Digital controllers -emulate- analog behavior (at least many of them do). There's a pantload of research and science behind analog control.
Re:I'm still using CGA you insensitive clod
on
Goodbye, VGA
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· Score: 1
I had a similar setup, but my -very early- IBM-PC dot-matrix printer did not even have a dot-addressable graphics mode. Instead, its font had a particular range of 64 characters it printed as 2x3 'block graphics'. I wrote a BASIC program to bload video images, and then translate them to the proper character sequence for the printer.
And oh yes, relative to the discussion, I had a CGA adapter and monitor. How great it was that you had two choices of the 4 colors it could display at once.
Despite the summary, I don't think they're literally talking about 'stacked chips' in the sense of 2 separate packages here. I have (seriously) a 64KB expansion card for the original IBM PC (1982) that achieves its incredible memory density with stacked chips. A quick look at the link to 'Through Silicon Via" suggests something more like two wafers inside a single plastic package, with vertical traces connecting them together inside the package.
I was going to say the same thing. In over 30 years of dealing with computers, my instances of data loss, sorted by frequency, are 1) Accidental deletion, 2) Hardware failure, 3) there is no #3. The closest I've come to data loss by malware is when I encrypted some data myself and lost the key. I've never had a 'catastrophic disaster', ever.
When I was once responsible for a business computer network, of course we had tape backup and off-site storage, even for the fairly small operation we were. For my own needs, I create DVD backups of the most important data, but have yet to extend the protection to off-site storage (see above).
I think the GP is being a little hard on external drive solutions considering they probably protect against 99% of likely losses (and 100% of mine). And a simple habit like -turning them off- when not in use could extend their ability to protect against malware.
In the UK do routers generally only come from your ISP? In the US the ISP often provides only a direct wired connection to a single computer: any router is often the customer's responsibility to provide and it comes from an electronics store (Best Buy, Walmart) so they're all configured exactly the same out of the box.
So will a person from the 20th century be fluent in 22nd century english or will they need a translator, I'm betting they'd need an auto-translator.
They'll need a time machine too. I think your question should have been, So will a person from the 22nd century be fluent in 20th century english or will they need a translator?
I'd say you're right, except that I've seen how well my neighbors recycle (living in a US apartment complex). 1) Lots of recyclable stuff still gets tossed in the garbage. 2) The recycling that is done is often done carelessly (I find stuff in the recycling bins that absolutely doesn't belong there).
If this catches on, even if the paper still gets recycled, we'll have tons and tons of single-use LCD displays, batteries and circuit boards destined for landfill.
Interesting. I'm old enough to remember that during the late 70's or so, Honeywell used to advertise a system like this during "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau". When the same show gets the same ads practically every week (there was also a memorable ad for Burlington textiles), they stick in your brain. I wonder if Honeywell supplied this system, using the DG equipment.
Worth echoing that comment. Early on I bought some Sylvania OSRAM bulbs that were being subsidized by the local electric company at the time. Those lights lasted an incredibly long time (near 9 or 10 years if I recall correctly). Some cheaper bulbs purchased later dropped like flies. My recent purchases of Phillips CFLs seem to be going strong, and the bulbs are finally reasonably sized, unlike the early models with massive ballast bases.
Also worth mentioning that recent bulbs have much better warm-up times than the early models. If they really are dimmer at startup, the delay must be a second or less these days because I don't notice it at all.
Elizabeth Hurley. Maybe that one wasn't as funny (except for the spanish part), but Hurley's princess of darkness was a damn sight easier on the eyes than Peter Cook.
Re:From the last Slashdot article and FYI:
on
Revisiting DIY HERF Guns
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Sorry, I disagree with one of your points. As long as I'm passing somebody, I get to decide the speed with which I pass them, not the car behind me. I'm responsible for my safety, not them. I'm typically talking about a case where the car behind me would like to be going 80+, and I'm passing at 70 a car to my right going 65. Yes, a 5 mph difference means the driver behind me may get impatient. Too damn bad.
Name provided because I believe in this -very- strongly. If you want something to complain about, complain about the drivers that sit anywhere but the right line without passing anybody at all.
I can create quite attractive and legible cursive hand writing, but it is -slow- compared to block printing. When I block print notes, I do find myself falling into a half-block half-cursive style as you describe, but I make an effort to avoid that as much as possible. When I actually fall into full-cursive while writing notes, the results are often hard for ME to read later.
Clean block printing is IMHO going to be more readable to more people as the population continues to abandon cursive. And, it can be nearly as fast as cursive so it's fine for rare note-taking on paper.
I am not some recent product of the public school system. I'm an old fogy who went to Catholic school and was taught Palmer Method by nasty ruler-wielding nuns. I'd rather not have my children wasting any of their limited school time learning cursive.
Personally I think this crowd is trashing the books more than is warranted, and the person pointing out the lack of respect for the written word (vs the more limited depth of radio/TV/movies) is right on. I do agree with you that the whole Fenchurch thing was a low point in the series (I haven't read the books in years but I do recall really disliking that part), and the ending of Mostly Harmless was so upsetting it sparked actual anger in myself (and apparently in others I've discussed the story with). However, Mostly Harmless had some absolutely outstanding flashes of creativity (The Domain of the King being my favorite), but I'm still looking forward to seeing how another author might envision Adams' universe going forward.
I would go without internet service/phone service etc before I gave any of this kind of information up.
Good luck with that. Fact is, in the U.S. basically -every- provider of a service you pay in arrears (like internet, phone, cable, electricity) demands a credit check, and they need your SSN to accomplish that. Whether right or wrong, that's the way it is, and you'll find yourself doing without -many- basic services if you don't play along. Your opinion on what amount of credit is 'trivial' is irrelevant. You and I might think (for example) that $20 U.S. per month for dial-up internet access doesn't warrant a credit check. The provider thinks otherwise.
Now that I've finished the article, I see that it finally does mention "available technology" as a factor in these "design mistakes" in later entries, most notably #10 and #11 (Nintendo Virtual Boy), and #13 (Nintendo GBA). I also see comments where readers wish the author tried to contact the engineers behind these products to learn what they "really" were thinking. I agree.
My complaint with the article (at least after reading the 1st half) is that lots of these "mistakes" are really just laments that the technology of the 80's was not as good as today's. In any generation, design engineers have to work with the tools that are available. Poor sound? Well how much would a 'better' chip cost, and would the very best sound chip of its time really measure up to the author's expectations? Unreliable analog joystick? Were the manufacturing techniques (cheaper production, finer tolerances, advanced materials) that would lead to a more reliable (and acceptably low-cost) joystick available at the time? To anyone?
Why not complain about Classic PC Design Mistakes like 1) only 4 (or 16 or 32 or 256) colors on display. 2) Very low resolution. 3) Insufficient multitasking support. 4) Dumb AI. 5) No input devices other than keyboard. 6) Unreliable game loading with primitive floppy media.
I think I could sum up at least 1/4 of this article by saying "technology sucked in the 80's"
Slashdot Mirror
Digital controllers -emulate- analog behavior (at least many of them do). There's a pantload of research and science behind analog control.
I had a similar setup, but my -very early- IBM-PC dot-matrix printer did not even have a dot-addressable graphics mode. Instead, its font had a particular range of 64 characters it printed as 2x3 'block graphics'. I wrote a BASIC program to bload video images, and then translate them to the proper character sequence for the printer. And oh yes, relative to the discussion, I had a CGA adapter and monitor. How great it was that you had two choices of the 4 colors it could display at once.
Despite the summary, I don't think they're literally talking about 'stacked chips' in the sense of 2 separate packages here. I have (seriously) a 64KB expansion card for the original IBM PC (1982) that achieves its incredible memory density with stacked chips. A quick look at the link to 'Through Silicon Via" suggests something more like two wafers inside a single plastic package, with vertical traces connecting them together inside the package.
When I was once responsible for a business computer network, of course we had tape backup and off-site storage, even for the fairly small operation we were. For my own needs, I create DVD backups of the most important data, but have yet to extend the protection to off-site storage (see above).
I think the GP is being a little hard on external drive solutions considering they probably protect against 99% of likely losses (and 100% of mine). And a simple habit like -turning them off- when not in use could extend their ability to protect against malware.
Opening a calculator? I remember when calculators were physical things that you could flip upside down so they read '8008135'.
Makes me wanna scream and shout.
But in post Cold War Russia, game doesn't finish you!
In the UK do routers generally only come from your ISP? In the US the ISP often provides only a direct wired connection to a single computer: any router is often the customer's responsibility to provide and it comes from an electronics store (Best Buy, Walmart) so they're all configured exactly the same out of the box.
Sham wow!
I was wondering how many comments I would have to read before getting to this joke. You have made Slashdot proud.
So will a person from the 20th century be fluent in 22nd century english or will they need a translator, I'm betting they'd need an auto-translator.
They'll need a time machine too. I think your question should have been, So will a person from the 22nd century be fluent in 20th century english or will they need a translator?
If this catches on, even if the paper still gets recycled, we'll have tons and tons of single-use LCD displays, batteries and circuit boards destined for landfill.
Interesting. I'm old enough to remember that during the late 70's or so, Honeywell used to advertise a system like this during "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau". When the same show gets the same ads practically every week (there was also a memorable ad for Burlington textiles), they stick in your brain. I wonder if Honeywell supplied this system, using the DG equipment.
Worth echoing that comment. Early on I bought some Sylvania OSRAM bulbs that were being subsidized by the local electric company at the time. Those lights lasted an incredibly long time (near 9 or 10 years if I recall correctly). Some cheaper bulbs purchased later dropped like flies. My recent purchases of Phillips CFLs seem to be going strong, and the bulbs are finally reasonably sized, unlike the early models with massive ballast bases.
Also worth mentioning that recent bulbs have much better warm-up times than the early models. If they really are dimmer at startup, the delay must be a second or less these days because I don't notice it at all.
Are you sure? Maybe those memories were implanted.
would be very sad indeed.
Elizabeth Hurley. Maybe that one wasn't as funny (except for the spanish part), but Hurley's princess of darkness was a damn sight easier on the eyes than Peter Cook.
Sorry, I disagree with one of your points. As long as I'm passing somebody, I get to decide the speed with which I pass them, not the car behind me. I'm responsible for my safety, not them. I'm typically talking about a case where the car behind me would like to be going 80+, and I'm passing at 70 a car to my right going 65. Yes, a 5 mph difference means the driver behind me may get impatient. Too damn bad.
Name provided because I believe in this -very- strongly. If you want something to complain about, complain about the drivers that sit anywhere but the right line without passing anybody at all.
I can create quite attractive and legible cursive hand writing, but it is -slow- compared to block printing. When I block print notes, I do find myself falling into a half-block half-cursive style as you describe, but I make an effort to avoid that as much as possible. When I actually fall into full-cursive while writing notes, the results are often hard for ME to read later.
Clean block printing is IMHO going to be more readable to more people as the population continues to abandon cursive. And, it can be nearly as fast as cursive so it's fine for rare note-taking on paper.
I am not some recent product of the public school system. I'm an old fogy who went to Catholic school and was taught Palmer Method by nasty ruler-wielding nuns. I'd rather not have my children wasting any of their limited school time learning cursive.
Just make sure you always know where your ShamWow is.
Well it won't happen here. Most slashdotters have no idea how to manipulate a SWF.
Personally I think this crowd is trashing the books more than is warranted, and the person pointing out the lack of respect for the written word (vs the more limited depth of radio/TV/movies) is right on. I do agree with you that the whole Fenchurch thing was a low point in the series (I haven't read the books in years but I do recall really disliking that part), and the ending of Mostly Harmless was so upsetting it sparked actual anger in myself (and apparently in others I've discussed the story with). However, Mostly Harmless had some absolutely outstanding flashes of creativity (The Domain of the King being my favorite), but I'm still looking forward to seeing how another author might envision Adams' universe going forward.
I would go without internet service/phone service etc before I gave any of this kind of information up.
Good luck with that. Fact is, in the U.S. basically -every- provider of a service you pay in arrears (like internet, phone, cable, electricity) demands a credit check, and they need your SSN to accomplish that. Whether right or wrong, that's the way it is, and you'll find yourself doing without -many- basic services if you don't play along. Your opinion on what amount of credit is 'trivial' is irrelevant. You and I might think (for example) that $20 U.S. per month for dial-up internet access doesn't warrant a credit check. The provider thinks otherwise.
Now that I've finished the article, I see that it finally does mention "available technology" as a factor in these "design mistakes" in later entries, most notably #10 and #11 (Nintendo Virtual Boy), and #13 (Nintendo GBA). I also see comments where readers wish the author tried to contact the engineers behind these products to learn what they "really" were thinking. I agree.
My complaint with the article (at least after reading the 1st half) is that lots of these "mistakes" are really just laments that the technology of the 80's was not as good as today's. In any generation, design engineers have to work with the tools that are available. Poor sound? Well how much would a 'better' chip cost, and would the very best sound chip of its time really measure up to the author's expectations? Unreliable analog joystick? Were the manufacturing techniques (cheaper production, finer tolerances, advanced materials) that would lead to a more reliable (and acceptably low-cost) joystick available at the time? To anyone?
Why not complain about Classic PC Design Mistakes like 1) only 4 (or 16 or 32 or 256) colors on display. 2) Very low resolution. 3) Insufficient multitasking support. 4) Dumb AI. 5) No input devices other than keyboard. 6) Unreliable game loading with primitive floppy media.
I think I could sum up at least 1/4 of this article by saying "technology sucked in the 80's"