Many Mac users including myself like the fact that everything works prety well in OS X. We also like the unix underpinning. We like not having to mess with spybot and all that crap. I see little value in mucking up a perfectly good Mac by putting Windows on it. Apple would be crazy to ditch OS X, especially in favor of Windows.
I remember the days of junk faxes. This was before cheap plain paper fax machines became ubiquitous. Most businesses used inexpensive faxes with a thermal printer. We'd come in on Monday morning and find the entire roll of paper used up with coils of junk faxes strewn about on the floor. We'd miss important faxes due to all the junk fax noise. Customer orders were lost. The fax machine became almost useless. A small cheer went up when we heard junk faxes had been outlawed. Here we go again...
I haven't ever really understood what the RIAA hopes to achieve from all their lawsuits and extortion rackets, I mean all they are doing is alienating their core market the way they have been going recently I can't wait for someone to make a stand against them in court.
One thing the RIAA has achieved is they've made lots of enemies. There's an old saying, "Friends come and friends go but enemies accumulate." They've done such a fine job of making enemies that should some extraordinarily bad things happen to RIAA staffers, the pool of potential suspects will be huge.
You basically missed every point I made completely. As far as transistors being conceptually useful 40 years ago, that statement was made in the context of computers, not radios.
OK, then. IBM was manufacturing the system 360 40 years ago with transistors. It was the first system I wrote programs for.
Your approach of saying that nothing new has been developed because there are still transistors at the core of things is patently absurd.
That ain't what I said. I said no breakthrus. Yes there's been plenty of incremental development over the past 6 decades building on the work of Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain. But most of this stuff has been the next logical step.
As far as nanotechnology, there are working applications available today, including paint-on solar panels.
Yes and as another poster mentioned, transistors can be fabricated from nanotubes. Of course, there's much more promise there. But nanotech has been around for awhile now and yet it simply hasn't had the kind of effect on our daily lives like the transistor did in the 60s. You mentioned computers. The IBM 360 may seem clunky today but back then it was a miracle. My high school had a card punch, card reader, terminal, modem and a teletype through which we could submit programs to an IBM 360. It took all day but it worked... much to the detriment of my other school work. Mine was probably one of the first high school class with any kind of computer access. Yes, computers are MUCH better today. I have a house full of them running every OS I can lay my hands on. But none were as big a deal as that old clunker because before it there was nothing available to me.
Are you serious? The first microprocessor wasn't even manufactured in the commercial sector until 1971 (IIRC) and a multi-million dollar supercomputer from the early 80s couldn't keep up with the average desktop machine of today.
Yes. Today's microprocessors are made with a deep submicron CMOS process but it's still transistors. Yep. Computing power has increased many orders of magnitude because we've refined transistor technology. Just because we're better at connecting them together doesn't change the fact that this is transistor technology.
Just as a single transistor was only conceptually useful 40 years ago, quantum gates and storage techniques are conceptually useful in the present day.
Woa up there partner! There were transistor radios in production in 1966. I had one then and I got my first cassette player a year later. I worked for a company formed in 1963 building Royer oscillator based DC-DC converters for spacecraft. Your assertion was true in the 50s. But then it wasn't too much of a stretch to picture how the point contact transistor might be adapted for production. We were already able to build Selenium rectifiers then. It's not so clear how to refine quantum gates and storage techniques such that we can produce large quatities of useful products.
Fab process improvements are incremental improvements in our ability to producte transistors. Nanotechnology certainly has promise but it isn't clear that it will be realized. There are spooky risks associated with it too. I hope we have the opportunity to revisit this discussion in 5 or 10 years.:-)
Maybe he does lack imagination as some have said but he's got a point.
Consider the field of electronics. Most of the engineering work during the past 50 years has been refining the fabrication of the transistor and it's application. Regardless of whether you're talking about TV, audio equipment, computers, defense systems, industrial controls or any other product made of electronics.
It's all been about the transistor. The nobel prize in physics was awarded to 3 engineers in 1947. It took more than a decade to get the transistor into a form that could be used in prodcution. Since then, there have been many refinements including printed circuit boards, integrated circuits and lots of miniaturization of systems. We've gotten lots of mileage out of the transistor because of it's versatility as a controlled source. It can be used as a switch or as an amplifier. The mother of it's invention was the need for a better way of performing these switching and amplification functions than vacuum tubes could provide.
Transistor technology is mature. Discrete transistor circuitry is already considered as quaint as tube circuitry. Soon, we'll regard standard ICs the same way.
But where are the glass or plastic light based circuits on Star Trek and 2001 Space Oddessy? The answer is that awaits a breakthrough in physics of the same magnitude as the transistor was.
Since most of the people reading Slashdot are programmers rather than EEs, I will point out that much of the software we develop runs on machines made of this 50 year old transistor technology. Having machines based on light or water or living tissue or whatever form they'll eventually take is bound to change this.
But this breakthrough in physics hasn't happened yet. It might be next year or it might be 30 years from now. Look at the time it took us to progress from vacuum tubes to transistors. It's hard to predict. But there will be a certain transition period between transistor technology and whatever replaces it. Only then will we have some idea what the next big thing might be. Whatever it will be, it ain't in sight yet.
I took a college course which used an eBook in pdf form for the course text. Once the course was complete, the eBook disappeared. It simply wasn't practical to print this "book". So I have no reference for that course. I'm one of those people who saved almost all of my textbooks from all the college courses I took. I just can't remember all the details I might need later on. Occasionally, I need to look up something. If I have the textbook, I can quickly find what I'm looking for. Going to the library isn't practical and most libraries lack books on esoteric technical subjects. Those textbooks have come in handy on numerous occasions.
I'm talking about those big honkin' surge protectors like the power company uses that attach to a ground stake and the coax feedline runs through it. He also better have a good quality grounding system. All towers get hit by lightning sooner or later. Yessir. The nail that sticks up gets pounded.
The Tesla vs. Edison dispute was over transmission of power. AC won because the transformer and 3 phase power made it more economical over large distances. It still is.
However, over small distances, DC has lots of advantages. Telephone Central Offices have historically used -48 volt DC power and modern telephone switching systems have the same kinds of power requirements as servers. Why not power servers the same way as a Central Office Switch? Battery chargers constantly float charge large banks of station batteries with the 48 volt DC power distributed to the individual racs via bus bars. Highly efficient DC-DC converters at the point of use step down the voltage. If the system is designed cleverly, isolation could be eliminated, simplifying the down converters and boosting their efficiency. The whole system is a great big UPS with lots of hold-up time.
I'm not surprised that VoIP doesn't play well over ComCuss or RoadRunarounder. I was with Roadrunarounder for 3 years. The first year and a half was flawless. Then came the packet loss. They claimed it was "signal strength". They replaced our cable drop with RJ6 but the problem came back. Then they replaced the hybrid splitter transformer but the packet loss reared it's head after a few months. Then the packet loss went away for 4 or 5 months and it was smooth sailing. It reared it's head again and RoadRunarounder denied there was a problem. Then they had techs measure it. It was so bad I couldn't ssh to a shell account. I showed them this and their response was that they don't support that. At first, their tech support didn't understand what ssh was. If it ain't web or email, they don't understand it. I gave up and switched to DSL with a small local company 3 years ago and it's been smooth sailing since.
The bottom line is the major electronics makers still dominate the market...
There are still major electronics makers that actually make electronics products. I thought most of them had hollowed out to the point that they were little more than a brand name with a sales force. That's pretty much the case in the US anyhow.
I use an old Pioneer receiver from the 70's and some big Advent speakers. Man that sounds good. Ya'll can keep all that surround sound crap. The old Pioneers paired up with Advents don't clip. The SX939 is 70W per channel and they MEAN 70W. Yessir. That beautiful blue dial and my lavalamp glowing beside it looks swank. Yeah, keep your jakey surround sound stuff. I'll give the old stuff a home.
This article has been planted by the "trade group" to further their self-serving interests. Their lobbyists can point to it as an example of why the cap on H1-B and L-1 visas should be extended or why all the outsourcing and sweetheart trade deals with foreign gov'ts and companies ain't so bad afterall.
Well, it doesn't jive with the Bureau of Labor Statistics data. According to the BLS, IT lost 17% of it's workforce in the US over the past 5 years, communication equipment lost 43% of it's workforce and semiconductors and electronic components lost 37% of it's workforce. The US electronics industry has shriveled. Hundreds of thousands of engineers have been unemployed or underemployed (in menial jobs) as a result. I personally know several dozen. No doubt they bristle with rage as they read these rosy assessments of the job market.
You'd think people would have gotten the message
on
RadioShack CEO Resigns
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This isn't the first person to be exposed for lying about academic credentials and it probably won't be the last. Nonetheless, after so many have been keelhauled for doing this, I'm surprised that people still lie in writing about their academinc credentials and surprised that there are still companies not checking for this, particularly for executive candidates. No doubt some of the Radio Shack board have egg on their faces as well, especially in light of the drastic cuts that ananlysts suggest are needed.
Academic credentials are about the easiest qualification to check for. Just call the school. Either the candidate has the degree they claim to have or they do not. There's no shade of gray. That's why it's so stupid to lie about this. It's easy to check and there's no wiggle room. Why then do so many do it? Why then are there companies that don't check for this?
The RIAA seeks to change the conditions of the sale after the fact. There was no rule barring the copying of CDs or vinyl records to digital format for the purpose of backup or for the purpose of having the music in a more convenient format when the CD was sold. Afterall, the RIAA did not provide any alternative. Many vinyl albums have never been released on CD. For example, one of my Commander Cody records, Country Casanova, was only released on vinyl. It contains several tracks not found on any of Cody's CDs.
The RIAA has become a rogue organization of litigious thugs and shakedown artists. They have accumulated many enemies. When bad things befall RIAA associates, the pool of suspects will be vast.
... when I stare at code too long. A change of pace can freshen my perspective. Yeah, I'm being paid to work but this ain't production work. There's no standard idea rate. You can work for hours or days tracking down a bug and then, in a sudden burst of insight, find it. That's the nature of the work. It tends to come in fits and starts.
Now that computer work has "matured", there are people with the same mentality as grocery store managers becoming IT managers and trying to improve efficiency by cracking down on goofing off. They succeed in turning the workplace into a pressure cooker.
Where is the new cutting edge field where a geek can be a free spirit?
... and never regretted it. I figure most of my waking hours are spent working and life is too short to squander. Heck, I ended up making alot more money than I would have had I stayed in the dullsville job.
However, it's been my experience that most people change jobs to get away from assholes.
This is a DC-to-DC Converter, not a Power Supply. Nonetheless, the power density is impressive. Point of load regulation is better anyway. You can get by with a single output power supply and simpify the wiring. Just use converters where you need the lower voltage.
Look at all the flamming on certain newsgroups. Is that covered by Bush's new law? The vast majority of the posts on groups like triangle.general are profane name calling exchanges. Are the Feds going to appear on the front steps of the ones posting such messages?
In the 60s, when I was growing up, only real bad offenses were deemed felonies. Murder, Rape, Arson, Armed Robbery and other stuff like that. Then along comes a new breed of careerist prosecutors and grandstanding politicians, all one-uping each other to see who could be toughest on crime. They're ratcheted damn near everything up to felony status. Are there any misdimeanors anymore?
In my state and others, many drug offenses carry longer mandatory minimum sentences than violent crimes. I was buying ammo recently at a gun shop. There was a sticker beside the register which warned of a 10 year sentence for buying a firearm for someone who shouldn't have one. Well, there ought to be a serious penalty for that but Armed Bank Robbery carries a 7 year penalty. Either the illegal gun purchase should carry a shorter penalty or the violent robbery should carry more. It's nuts.
These officials who slapped the HS kid with a felony say they're doing it to send a message. This is zero tolerance run amuk. All this felonizing of picayune offenses reminds me of something Deep Purple Ian Gilliam joked about on the Made In Japan album, "Make everything louder than everthing else."
how about a good power supply instead?
on
A Kilowatt of Power
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Most computer power supplies are crap. In the race to the bottom to get the lowest cost, quality and performance were the casualties. In previous power supply roundups and shootouts, a number of products didn't deliver rated faceplate performance. Some smoked. Forget thousand watt power supplies. Most general purpose computers need a reliable power supply that meets it's published specs at 350 watts.
Slashdot Mirror
Many Mac users including myself like the fact that everything works prety well in OS X. We also like the unix underpinning. We like not having to mess with spybot and all that crap. I see little value in mucking up a perfectly good Mac by putting Windows on it. Apple would be crazy to ditch OS X, especially in favor of Windows.
I remember the days of junk faxes. This was before cheap plain paper fax machines became ubiquitous. Most businesses used inexpensive faxes with a thermal printer. We'd come in on Monday morning and find the entire roll of paper used up with coils of junk faxes strewn about on the floor. We'd miss important faxes due to all the junk fax noise. Customer orders were lost. The fax machine became almost useless. A small cheer went up when we heard junk faxes had been outlawed. Here we go again
I haven't ever really understood what the RIAA hopes to achieve from all their lawsuits and extortion rackets, I mean all they are doing is alienating their core market the way they have been going recently I can't wait for someone to make a stand against them in court.
One thing the RIAA has achieved is they've made lots of enemies. There's an old saying, "Friends come and friends go but enemies accumulate." They've done such a fine job of making enemies that should some extraordinarily bad things happen to RIAA staffers, the pool of potential suspects will be huge.
You basically missed every point I made completely. As far as transistors being conceptually useful 40 years ago, that statement was made in the context of computers, not radios.
OK, then. IBM was manufacturing the system 360 40 years ago with transistors. It was the first system I wrote programs for.
Your approach of saying that nothing new has been developed because there are still transistors at the core of things is patently absurd.
That ain't what I said. I said no breakthrus. Yes there's been plenty of incremental development over the past 6 decades building on the work of Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain. But most of this stuff has been the next logical step.
As far as nanotechnology, there are working applications available today, including paint-on solar panels.
Yes and as another poster mentioned, transistors can be fabricated from nanotubes. Of course, there's much more promise there. But nanotech has been around for awhile now and yet it simply hasn't had the kind of effect on our daily lives like the transistor did in the 60s. You mentioned computers. The IBM 360 may seem clunky today but back then it was a miracle. My high school had a card punch, card reader, terminal, modem and a teletype through which we could submit programs to an IBM 360. It took all day but it worked
Earth.
:-)
Are you serious? The first microprocessor wasn't even manufactured in the commercial sector until 1971 (IIRC) and a multi-million dollar supercomputer from the early 80s couldn't keep up with the average desktop machine of today.
Yes. Today's microprocessors are made with a deep submicron CMOS process but it's still transistors. Yep. Computing power has increased many orders of magnitude because we've refined transistor technology. Just because we're better at connecting them together doesn't change the fact that this is transistor technology.
Just as a single transistor was only conceptually useful 40 years ago, quantum gates and storage techniques are conceptually useful in the present day.
Woa up there partner! There were transistor radios in production in 1966. I had one then and I got my first cassette player a year later. I worked for a company formed in 1963 building Royer oscillator based DC-DC converters for spacecraft. Your assertion was true in the 50s. But then it wasn't too much of a stretch to picture how the point contact transistor might be adapted for production. We were already able to build Selenium rectifiers then. It's not so clear how to refine quantum gates and storage techniques such that we can produce large quatities of useful products.
Fab process improvements are incremental improvements in our ability to producte transistors. Nanotechnology certainly has promise but it isn't clear that it will be realized. There are spooky risks associated with it too. I hope we have the opportunity to revisit this discussion in 5 or 10 years.
Maybe he does lack imagination as some have said but he's got a point.
Consider the field of electronics. Most of the engineering work during the past 50 years has been refining the fabrication of the transistor and it's application. Regardless of whether you're talking about TV, audio equipment, computers, defense systems, industrial controls or any other product made of electronics.
It's all been about the transistor. The nobel prize in physics was awarded to 3 engineers in 1947. It took more than a decade to get the transistor into a form that could be used in prodcution. Since then, there have been many refinements including printed circuit boards, integrated circuits and lots of miniaturization of systems. We've gotten lots of mileage out of the transistor because of it's versatility as a controlled source. It can be used as a switch or as an amplifier. The mother of it's invention was the need for a better way of performing these switching and amplification functions than vacuum tubes could provide.
Transistor technology is mature. Discrete transistor circuitry is already considered as quaint as tube circuitry. Soon, we'll regard standard ICs the same way.
But where are the glass or plastic light based circuits on Star Trek and 2001 Space Oddessy? The answer is that awaits a breakthrough in physics of the same magnitude as the transistor was.
Since most of the people reading Slashdot are programmers rather than EEs, I will point out that much of the software we develop runs on machines made of this 50 year old transistor technology. Having machines based on light or water or living tissue or whatever form they'll eventually take is bound to change this.
But this breakthrough in physics hasn't happened yet. It might be next year or it might be 30 years from now. Look at the time it took us to progress from vacuum tubes to transistors. It's hard to predict. But there will be a certain transition period between transistor technology and whatever replaces it. Only then will we have some idea what the next big thing might be. Whatever it will be, it ain't in sight yet.
I took a college course which used an eBook in pdf form for the course text. Once the course was complete, the eBook disappeared. It simply wasn't practical to print this "book". So I have no reference for that course. I'm one of those people who saved almost all of my textbooks from all the college courses I took. I just can't remember all the details I might need later on. Occasionally, I need to look up something. If I have the textbook, I can quickly find what I'm looking for. Going to the library isn't practical and most libraries lack books on esoteric technical subjects. Those textbooks have come in handy on numerous occasions.
And they don't know how they did it.
Beans prob'ly
I'm talking about those big honkin' surge protectors like the power company uses that attach to a ground stake and the coax feedline runs through it. He also better have a good quality grounding system. All towers get hit by lightning sooner or later. Yessir. The nail that sticks up gets pounded.
The Tesla vs. Edison dispute was over transmission of power. AC won because the transformer and 3 phase power made it more economical over large distances. It still is.
However, over small distances, DC has lots of advantages. Telephone Central Offices have historically used -48 volt DC power and modern telephone switching systems have the same kinds of power requirements as servers. Why not power servers the same way as a Central Office Switch? Battery chargers constantly float charge large banks of station batteries with the 48 volt DC power distributed to the individual racs via bus bars. Highly efficient DC-DC converters at the point of use step down the voltage. If the system is designed cleverly, isolation could be eliminated, simplifying the down converters and boosting their efficiency. The whole system is a great big UPS with lots of hold-up time.
I'm not surprised that VoIP doesn't play well over ComCuss or RoadRunarounder. I was with Roadrunarounder for 3 years. The first year and a half was flawless. Then came the packet loss. They claimed it was "signal strength". They replaced our cable drop with RJ6 but the problem came back. Then they replaced the hybrid splitter transformer but the packet loss reared it's head after a few months. Then the packet loss went away for 4 or 5 months and it was smooth sailing. It reared it's head again and RoadRunarounder denied there was a problem. Then they had techs measure it. It was so bad I couldn't ssh to a shell account. I showed them this and their response was that they don't support that. At first, their tech support didn't understand what ssh was. If it ain't web or email, they don't understand it. I gave up and switched to DSL with a small local company 3 years ago and it's been smooth sailing since.
The bottom line is the major electronics makers still dominate the market
There are still major electronics makers that actually make electronics products. I thought most of them had hollowed out to the point that they were little more than a brand name with a sales force. That's pretty much the case in the US anyhow.
I use an old Pioneer receiver from the 70's and some big Advent speakers. Man that sounds good. Ya'll can keep all that surround sound crap. The old Pioneers paired up with Advents don't clip. The SX939 is 70W per channel and they MEAN 70W. Yessir. That beautiful blue dial and my lavalamp glowing beside it looks swank. Yeah, keep your jakey surround sound stuff. I'll give the old stuff a home.
This article has been planted by the "trade group" to further their self-serving interests. Their lobbyists can point to it as an example of why the cap on H1-B and L-1 visas should be extended or why all the outsourcing and sweetheart trade deals with foreign gov'ts and companies ain't so bad afterall.
Well, it doesn't jive with the Bureau of Labor Statistics data. According to the BLS, IT lost 17% of it's workforce in the US over the past 5 years, communication equipment lost 43% of it's workforce and semiconductors and electronic components lost 37% of it's workforce. The US electronics industry has shriveled. Hundreds of thousands of engineers have been unemployed or underemployed (in menial jobs) as a result. I personally know several dozen. No doubt they bristle with rage as they read these rosy assessments of the job market.
This isn't the first person to be exposed for lying about academic credentials and it probably won't be the last. Nonetheless, after so many have been keelhauled for doing this, I'm surprised that people still lie in writing about their academinc credentials and surprised that there are still companies not checking for this, particularly for executive candidates. No doubt some of the Radio Shack board have egg on their faces as well, especially in light of the drastic cuts that ananlysts suggest are needed.
Academic credentials are about the easiest qualification to check for. Just call the school. Either the candidate has the degree they claim to have or they do not. There's no shade of gray. That's why it's so stupid to lie about this. It's easy to check and there's no wiggle room. Why then do so many do it? Why then are there companies that don't check for this?
Don't call the cops.
You bother us and we'll go 1984 on your house.
Zig Heil!
The RIAA seeks to change the conditions of the sale after the fact. There was no rule barring the copying of CDs or vinyl records to digital format for the purpose of backup or for the purpose of having the music in a more convenient format when the CD was sold. Afterall, the RIAA did not provide any alternative. Many vinyl albums have never been released on CD. For example, one of my Commander Cody records, Country Casanova, was only released on vinyl. It contains several tracks not found on any of Cody's CDs.
The RIAA has become a rogue organization of litigious thugs and shakedown artists. They have accumulated many enemies. When bad things befall RIAA associates, the pool of suspects will be vast.
Perhaps they just have too many customers.
... when I stare at code too long. A change of pace can freshen my perspective. Yeah, I'm being paid to work but this ain't production work. There's no standard idea rate. You can work for hours or days tracking down a bug and then, in a sudden burst of insight, find it. That's the nature of the work. It tends to come in fits and starts.
Now that computer work has "matured", there are people with the same mentality as grocery store managers becoming IT managers and trying to improve efficiency by cracking down on goofing off. They succeed in turning the workplace into a pressure cooker.
Where is the new cutting edge field where a geek can be a free spirit?
This is about spying on US citizens.
... and never regretted it. I figure most of my waking hours are spent working and life is too short to squander. Heck, I ended up making alot more money than I would have had I stayed in the dullsville job.
However, it's been my experience that most people change jobs to get away from assholes.
This is a DC-to-DC Converter, not a Power Supply. Nonetheless, the power density is impressive. Point of load regulation is better anyway. You can get by with a single output power supply and simpify the wiring. Just use converters where you need the lower voltage.
Look at all the flamming on certain newsgroups. Is that covered by Bush's new law? The vast majority of the posts on groups like triangle.general are profane name calling exchanges. Are the Feds going to appear on the front steps of the ones posting such messages?
In the 60s, when I was growing up, only real bad offenses were deemed felonies. Murder, Rape, Arson, Armed Robbery and other stuff like that. Then along comes a new breed of careerist prosecutors and grandstanding politicians, all one-uping each other to see who could be toughest on crime. They're ratcheted damn near everything up to felony status. Are there any misdimeanors anymore?
In my state and others, many drug offenses carry longer mandatory minimum sentences than violent crimes. I was buying ammo recently at a gun shop. There was a sticker beside the register which warned of a 10 year sentence for buying a firearm for someone who shouldn't have one. Well, there ought to be a serious penalty for that but Armed Bank Robbery carries a 7 year penalty. Either the illegal gun purchase should carry a shorter penalty or the violent robbery should carry more. It's nuts.
These officials who slapped the HS kid with a felony say they're doing it to send a message. This is zero tolerance run amuk. All this felonizing of picayune offenses reminds me of something Deep Purple Ian Gilliam joked about on the Made In Japan album, "Make everything louder than everthing else."
Most computer power supplies are crap. In the race to the bottom to get the lowest cost, quality and performance were the casualties. In previous power supply roundups and shootouts, a number of products didn't deliver rated faceplate performance. Some smoked. Forget thousand watt power supplies. Most general purpose computers need a reliable power supply that meets it's published specs at 350 watts.