messages are still light years ahead of the blue screen of death and boxes that accuse users of being criminals without telling the programming cause of the problem.
XP is the end of whose world? I greeted the original announcement of Windoze eXPired with one hand clapping. Seeing that the price is more than I paid for my computer, and they want yet another memory/cpu upgrade, the hand is crippled. When held vertically, only one finger remans erect. My open source boxed set serves me cheaply and well.
The six nurses in my family tell me that it is impossible for any people except hermaphrodites to have sexual relations with themselves. Nevertheless, I do expect the people in Microsoft that wrote, promoted, or agreed with this EULA to try diligently.
There is a simple test simulation for any program that is supposed to predict climate or weather. Just post the data from 100 years ago, then see how long the model accurately portrays conditions. Then, if you are no more successful than all other climate modelers, try again. Remember, all data and formulae must be available when the prediction is made, not corrected for things that happened later.
I already voted with my billfold and my feet. Microsoft products are, like the company itself and poster codeforprofit2, totally irrelevant.
Dr. Pournelle was pinpointing the nations whose governments are controlled by extremists. The individual has no independent voice in these countries, and will be hung for blasphemy for even speaking out. The radical governments are following what they feel is the example of the Prophet Muhammed (Peace Be Unto Him) in fighting non-Muslims, without the minor bother of exhausting all other remedies, as he did before reluctantly going to war.
Our own government immediately instituted all of these new restrictions at airports. Has anyone else noticed that the US citizen passengers are now greatly inconvenienced by regulations that would have had zero effect on the hijackers had they been in place September 11?
I do not know what the government knew about the terrorists. The FBI did raid an ISP in Richardson TX that was operated by Muslims and physically located in or near the main Dallas TX area Mosque. Several Muslim families protested this raid of what they called a pure business ISP, with no connection to terrorists. The Mosque has been there some time, and I, a Baptist, have bought books from the associated book store, which is a convenient source of Islamic literature operated by Mulism ladies. Neither the Mosque nor the bookstore present even a hint of association with Muslim radicals.