>(I wonder what it costs to look at the Windows source.)
No, you just have to live in Seattle. With so many contractors working for the velvet sweatshop you can't walk down the street with out tripping over some former contractor/slave that is holding up a sign that say, "Will trade W2K source for food.";-)
But seriously, several years ago we found a deep problem that micro$oft had no interest in fixing with NT, nor could we wait for their next release cycle even if they would, so we had everybody in our little company ask around and sure enough somebody was in the church choir with a micro$oft employee who knew the person who worded on that part of the code. We got the source under the table, fixed the bug, returned the fix and the fix now lives in the NT source tree. Not what I would call open source, but it saved our butts.
Another abandoned cold war wonder is the accoustic listening system that was used for tracking subs. It has $G worth of fiber and transducers sitting on the bottem of the ocean. Just waiting for some good use. There was some talk of turning it over to marine biologist to track whales.
What other goodies are just sitting out there about to be bulldozed? Or in orbit?
Remember that pacemakers are more than just the electronics. They include a wire lead read antana) reraching into the heart where just a few volts can do bad things to a dodgie heart.
Their is an old film of the promoter of the modern elevator, Otis I think, doing a dog any pony show at a worlds fair where he rides an exposed demo elevator up 50 ft then cuts the cable. The mechanical brakes kick in and the public starts using elevators. Before Otis their were some well reported failures and the public would not step foot in the damn contraptions.
If you open up just about any piece of life saving (ie., ECG) or other crital box of electronics (rail road switch) you will find 8 bit microcontroller at the heart of it. Whis is a world of 8KB of RAM and a few MHz of clock speed. Using an 8 bit micro for more than one real-time task is a challange, but with some very carefull ASM code it can be done.
One thing that make my skin crawl is the thought of connecting up patients to an off the shelf computer without any electrical isolation. Just place electrodes on your chest so that you have a direct electrical path into your heart from the computer. Hook those electrodes to a power supply built by the lowest bidder to minimal standards. Now ask yourself, "are you feeling lucky, punk?" An off the self computer can be used just fine, but propper engineering MUST be done to provide proper isolation at the pre-amps before the signal reaches the computer.
For that matter the largest selling computing platform on earth is a 2 MHz Z80-like 8 bit micro ---- Game Boy!
One problem is the transmission back from the generating station back to shore. These station should work better in "open" sea better than surf areas (more Z and less Z vector).
Pulling 50KV lines along the bottom of the sea doeas have it's problems.
There is one large inductry that has worked out Micro Payments and that is the Telecos. Two minute call to LA 20 cents. Five minute call to NY half a buck.
What ever happened to all of those cyber cash start-up from five years ago?
Devon Island is totally unable to support what they have in mind. That tin box will sink into the permafrost in a few weeks. They will leave their crap (and I do mean mean crap and and other garbage) on the landscape. They will trample ruts into the land that will take 1000 years to recover. Champion Moss axpands at a rate of one inch per 100 years! It's clear that they are going to leave it there if they are going to 'chute it in. This is hubris by some loosers that have no respect for their planet. No wonder they are so hot to find a new one. ARGH!!!
Finding and common band is a real problem. The Bluethooth folks assumed that they had it all worked out and spend billions on infrastructure, ASICS, etc. Bluetooth just got a nasty shock. The French military refuses to open up their portion of the 2.45 MHz band required for Bluetooth. They could very well make it illeagal to have a bluetooth device in France. Imagine getting your laptop nicked at the airport because it has Bluetooth! The truth is, their is no universal chunk of bandwidth in the world and the death of Bluetooth is going to prove it.
As an engineer often involved in hiring decisions I will not hire anyone with "*CE" on their resume. HR can try and send me anybody they want (and often do), but I wont take dead wood. _Real Engineers_ learn by doing. As far as I'm concerned, anybody throwing away their time on someting like this is going to be dead wood. While most HR folks are clueless they do learn what buzz words I want. They don't want to waste their time on someone I'm not even going to interview. It just takes educating the HR folks.
Statatory patents owners are not able to demand any kind of royalties. It is the "original" open source. Seldom used, but possible very powerful.
As far as if they can enforce IP rights against volunteers just ask the scandanavian kid who was rousted in the middle of the night by the cops over the DVD copyright fight.
As an engineer who has my company's patent counsels almost live in my cube (knock, knock, how many patent counsels does it take to fill an engineer's cube...) I have a few thoughts on why MS did what they did. Patents are a current part of the business landscape. Companies get patents for "real" reasons such as protecting their IP rights as well as "human" reasons such as a patent counsel's bonus is based on how many patents they file. The fact of the matter is that the decission to file this patent was made 3 to 5 years ago as that is how much time it often takes to get a patent out. Don't waste too much time trying to figure out why some big dumb creature as MS does something, just assume one Dilbert manger won out over a different Dilbert manager. The patant office is so short staffed that the examaner spends only a short few hours with each patent and most of that time is spent dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s. The reality is not that questionable patents get issued, but that some future Dilbert manager may try to make a name for themselves by using it againts a smaller group that can not afford to defend them selves. Sometime the small guy wins, too. Anybody remember Stacker Software and MS?
Patents tend to be written in two ways, as shields or as swards. Shield patents are designed to allow a company to continue to do what they want while swords are intended to go after others. There exists another type of patent, statutory, that is seldom used and the open source sommunity should consider it. A statutory patent provides no IP rights to the issuer and is most often used by a government lab or university to put their work into the public domain. The nice thing about this kind of patent is that it is cheep and puts the work firmly into the public domain. We might want to write up Linux, Apache, etc. each into it's own patent application and file them as statutory patents. Such actions would form the ultamate shield that _proves_ prior art!
The Apple Airport web page includes an interisting Orwellian usage of "user experance."
"AirPort 1.1 Update
If you purchased an AirPort product, you will want to upgrade your base station and card to AirPort version 1.1, which features improved user experience, new functionality such as active roaming, and a preview version of the software base station .
Caldera is placing them selves much different from the Red Hats & VAs. They have a unique offering for embedded support. RH/VA really are positioning themselves as desktop players. I see a lot more room for Caldera supporting embeded for Linux than every corperate IS department switching over to Linux on the desktop. (Not the because of the value of Linux for the desktop, but because of the slowness of most IS dept). Embeded engineers can select an OS with few of the restriction an IS dept has as long as it gets the job done.
Hardly a good idea for a heard drive. Building one of these today would run $100K for just 5K+ bytes. I assume that they had 10 heads running in parallel to give word access (thnk of this as the original raid disk). This beast was a drum NOT a disk and for main memory NOT secondary memory. Very expensive to build. 17 KRPM lets see that gives you 55.5 mS max access time on you main memory or almost 6000 time slower than todays memory. Did the Univac even have a cache? I don't think so.
Progress in storage follow Moore's Law rather closely for both size metrics (Areal density) and performance (data rate). It is easy to over state capacity of a drive technology as the manufacture can just add more disks to up the drives capacity. The real magic is increasing the areal density of the recording media. The cost of building a drive is basically fixed. Heads cost X, disks cost Y, etc. The inductry adopts the next generation technology when it becomes cost effective. The business model of the drive business is crazy. It take 18 months to develop a drive and it has a market life of just 6 months. The manufacturers FLY the drives to the US using cargo 747s. Also the profit margins in the drive business are razor thin.
The drive have also evolved some very cool tech over the years. If you kill power on a drive the motor becomes a generater and powers the head into the landing zone. Today's drive include either a ARM7 or 16 bit DSP class processor. As long as you don't shock the drive (1/2 ich can kill a drive) it will last forever, unlike drives of old.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that the drop dead date is Friday the 13th
So what is all this button talk in the patent? Sounds like a different device from a Palm.
>(I wonder what it costs to look at the Windows source.) ;-)
No, you just have to live in Seattle. With so many contractors working for the velvet sweatshop you can't walk down the street with out tripping over some former contractor/slave that is holding up a sign that say, "Will trade W2K source for food."
But seriously, several years ago we found a deep problem that micro$oft had no interest in fixing with NT, nor could we wait for their next release cycle even if they would, so we had everybody in our little company ask around and sure enough somebody was in the church choir with a micro$oft employee who knew the person who worded on that part of the code. We got the source under the table, fixed the bug, returned the fix and the fix now lives in the NT source tree. Not what I would call open source, but it saved our butts.
Another abandoned cold war wonder is the accoustic listening system that was used for tracking subs. It has $G worth of fiber and transducers sitting on the bottem of the ocean. Just waiting for some good use. There was some talk of turning it over to marine biologist to track whales.
What other goodies are just sitting out there about to be bulldozed? Or in orbit?
Remember that pacemakers are more than just the electronics. They include a wire lead read antana) reraching into the heart where just a few volts can do bad things to a dodgie heart.
Their is an old film of the promoter of the modern elevator, Otis I think, doing a dog any pony show at a worlds fair where he rides an exposed demo elevator up 50 ft then cuts the cable. The mechanical brakes kick in and the public starts using elevators. Before Otis their were some well reported failures and the public would not step foot in the damn contraptions.
If you open up just about any piece of life saving (ie., ECG) or other crital box of electronics (rail road switch) you will find 8 bit microcontroller at the heart of it. Whis is a world of 8KB of RAM and a few MHz of clock speed. Using an 8 bit micro for more than one real-time task is a challange, but with some very carefull ASM code it can be done.
One thing that make my skin crawl is the thought of connecting up patients to an off the shelf computer without any electrical isolation. Just place electrodes on your chest so that you have a direct electrical path into your heart from the computer. Hook those electrodes to a power supply built by the lowest bidder to minimal standards. Now ask yourself, "are you feeling lucky, punk?" An off the self computer can be used just fine, but propper engineering MUST be done to provide proper isolation at the pre-amps before the signal reaches the computer.
For that matter the largest selling computing platform on earth is a 2 MHz Z80-like 8 bit micro ---- Game Boy!
On-On,
Scott
For more public wireless links check out:
www.seattlewireless.net/
www.teleport.com/~samc/psuwireless/
And at burning man with sat link:
www.eugeneweb.com/~bm/ibm.html
I think all of these are 802.11 based.
That would be 0.18 micron and 0.21 micron. You'll not get many gates on a chip a one-fifth of a mm per feature.
One problem is the transmission back from the generating station back to shore. These station should work better in "open" sea better than surf areas (more Z and less Z vector).
Pulling 50KV lines along the bottom of the sea doeas have it's problems.
Don't be foolish. It will translate it into Flemish. ;-)
There is one large inductry that has worked out Micro Payments and that is the Telecos. Two minute call to LA 20 cents. Five minute call to NY half a buck.
What ever happened to all of those cyber cash start-up from five years ago?
On On
Devon Island is totally unable to support what they have in mind. That tin box will sink into the permafrost in a few weeks. They will leave their crap (and I do mean mean crap and and other garbage) on the landscape. They will trample ruts into the land that will take 1000 years to recover. Champion Moss axpands at a rate of one inch per 100 years! It's clear that they are going to leave it there if they are going to 'chute it in. This is hubris by some loosers that have no respect for their planet. No wonder they are so hot to find a new one. ARGH!!!
Finding and common band is a real problem. The Bluethooth folks assumed that they had it all worked out and spend billions on infrastructure, ASICS, etc. Bluetooth just got a nasty shock. The French military refuses to open up their portion of the 2.45 MHz band required for Bluetooth. They could very well make it illeagal to have a bluetooth device in France. Imagine getting your laptop nicked at the airport because it has Bluetooth! The truth is, their is no universal chunk of bandwidth in the world and the death of Bluetooth is going to prove it.
For the record, copyright and patents are part of the original constitution. Free speech did not show up until constitution rev. 1.1.
As an engineer often involved in hiring decisions I will not hire anyone with "*CE" on their resume. HR can try and send me anybody they want (and often do), but I wont take dead wood. _Real Engineers_ learn by doing. As far as I'm concerned, anybody throwing away their time on someting like this is going to be dead wood.
While most HR folks are clueless they do learn what buzz words I want. They don't want to waste their time on someone I'm not even going to interview. It just takes educating the HR folks.
Statatory patents owners are not able to demand any kind of royalties. It is the "original" open source. Seldom used, but possible very powerful.
As far as if they can enforce IP rights against volunteers just ask the scandanavian kid who was rousted in the middle of the night by the cops over the DVD copyright fight.
As an engineer who has my company's patent counsels almost live in my cube (knock, knock, how many patent counsels does it take to fill an engineer's cube...) I have a few thoughts on why MS did what they did. Patents are a current part of the business landscape. Companies get patents for "real" reasons such as protecting their IP rights as well as "human" reasons such as a patent counsel's bonus is based on how many patents they file. The fact of the matter is that the decission to file this patent was made 3 to 5 years ago as that is how much time it often takes to get a patent out. Don't waste too much time trying to figure out why some big dumb creature as MS does something, just assume one Dilbert manger won out over a different Dilbert manager. The patant office is so short staffed that the examaner spends only a short few hours with each patent and most of that time is spent dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s. The reality is not that questionable patents get issued, but that some future Dilbert manager may try to make a name for themselves by using it againts a smaller group that can not afford to defend them selves. Sometime the small guy wins, too. Anybody remember Stacker Software and MS?
Patents tend to be written in two ways, as shields or as swards. Shield patents are designed to allow a company to continue to do what they want while swords are intended to go after others.
There exists another type of patent, statutory, that is seldom used and the open source sommunity should consider it. A statutory patent provides no IP rights to the issuer and is most often used by a government lab or university to put their work into the public domain. The nice thing about this kind of patent is that it is cheep and puts the work firmly into the public domain. We might want to write up Linux, Apache, etc. each into it's own patent application and file them as statutory patents. Such actions would form the ultamate shield that _proves_ prior art!
Adds a whole new meaning to the phrase,
"Blue Screen of Death!"
"AirPort 1.1 Update
If you purchased an AirPort product, you will want to upgrade your base station and card to AirPort version 1.1, which features improved user experience, new functionality such as active roaming, and a preview version of the software base station .
The ECDIS (Electronic Charting Display and Informatino System) on board all the big US Navy ships. Talk about the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD).
Red Hat has bigger fish to fry. Embeded will suffer.
Caldera is placing them selves much different from the Red Hats & VAs. They have a unique offering for embedded support. RH/VA really are positioning themselves as desktop players. I see a lot more room for Caldera supporting embeded for Linux than every corperate IS department switching over to Linux on the desktop. (Not the because of the value of Linux for the desktop, but because of the slowness of most IS dept). Embeded engineers can select an OS with few of the restriction an IS dept has as long as it gets the job done.
S-
Hardly a good idea for a heard drive. Building one of these today would run $100K for just 5K+ bytes. I assume that they had 10 heads running in parallel to give word access (thnk of this as the original raid disk). This beast was a drum NOT a disk and for main memory NOT secondary memory. Very expensive to build. 17 KRPM lets see that gives you 55.5 mS max access time on you main memory or almost 6000 time slower than todays memory. Did the Univac even have a cache? I don't think so.
-Scott
Progress in storage follow Moore's Law rather closely for both size metrics (Areal density)
and performance (data rate). It is easy to over state capacity of a drive technology as the manufacture can just add more disks to up the drives capacity. The real magic is increasing the areal density of the recording media. The cost of building a drive is basically fixed. Heads cost X, disks cost Y, etc. The inductry adopts the next generation technology when it becomes cost effective.
The business model of the drive business is crazy. It take 18 months to develop a drive and it has a market life of just 6 months. The manufacturers FLY the drives to the US using cargo 747s. Also the profit margins in the drive business are razor thin.
The drive have also evolved some very cool tech over the years. If you kill power on a drive the motor becomes a generater and powers the head into the landing zone. Today's drive include either a ARM7 or 16 bit DSP class processor. As long as you don't shock the drive (1/2 ich can kill a drive) it will last forever, unlike drives of old.
Scott