And seriously, a person only has to compare Apple products at launch to the competition to see if there is any R&D being done.
The iPhone at launch was entirely like any other phone on the market. It inspired a new generation of phones from almost every other manufacturer. The bulk of the R&D on that product might have gone into ergonomics and user interface and not "new technology", but that's still R&D and it's still significant.
To elaborate, over the course of a year, the entire celestial sky is visible at the equator. At the poles, only half the celestial sky is visible.
Large chunks of the sky are circumpolar, that is to say are visible any time of year because they never set. The more stars you have that don't set, the more you have that never rise.
That's not the case in Arctic Canada, except for specific short periods of intense weather. Due to the presence of the Arctic Ocean, the temperatures are much more moderate so air travel occurs pretty much all year long.
Indeed, and Canada has tons of its own infrastructure. You can drive to the Arctic, and scheduled airline flights get to many points up there as well.
Now, the parts of the Arctic that are being considered here may not have roads to them, but it is still a relatively easy jaunt to them from ports in eastern Canada and the northeastern USA. It might be easy to get from Tierra del Fuego to Antarctica by boat, but you still have a lot of overland schlepping that you wouldn't have to the same degree in Arctic Canada.
Also, simply thinking practically, at the South Pole half the heavens are inaccessible. This is true at the North Pole too, but the visible regions of the sky are complementary.
Oh, it was useful if you liked sports - but things got complicated when we moved to satellite TV and digital cable. You needed two tuners to get all your channels, and that just started getting silly.
If your point is that 3D is a niche product and many people won't want it, then I agree. Colour TV is something everybody wants; HD television is something almost everybody will want once they see the improvement in picture quality; 3D just isn't that much more interesting.
Actually, with enough RAM a VIC-20 is a pretty fun machine. There is a fellow in Montreal that makes 32K expanders for them that are pretty cheap so you can have a 37K VIC-20 and geek out to your heart's content. The simple architecture makes it relatively easy to program.
The C64 can do a lot more, but added a lot of complexity. The higher video resolution was definitely a plus, though.
Mail them a cheque (err, check, my American friends) and make a point. If millions of customers did this, their payment processing costs would go through the roof.
For what it is, it's pretty large. Why not come out and have some fun? I'm crossing half the country, surely you can brave the 401.
I agree that it might be fun to have a huge retro-computing festival with all sorts of computer platforms supported. Maybe one day someone can put that together.
Commodore BASIC was pretty lax in some of its form. You could get away with a lot of things that strictly speaking shouldn't have worked. Dropping the semicolons was one, e.g.
PRINT A$;B$;C$;D$ PRINT A$B$C$D$
Both functioned the same, but
PRINT 4;5;6;7
would require the semicolons to separate the numbers properly.
Creative BASIC programmers took advantage of this as a way to save memory. Similarly, strictly speaking for/next loops were structured like FOR T=1 TO 100:[ACTION]:NEXT T but typically Commodore programmers dropped the spaces and the variable in the NEXT statement so you would see things like FORT=1TO100:[ACTION]:NEXT... harder to read but more efficient memorywise.
I learned a weird trick back in the day that Commodore BASIC parsed "." as zero faster than it parsed "0" which ended up with even sneakier for/next loops like FORT=.TO99:[ACTION]:NEXT...:) Not very user-friendly but every cycle mattered!
I'm sure the source code to my BBS looks like a dog's breakfast as a result, but all those little steps let it fit in under 30K of RAM and it ran pretty fast, for what it was and for that on which it ran.
Isn't that sort of like saying that, by default, a fridge is inconvenient because you have to open a door to get your beer out?
With the C128, the 1571 gave full capacity by default. With a C64, it didn't - it pretended to be a 1541 drive so that copy-protected games worked. A simple command and the emulation was disabled so that you could have full disk capacity. It was a brilliant, user-friendly move if you ask me, in an era when user friendliness was just beginning (the Mac was just released that year after all).
Bring a real book along with your Kindle. They still work if you drop them, too, which is a bonus.
I use my Kindle to keep up with news and for portability, and I definitely read a lot of books on it, but I still buy quite a few physical books, and I always take one with me when I fly - ideally one that I am just starting, so that I have lots of reading material if I need it.
File and forget works with film. Digital archives are better if you do the work; analog archives are better if you don't. And over the decades, almost inevitably, someone forgets to do the work.
And "name brand" may not be what you think it is. Very few of the name brands make their own media. Many of them hire out the cheapest producer to make it for them.
Taiyo Yuden (aka Thats aka JVC) and Verbatim (primarily made by Mitsubishi Chemical Company) are pretty much the best and have been for years. You will pay a little more for them, but they have a far higher chance of surviving several years.
Also, don't burn at maximum speed. That maximizes convenience, not quality. Burn around half maximum speed, or slightly faster. You can test your own burner's results to see where the sweet spot is, but it's never at maximum speed.
You almost brought up my suggestion. Do what you can to archive your digital images, of course... but shoot some on photographic film, too. Film is easily stored and easily used again. Plus you can scan it and do your whole digital thing too. Just keep the negatives.
Film cameras are cheap, and colour negative film is still readily available. Shoot half a dozen rolls of your kids a year and store the negatives well, and you'll have a Plan B in case your digital archiving project becomes a problem.
I know some will probably hate this suggestion, but at a certain point, why not just run wire? If you can't do the run yourself, you could hire somebody to install it for a hundred or two hundred dollars at most. For that money you could probably get wire run to a few places in your home.
That's what I've done. I use wire when I need to do bandwidth-intensive activity, and I use wireless when I'm not near wire (which is almost exclusively when I'm doing low-bandwidth stuff). Do file transfers, torrents, and the like via wire. Besides, the speed you can get out of GigE wire is a lot faster than you will get out of any wireless at this point. Remember also that wireless is half duplex (i.e. the speed is shared for both directions, and indeed for everyone using it). Wire is your own and is dedicated to you. If you have a server, you can talk to your server at GigE speeds and not affect the Internet traffic for the other users one tiny bit.
One other thing worth considering, if you have technical ability, is some of the small single-board computers (I use an Alix 2D3). Hook up a good consumer router with DHCP turned off, and use that for WiFi (I use a Linksys WRT54G). Don't use the router's WAN port. Let the single-board computer do all the work for you. The only limiting factor on mine is that the wired Ethernet ports are 100BaseTX so I'd be maxed out with a 100 megabit Internet connection, but in my part of the world such a connection is not imminent so I have a lot of room to expand. I'm sure gigabit SBCs are available now or will be soon. With a quarter gig of RAM and a 600 MHz Geode processor, mine twiddles its thumbs even when I max out my Internet connection (plus I have about 15 OpenVPN tunnels running on it). It was a terrific investment.
Modern Debian runs fine on a 486DX (and worked fine on the same system while it was still a 486SX, a year ago). I'm not certain that many Linux distros will install from scratch on a 486 today but the system has taken upgrades successfully over the past six years. The only accommodation I've made (primarily to accommodate its modest RAM - 32 MB, good for the era but not by today's standards) is to compile a custom kernel.
2 percentage points, not 2%. Think of it as call failure rates of 3% and 5% and now you're looking at a 66.7% difference (.05/.03 = 1.666.., hence.666... or 66.7% increase).
Or Canada. 90%+ of the country has no coverage but 98% of the population has coverage because Canadians tend to live fairly close to the US border (the climate is warmer there).
Also, CDMA/WCDMA services like UMTS change service area as they are under increasing or decreasing load. The coverage area of a 3G cell site is much larger when it's under zero load than when it's exceptionally busy. 2G GSM sites have a fixed coverage area (and a fixed capacity for calls). On UMTS, one more call on a busy site is probably going to work although the site loses a little coverage area. On 2G GSM, one more call on a site at capacity means that last call gets rejected (unless it's a 911/112 call). That could explain some of the issues.
Slashdot Mirror
And seriously, a person only has to compare Apple products at launch to the competition to see if there is any R&D being done.
The iPhone at launch was entirely like any other phone on the market. It inspired a new generation of phones from almost every other manufacturer. The bulk of the R&D on that product might have gone into ergonomics and user interface and not "new technology", but that's still R&D and it's still significant.
I don't think it takes a doctorate in etiquette to realize that this is a pretty inappropriate joke.
There's plenty of bare rock in northern Canada.
There are also building techniques that solve the problem of permafrost. They require extra expense, mind.
To elaborate, over the course of a year, the entire celestial sky is visible at the equator. At the poles, only half the celestial sky is visible.
Large chunks of the sky are circumpolar, that is to say are visible any time of year because they never set. The more stars you have that don't set, the more you have that never rise.
That's not the case in Arctic Canada, except for specific short periods of intense weather. Due to the presence of the Arctic Ocean, the temperatures are much more moderate so air travel occurs pretty much all year long.
Indeed, and Canada has tons of its own infrastructure. You can drive to the Arctic, and scheduled airline flights get to many points up there as well.
Now, the parts of the Arctic that are being considered here may not have roads to them, but it is still a relatively easy jaunt to them from ports in eastern Canada and the northeastern USA. It might be easy to get from Tierra del Fuego to Antarctica by boat, but you still have a lot of overland schlepping that you wouldn't have to the same degree in Arctic Canada.
Also, simply thinking practically, at the South Pole half the heavens are inaccessible. This is true at the North Pole too, but the visible regions of the sky are complementary.
Oh, it was useful if you liked sports - but things got complicated when we moved to satellite TV and digital cable. You needed two tuners to get all your channels, and that just started getting silly.
If your point is that 3D is a niche product and many people won't want it, then I agree. Colour TV is something everybody wants; HD television is something almost everybody will want once they see the improvement in picture quality; 3D just isn't that much more interesting.
Actually, with enough RAM a VIC-20 is a pretty fun machine. There is a fellow in Montreal that makes 32K expanders for them that are pretty cheap so you can have a 37K VIC-20 and geek out to your heart's content. The simple architecture makes it relatively easy to program.
The C64 can do a lot more, but added a lot of complexity. The higher video resolution was definitely a plus, though.
Mail them a cheque (err, check, my American friends) and make a point. If millions of customers did this, their payment processing costs would go through the roof.
This happens every year. Plan now for 2012.
For what it is, it's pretty large. Why not come out and have some fun? I'm crossing half the country, surely you can brave the 401.
I agree that it might be fun to have a huge retro-computing festival with all sorts of computer platforms supported. Maybe one day someone can put that together.
Commodore BASIC was pretty lax in some of its form. You could get away with a lot of things that strictly speaking shouldn't have worked. Dropping the semicolons was one, e.g.
PRINT A$;B$;C$;D$
PRINT A$B$C$D$
Both functioned the same, but
PRINT 4;5;6;7
would require the semicolons to separate the numbers properly.
Creative BASIC programmers took advantage of this as a way to save memory. Similarly, strictly speaking for/next loops were structured like FOR T=1 TO 100:[ACTION]:NEXT T but typically Commodore programmers dropped the spaces and the variable in the NEXT statement so you would see things like FORT=1TO100:[ACTION]:NEXT ... harder to read but more efficient memorywise.
I learned a weird trick back in the day that Commodore BASIC parsed "." as zero faster than it parsed "0" which ended up with even sneakier for/next loops like FORT=.TO99:[ACTION]:NEXT ... :) Not very user-friendly but every cycle mattered!
I'm sure the source code to my BBS looks like a dog's breakfast as a result, but all those little steps let it fit in under 30K of RAM and it ran pretty fast, for what it was and for that on which it ran.
Yes, because slashdot is productive and useful. :)
Maybe you should get off the Internet and go do some coding or something productive.
Fly out Friday night, fly home Sunday. I'll be there.
Granted I planned a month ago but I could still go this weekend if I'd just read about this and didn't have any plans tomorrow.
(1,200 miles away, but we have non-stop Toronto flights, which helps.)
Isn't that sort of like saying that, by default, a fridge is inconvenient because you have to open a door to get your beer out?
With the C128, the 1571 gave full capacity by default. With a C64, it didn't - it pretended to be a 1541 drive so that copy-protected games worked. A simple command and the emulation was disabled so that you could have full disk capacity. It was a brilliant, user-friendly move if you ask me, in an era when user friendliness was just beginning (the Mac was just released that year after all).
Bring a real book along with your Kindle. They still work if you drop them, too, which is a bonus.
I use my Kindle to keep up with news and for portability, and I definitely read a lot of books on it, but I still buy quite a few physical books, and I always take one with me when I fly - ideally one that I am just starting, so that I have lots of reading material if I need it.
File and forget works with film. Digital archives are better if you do the work; analog archives are better if you don't. And over the decades, almost inevitably, someone forgets to do the work.
And "name brand" may not be what you think it is. Very few of the name brands make their own media. Many of them hire out the cheapest producer to make it for them.
Taiyo Yuden (aka Thats aka JVC) and Verbatim (primarily made by Mitsubishi Chemical Company) are pretty much the best and have been for years. You will pay a little more for them, but they have a far higher chance of surviving several years.
Also, don't burn at maximum speed. That maximizes convenience, not quality. Burn around half maximum speed, or slightly faster. You can test your own burner's results to see where the sweet spot is, but it's never at maximum speed.
You almost brought up my suggestion. Do what you can to archive your digital images, of course... but shoot some on photographic film, too. Film is easily stored and easily used again. Plus you can scan it and do your whole digital thing too. Just keep the negatives.
Film cameras are cheap, and colour negative film is still readily available. Shoot half a dozen rolls of your kids a year and store the negatives well, and you'll have a Plan B in case your digital archiving project becomes a problem.
I know some will probably hate this suggestion, but at a certain point, why not just run wire? If you can't do the run yourself, you could hire somebody to install it for a hundred or two hundred dollars at most. For that money you could probably get wire run to a few places in your home.
That's what I've done. I use wire when I need to do bandwidth-intensive activity, and I use wireless when I'm not near wire (which is almost exclusively when I'm doing low-bandwidth stuff). Do file transfers, torrents, and the like via wire. Besides, the speed you can get out of GigE wire is a lot faster than you will get out of any wireless at this point. Remember also that wireless is half duplex (i.e. the speed is shared for both directions, and indeed for everyone using it). Wire is your own and is dedicated to you. If you have a server, you can talk to your server at GigE speeds and not affect the Internet traffic for the other users one tiny bit.
One other thing worth considering, if you have technical ability, is some of the small single-board computers (I use an Alix 2D3). Hook up a good consumer router with DHCP turned off, and use that for WiFi (I use a Linksys WRT54G). Don't use the router's WAN port. Let the single-board computer do all the work for you. The only limiting factor on mine is that the wired Ethernet ports are 100BaseTX so I'd be maxed out with a 100 megabit Internet connection, but in my part of the world such a connection is not imminent so I have a lot of room to expand. I'm sure gigabit SBCs are available now or will be soon. With a quarter gig of RAM and a 600 MHz Geode processor, mine twiddles its thumbs even when I max out my Internet connection (plus I have about 15 OpenVPN tunnels running on it). It was a terrific investment.
Modern Debian runs fine on a 486DX (and worked fine on the same system while it was still a 486SX, a year ago). I'm not certain that many Linux distros will install from scratch on a 486 today but the system has taken upgrades successfully over the past six years. The only accommodation I've made (primarily to accommodate its modest RAM - 32 MB, good for the era but not by today's standards) is to compile a custom kernel.
2 percentage points, not 2%. Think of it as call failure rates of 3% and 5% and now you're looking at a 66.7% difference (.05/.03 = 1.666.., hence .666... or 66.7% increase).
Or Canada. 90%+ of the country has no coverage but 98% of the population has coverage because Canadians tend to live fairly close to the US border (the climate is warmer there).
Also, CDMA/WCDMA services like UMTS change service area as they are under increasing or decreasing load. The coverage area of a 3G cell site is much larger when it's under zero load than when it's exceptionally busy. 2G GSM sites have a fixed coverage area (and a fixed capacity for calls). On UMTS, one more call on a busy site is probably going to work although the site loses a little coverage area. On 2G GSM, one more call on a site at capacity means that last call gets rejected (unless it's a 911/112 call). That could explain some of the issues.
View it as 3% failure versus 5%. Does that change your perspective?
The failure rate increases by 66.7%. To me that's statistically significant.
Is it burdensome? Probably not.