Texas Instruments has a spotty history in computing. In general, they do well in business-to-business sales and fail miserably in consumer sales. The TI-99/4A failed because they tried to keep peripherals and functions proprietary. Consumers said,"Take a hike." The DSP does very well because it can be customized easily to the customer's specification, then made and sold in huge lots. Several attempts at desktop PC's showed promise, then died. TI promoted their own proprietary software and copy protection on PCs, both rejected outright by consumers. They did get calculators and portable computers right, finally, but sold the laptop business when the fast-changing market was too much.
TI will do well, and tales of their demise are always exaggerated and premature. Tom Engibous inherits a company that has learned from past mistakes, and redesigned its methods. They learned the hard way that a company must listen to customers, not dictate to them. Predictably, they will sell tons of well designed and innovative components to other businesses. They might also sell some consumer goods, which will do well for a short time, then be left in the dust by hungry competitors. The inertia of this company makes learning a slow process, a disastrous flaw in the consumer market today.
A group of technicians I worked with many years ago repaired and ran a five-watt FM stereo station. We had the permission of the base commander and the tacit approval of the local government. The feature program was an hour each day programmed by local high school students. The station operator refused to acknowledge any comments on this hour by any adults. Remember, this was a military base, so total anarchy was out of the question.
New York Attorney General Spitzer fears the misuse of aggregated information. He is a politician, and his biggest fear is rapid unemployment and loss of job benefits. If he is like many, he has severely abused his privileges and milked his job for everything he could get. I have no vested interest in being right, and would be delighted if someone could prove me mistaken in this case. Be aware that politicians are usually promoting their own freedom, not yours. When Patrick Henry said,"Give me liberty or give me death." he was referring to the liberty of Patrick Henry, chiefly from English creditors, not the liberty of slaves, servants, peons, trappers, fisherman, craftsmen, small farmers, etc.
McCain and Gore seem to be suffering from foot_in_mouth disease. Each is easily identified by the self-inflicted hole in his foot. Vote Republican, vote for donkeys, vote for Libertarians, or Progressives, or Socialists. Do not stay home and discard your vote as futile, because that is the only known way to guarantee a dictatorship by a minority. Dictators take power because nobody cares enough to stop them in time.
My IBM 365CSD Thinkpad runs quite well with Red Hat Linux 5.2. I have a 486 chip, and upgraded to 24 MB memory. Hardware limits, not Linux, limit me to a 640x480x16 window on a 1024x768 virtual screen and 33.6K on my 33.6K PCMCIA modem. The 512 MB hard disk forced choices during installation. I like Linux because it works. Previous experience with M$ Win95 (M$ backup to my own new floppies failed on the first try) and OS/2 (640x480x16 color limit) left me with a bad attitude toward expensive proprietary software.
Yes, Playboy has articles. I have read it, and at one time subscribed to it, since the Marilyn Monroe center picture in issue number one. The articles tend to be well written, thoughtful, and on a wide variety of subjects. Playboy does not fear controversial issues. Professional writers have grown to admire Playboy, because if the staff sees a good, but unsolicited, article, they will work with the writer to get it properly polished for publication. I found only one statement in the article that upset me. Gillian did not want to try a dual boot, dual disk configuration because of rumored problems. I have booted M$ and Linux from separate disks for years, using LILO.
After careful and lengthy review in a number of locations, this product has earned the one-finger salute award for ideas whose time has never arrived. As it stands, the device has two impediments that cost the inventor untold wealth. The hand dryer requires a 110 VAC 20 A power source, and 220VA is a lot of power. Tesla's broadcast power system would eliminate the cost of electricity. Also, the inventor will become rich beyond belief, as soon as he figures out how to dilute and cheapen air.
Many years ago, a charming teenage saleslady for a CATV service offered me MTV music IN STEREO (her emphasis) for free if I would sign up for six premium TV channels. I explained to her,"I think I would rather be strung up by the thumbs." Remeber that in the time capsule for the 1939/1940 New York World's Fair that we preserved a copy of "Flatfoot Floogie with a Floy Floy" as great music. That Time Capsule was lost. Maybe we can lose this one, too.
Dallas area investors should be very jumpy after reading a report like this. They saw what happened when Jimmy Ling went to work on Ling Temco Vought (stock collapsed, Braniff Airlines never recovered), when Dallas' biggest bank went bankrupt (bad loans to oil and real estate, good old boy practices), and the Billy Sol Estes schemes ( took much money by unethical practices, but only broke one law when he declared that an empty silo was full). It's your money, and everyone wants it. Be careful.
A few years back, at a North Texas PC Users Group meeting, a nice young lady from Intel gave me an "Intel Inside" badge. I treasured it. At the time, my home computers had Harris, AMD, and Texas Instruments CPU's. I still have Intel competitors in most of my equipment. Price rules, other features are minor considerations.
I have worked with missiles and countermeasures since the days of the Nike Ajax. What you saw in this article is a very small part of a very big picture.
1. The constant see-saw of measures and countermeasures never stops. Most of what does happen is classified, and for good reason. The United States does not want the rest of the world to know the capabilities and limitations of our systems. What we know is classified. What we don't know is classified at a higher level.
2. Reviewing the article showed me several problems. Celestial navigation first appeared with the SNARK missile. Older residents in the Cape Canaveral area recall the SNARK-infested waters of the time, so-called because of the number of aborted missions exploded by the Range Safety Officer. Also, The missile in the article was probably a hand-built prototype. Laboratory engineers fondly assume that any prototype can be duplicated indefinitely. This is not true , and never has been. Manufacturing engineers are well aware of the differences between a prototype and a producible item.
3. I know the Pacific Missile Range, having worked there. I congratulate them on a successful shot. These people are all too well aware how far removed we are from a full-up system.
4. Others have commented on other scenarios for delivering destruction to the United States. The concerns are real, but irrelevant to the anti-missile scenario.
5. The fear of multiple missiles and multiple warheads is shared by the military. One early answer was the Nike Zeus, prohibitively expensive and already plagued with problems in early test. It disappeared, and only insiders know where the remaining hardware is.
6. There was some talk of chaff, decoys, and other countermeasures. The military knows all about these countermeasures, as well as many others. It is an ongoing game with the rest of the world, and ordinary civilians are not even allowed to know the relevant terminology.
7. One continuing problem is resources. In simpler terrms, everybody wants more money. All of the people desiring money are eloquent, and paint a grim picture of what will happen if they don't get their budget requirements. Welcome to the real world. Sometimes the eloquent are correct, and the government must move quickly to cover their blunders, usually by classifying some documents "for reasons of national security". All too often, this means some person's continued employment.
Back in 1979 0r 1980, someone wrote a series of articles in a technical magazine. It included a good discussion of encryption by position changes and symbol changes. It also included a software program (I hate the word "implementation")for DES that would run on a computer with 1K (one kilobyte) memory. I returned the magazines to the owner, and no longer remember the title. The series was easy to understand, education level high school algebra.
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Texas Instruments has a spotty history in computing. In general, they do well in business-to-business sales and fail miserably in consumer sales. The TI-99/4A failed because they tried to keep peripherals and functions proprietary. Consumers said,"Take a hike." The DSP does very well because it can be customized easily to the customer's specification, then made and sold in huge lots. Several attempts at desktop PC's showed promise, then died. TI promoted their own proprietary software and copy protection on PCs, both rejected outright by consumers. They did get calculators and portable computers right, finally, but sold the laptop business when the fast-changing market was too much.
TI will do well, and tales of their demise are always exaggerated and premature. Tom Engibous inherits a company that has learned from past mistakes, and redesigned its methods. They learned the hard way that a company must listen to customers, not dictate to them. Predictably, they will sell tons of well designed and innovative components to other businesses. They might also sell some consumer goods, which will do well for a short time, then be left in the dust by hungry competitors. The inertia of this company makes learning a slow process, a disastrous flaw in the consumer market today.
A group of technicians I worked with many years ago repaired and ran a five-watt FM stereo station. We had the permission of the base commander and the tacit approval of the local government. The feature program was an hour each day programmed by local high school students. The station operator refused to acknowledge any comments on this hour by any adults. Remember, this was a military base, so total anarchy was out of the question.
New York Attorney General Spitzer fears the misuse of aggregated information. He is a politician, and his biggest fear is rapid unemployment and loss of job benefits. If he is like many, he has severely abused his privileges and milked his job for everything he could get. I have no vested interest in being right, and would be delighted if someone could prove me mistaken in this case. Be aware that politicians are usually promoting their own freedom, not yours. When Patrick Henry said,"Give me liberty or give me death." he was referring to the liberty of Patrick Henry, chiefly from English creditors, not the liberty of slaves, servants, peons, trappers, fisherman, craftsmen, small farmers, etc.
McCain and Gore seem to be suffering from foot_in_mouth disease. Each is easily identified by the self-inflicted hole in his foot. Vote Republican, vote for donkeys, vote for Libertarians, or Progressives, or Socialists. Do not stay home and discard your vote as futile, because that is the only known way to guarantee a dictatorship by a minority. Dictators take power because nobody cares enough to stop them in time.
My IBM 365CSD Thinkpad runs quite well with Red Hat Linux 5.2. I have a 486 chip, and upgraded to 24 MB memory. Hardware limits, not Linux, limit me to a 640x480x16 window on a 1024x768 virtual screen and 33.6K on my 33.6K PCMCIA modem. The 512 MB hard disk forced choices during installation. I like Linux because it works. Previous experience with M$ Win95 (M$ backup to my own new floppies failed on the first try) and OS/2 (640x480x16 color limit) left me with a bad attitude toward expensive proprietary software.
Yes, Playboy has articles. I have read it, and at one time subscribed to it, since the Marilyn Monroe center picture in issue number one. The articles tend to be well written, thoughtful, and on a wide variety of subjects. Playboy does not fear controversial issues. Professional writers have grown to admire Playboy, because if the staff sees a good, but unsolicited, article, they will work with the writer to get it properly polished for publication. I found only one statement in the article that upset me. Gillian did not want to try a dual boot, dual disk configuration because of rumored problems. I have booted M$ and Linux from separate disks for years, using LILO.
After careful and lengthy review in a number of locations, this product has earned the one-finger salute award for ideas whose time has never arrived. As it stands, the device has two impediments that cost the inventor untold wealth. The hand dryer requires a 110 VAC 20 A power source, and 220VA is a lot of power. Tesla's broadcast power system would eliminate the cost of electricity. Also, the inventor will become rich beyond belief, as soon as he figures out how to dilute and cheapen air.
Many years ago, a charming teenage saleslady for a CATV service offered me MTV music IN STEREO (her emphasis) for free if I would sign up for six premium TV channels. I explained to her,"I think I would rather be strung up by the thumbs." Remeber that in the time capsule for the 1939/1940 New York World's Fair that we preserved a copy of "Flatfoot Floogie with a Floy Floy" as great music. That Time Capsule was lost. Maybe we can lose this one, too.
Dallas area investors should be very jumpy after reading a report like this. They saw what happened when Jimmy Ling went to work on Ling Temco Vought (stock collapsed, Braniff Airlines never recovered), when Dallas' biggest bank went bankrupt (bad loans to oil and real estate, good old boy practices), and the Billy Sol Estes schemes ( took much money by unethical practices, but only broke one law when he declared that an empty silo was full). It's your money, and everyone wants it. Be careful.
A few years back, at a North Texas PC Users Group meeting, a nice young lady from Intel gave me an "Intel Inside" badge. I treasured it. At the time, my home computers had Harris, AMD, and Texas Instruments CPU's. I still have Intel competitors in most of my equipment. Price rules, other features are minor considerations.
I have worked with missiles and countermeasures since the days of the Nike Ajax. What you saw in this article is a very small part of a very big picture.
1. The constant see-saw of measures and countermeasures never stops. Most of what does happen is classified, and for good reason. The United States does not want the rest of the world to know the capabilities and limitations of our systems. What we know is classified. What we don't know is classified at a higher level.
2. Reviewing the article showed me several problems. Celestial navigation first appeared with the SNARK missile. Older residents in the Cape Canaveral area recall the SNARK-infested waters of the time, so-called because of the number of aborted missions exploded by the Range Safety Officer. Also, The missile in the article was probably a hand-built prototype. Laboratory engineers fondly assume that any prototype can be duplicated indefinitely. This is not true , and never has been. Manufacturing engineers are well aware of the differences between a prototype and a producible item.
3. I know the Pacific Missile Range, having worked there. I congratulate them on a successful shot. These people are all too well aware how far removed we are from a full-up system.
4. Others have commented on other scenarios for delivering destruction to the United States. The concerns are real, but irrelevant to the anti-missile scenario.
5. The fear of multiple missiles and multiple warheads is shared by the military. One early answer was the Nike Zeus, prohibitively expensive and already plagued with problems in early test. It disappeared, and only insiders know where the remaining hardware is.
6. There was some talk of chaff, decoys, and other countermeasures. The military knows all about these countermeasures, as well as many others. It is an ongoing game with the rest of the world, and ordinary civilians are not even allowed to know the relevant terminology.
7. One continuing problem is resources. In simpler terrms, everybody wants more money. All of the people desiring money are eloquent, and paint a grim picture of what will happen if they don't get their budget requirements. Welcome to the real world. Sometimes the eloquent are correct, and the government must move quickly to cover their blunders, usually by classifying some documents "for reasons of national security". All too often, this means some person's continued employment.
Back in 1979 0r 1980, someone wrote a series of articles in a technical magazine. It included a good discussion of encryption by position changes and symbol changes. It also included a software program (I hate the word "implementation")for DES that would run on a computer with 1K (one kilobyte) memory. I returned the magazines to the owner, and no longer remember the title. The series was easy to understand, education level high school algebra.