The best thing about IT in the days of raised floor machine rooms was if you kept Guiness down there it was always the perfect temperature and you were quite popular with other departments.
Changing location access for Waze and Uber from "Always" to "Never" not only improved my privacy, it greatly improved the battery life of my phone. I still use both apps; the extra 15 seconds to enable access when starting and disable when done is a PITA but in the end part of the price for convenience.
Put it on a 4s and found it a bit slow. Also, when using waze for car navigation it seems to go into screen lock even when that's disabled in waze's settings. Planned obsolescence to encourage upgrades?
Not only do I prefer emacs to vi (and use both quite a bit), I still read my personal e-mail in emacs using the mh-e macros Brian Reid first wrote in the mid-80s. It's not broken, why fix it?
When it comes to cars, San Francisco is a weird place. There's a "transit first policy" where high-rise condos are allowed only if they have less parking spaces than units. There's the parking meters that in my 'hood are more than 16 hours a day, 7 days a week - with a minimum $50 fine. The meter maids also ticket for not curbing your wheels - ON FLAT STREETS.
Overall, San Francisco generates ~10% of its annual budget - more than $100M per year - from various traffic enforcements. Autonomous vehicles will put the squeeze on the budget, the police budget, and the homeless budget.
DEC was ten great years of my life. Ken built a company from nothing into something huge, then ran it into the ground. Technological highlights like networking (including a mobile pre-cursor to WiFi), StrongARM, and Alpha; marketing tragedies like "Unix is snake oil" and an unswerving allegiance to VMS. Let's not remember him for funding the VAX 9000.
Ken built an international engineering-driven culture of people that firmly believed in "doing right for the customer" and would go out of their way to get it done. You could pick up the phone and dial strangers for help and more often than not they would come through without politics or me-first posturing - an attitude that came straight from the top. I really miss it.
The architecture lives on at http://simh.trailing-edge.com/
Previous editions were somewhat challenged, but Windows7 is way better than any previous version wrt multiscreen. I run multiscreen with one framebuffer on my desktop and laptop and multi-framebuffer on my laptop with a DisplayLink USB frame buffer. It Just Works, including easily changing orientations, laptop disconnect/reconnect, changing to display cloning for presentations, etc. Windows-P is your new keyboard shortcut friend.
What pisses me off is that I hate Windows; But it does show that if you concentrate on fixing bugs, over time code can improve.
Couldn't agree more - I've had three Squeezeboxes around the house for six or seven years and they've been great. Others at work also rave about them. There are now several ways to control them to suit taste and need.
I drove to their office to buy the first two and they're just good people.
When I lived in Switzerland '86-'88 you could get small gold ingots from a UBS ATM on the Bahnhofstrasse in downtown Zurich. Just the sort of thing a conservative Swiss banker would do on the way home from work.
Saw them on the last tour, a sold out performance at San Francisco's Warfield. They were excellent, and the crowd was better (banners like "Stumpy Joe lives"). Sex Farm Woman was a sing-along. The enormous Marshall amps went to 11, maybe more. The encore included guest bassist Flea playing something huge and Derek on a double-neck raging through Big Bottom with some extra-special on-stage talent. If they come to your town I say check it out.
Ten years ago you could buy an Alpha that had the same bragging rights - 64-bit registers & addressing, wider bus, better atomic primitives, etc. *YAWN* It solves a serious problem that confronts maybe.05% of the world, and runs about the same amount of sw compatibly. A technological masterpiece/kludge in the tradition of IPv6.
Thacker and Lampson have been with Microsoft for only a few years after long careers at Digital Equipment in the lab founded by Taylor when he left Xerox. Their good ideas continued to pour out well beyond the days at PARC.
Laptops are optimized for power consumption, so they're the obvious choice. They have lower power CPUs, memory systems, screens, and disks. You really can't beat them for power with a desktop.
Intel is currently shipping two similarly named but totally different low-power CPUs, the Pentium M (really an optimized P-III with more cache) and the Pentium IV-M (a mobilized P-4). The P-M seems to get as much or more throughput than the P-IV-M for far less power - look for it in Centrino-branded laptops.
Larger screens use more power for the backlights, so you might consider a system with a 12.2in screen (typically 1024x768) instead of a larger (14.4in or more) screen that has sex (and pixel) appeal but sucks down the juice. Many popular vendors have ultra-mobile form factor systems that put rarely used I/O devices like CD-R/DVDs in a "media slice" or other external packages.
Other advantages of laptops of off-grid use are that you can get a 12VDC adapter and run/charge it off a cigarette socket (including a car) eliminating inverter inefficiency, you can charge during the day when there's juice available and use it up at night, and you can use them while covered in blankets in bed during the cold of winter, a popular position for some of my off-grid friends.
In the 80s some guys I knew in our Storage group designed a super-whizzy ECC chip that could handle multi-bit errors. It was too slow for use with CPUs, but was perfect for solid-state disks, which they sold at a huge markup since the RAM was so cheap. Then digital answering machines claimed the DRAM slag heaps.
I've spent about 10 weeks over the last 12 months in various parts of Europe on business including three trips to Germany, and over the last few years have stayed with many friends with home broadband of various flavors. Telekom is like any other large phone company rolling out DSL - there are people that know what they're doing, people that don't, places where connectivity is great, and places where "you can't get there from here." Overall the connectivity in Europe for both home broadband and mobile phones is vastly superior to the USofA, though pockets of the US are also excellent.
First off, you'll want a native German speaker to help you get the right package. Imagine calling SBC (my DSL provider) and trying to get service speaking to htem in German, with your only English phrases being "beer", "toilet", and "I want to pay." Right.
Second, it's Germany, so you might as well use Telekom since they're the dominant carrier and have the best chance of having reliable service in your area. The tariffs are online at the T-DSL site in a pop-up that has something like 13 choices for connectivity, including flat-rate (EUR30/month), per-minute by day, per-minute by night, dial-up, and capped monthly download limits. This is a fine example of that special German rule fetish, but since Germans can actually read and comprehend tables they can get away with it. Once again, get a native speaker to translate; with so many choices one will meet your needs.
Third, you're dealing with a phone company. You might have excellent luck and flawless service in a week, or months of hell and people giving you abuse in a language you don't understand. It's a crap shoot, but it's fun once you get the hang of it. Once it's up and running it should be as solid as DSL in any civilized country and you'll never think about it until you leave. And if you do have problems, at least the beer is good.
I've heard reliable reports that MSN's Hotmail is currently dealing with (finger in mouth) ONE BILLION spam's per day - ~10k/second. How much of your incoming network bandwidth is consumed by spam (how much are you rejecting an hour) and how many machines are dedicated to incoming SMTP requests? What is the signal/noise ratio ("legit"/"filtered")? How much would The World save in dollars/year if spam went away?
Protecting against replay attack will become easy as the technology improves. The standard technique is to bury a "secret" (serial number) on the RFID tag, then use a series of yes/no challenges which the tag has to answer correctly using its secret until the reader is convinced of the tag's authenticity - the more questions asked, the more sure the reader is. The "secret" is never transmitted.
This requires slightly more complicated circuitry on the tag, but nothing out of the realm of near-future possibility.
I ran a major streaming media distribution net on 9/11. We saw a steady 75k - 100k simultaneous users (mostly audio) for the next several days as people used webcasts to get live news while at work. We had a few glitches as video streams were inserted by customers without warning us of the oncoming load, but they were mostly transient as we adjusted for capacity. At the edge we were seeing between two and four terabits/second being sent out, and could have turned up more if we needed it.
I've since built some even larger systems; I've no doubt that it's possible to scale Internet streaming media distribution to millions or even tens of millions of simultaneous viewers using today's technology and protocols.
The Zen Technology CD drives shoot a single laser through a difraction grating; last I checked they were reading seven tracks at a time. That's why Kenwood drives have the highest throughput yet spin slower (and are quieter, etc) than other manufacturers.
Slashdot Mirror
The public release wasn't supposed to be compiled with CIA_FBI_NSA=TRUE
If a fraction of the community had tried out the new firmware before release, would this have happened?
Hmmm.... the author of SysInternals (many, many years ago) is the CTO of Azure - coincidence?
The best thing about IT in the days of raised floor machine rooms was if you kept Guiness down there it was always the perfect temperature and you were quite popular with other departments.
Changing location access for Waze and Uber from "Always" to "Never" not only improved my privacy, it greatly improved the battery life of my phone. I still use both apps; the extra 15 seconds to enable access when starting and disable when done is a PITA but in the end part of the price for convenience.
Put it on a 4s and found it a bit slow. Also, when using waze for car navigation it seems to go into screen lock even when that's disabled in waze's settings. Planned obsolescence to encourage upgrades?
Not only do I prefer emacs to vi (and use both quite a bit), I still read my personal e-mail in emacs using the mh-e macros Brian Reid first wrote in the mid-80s. It's not broken, why fix it?
When it comes to cars, San Francisco is a weird place. There's a "transit first policy" where high-rise condos are allowed only if they have less parking spaces than units. There's the parking meters that in my 'hood are more than 16 hours a day, 7 days a week - with a minimum $50 fine. The meter maids also ticket for not curbing your wheels - ON FLAT STREETS.
Overall, San Francisco generates ~10% of its annual budget - more than $100M per year - from various traffic enforcements. Autonomous vehicles will put the squeeze on the budget, the police budget, and the homeless budget.
There may be reasons to run Windows or Linux natively on a Mac, but for me VMware Fusion does the job. Much better together than apart.
DEC was ten great years of my life. Ken built a company from nothing into something huge, then ran it into the ground. Technological highlights like networking (including a mobile pre-cursor to WiFi), StrongARM, and Alpha; marketing tragedies like "Unix is snake oil" and an unswerving allegiance to VMS. Let's not remember him for funding the VAX 9000.
Ken built an international engineering-driven culture of people that firmly believed in "doing right for the customer" and would go out of their way to get it done. You could pick up the phone and dial strangers for help and more often than not they would come through without politics or me-first posturing - an attitude that came straight from the top. I really miss it.
The architecture lives on at http://simh.trailing-edge.com/
Previous editions were somewhat challenged, but Windows7 is way better than any previous version wrt multiscreen. I run multiscreen with one framebuffer on my desktop and laptop and multi-framebuffer on my laptop with a DisplayLink USB frame buffer. It Just Works, including easily changing orientations, laptop disconnect/reconnect, changing to display cloning for presentations, etc. Windows-P is your new keyboard shortcut friend.
What pisses me off is that I hate Windows; But it does show that if you concentrate on fixing bugs, over time code can improve.
Couldn't agree more - I've had three Squeezeboxes around the house for six or seven years and they've been great. Others at work also rave about them. There are now several ways to control them to suit taste and need.
I drove to their office to buy the first two and they're just good people.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers". - (Henry VI Act IV, Scene II - Shakespeare, ca. 1623). Good idea then, good idea now.
When I lived in Switzerland '86-'88 you could get small gold ingots from a UBS ATM on the Bahnhofstrasse in downtown Zurich. Just the sort of thing a conservative Swiss banker would do on the way home from work.
Saw them on the last tour, a sold out performance at San Francisco's Warfield. They were excellent, and the crowd was better (banners like "Stumpy Joe lives"). Sex Farm Woman was a sing-along. The enormous Marshall amps went to 11, maybe more. The encore included guest bassist Flea playing something huge and Derek on a double-neck raging through Big Bottom with some extra-special on-stage talent. If they come to your town I say check it out.
Ten years ago you could buy an Alpha that had the same bragging rights - 64-bit registers & addressing, wider bus, better atomic primitives, etc. *YAWN* It solves a serious problem that confronts maybe .05% of the world, and runs about the same amount of sw compatibly. A technological masterpiece/kludge in the tradition of IPv6.
Thacker and Lampson have been with Microsoft for only a few years after long careers at Digital Equipment in the lab founded by Taylor when he left Xerox. Their good ideas continued to pour out well beyond the days at PARC.
then celebrate with lite beer...
Intel is currently shipping two similarly named but totally different low-power CPUs, the Pentium M (really an optimized P-III with more cache) and the Pentium IV-M (a mobilized P-4). The P-M seems to get as much or more throughput than the P-IV-M for far less power - look for it in Centrino-branded laptops.
Larger screens use more power for the backlights, so you might consider a system with a 12.2in screen (typically 1024x768) instead of a larger (14.4in or more) screen that has sex (and pixel) appeal but sucks down the juice. Many popular vendors have ultra-mobile form factor systems that put rarely used I/O devices like CD-R/DVDs in a "media slice" or other external packages.
Other advantages of laptops of off-grid use are that you can get a 12VDC adapter and run/charge it off a cigarette socket (including a car) eliminating inverter inefficiency, you can charge during the day when there's juice available and use it up at night, and you can use them while covered in blankets in bed during the cold of winter, a popular position for some of my off-grid friends.
ellbee
ellbee
First off, you'll want a native German speaker to help you get the right package. Imagine calling SBC (my DSL provider) and trying to get service speaking to htem in German, with your only English phrases being "beer", "toilet", and "I want to pay." Right.
Second, it's Germany, so you might as well use Telekom since they're the dominant carrier and have the best chance of having reliable service in your area. The tariffs are online at the T-DSL site in a pop-up that has something like 13 choices for connectivity, including flat-rate (EUR30/month), per-minute by day, per-minute by night, dial-up, and capped monthly download limits. This is a fine example of that special German rule fetish, but since Germans can actually read and comprehend tables they can get away with it. Once again, get a native speaker to translate; with so many choices one will meet your needs.
Third, you're dealing with a phone company. You might have excellent luck and flawless service in a week, or months of hell and people giving you abuse in a language you don't understand. It's a crap shoot, but it's fun once you get the hang of it. Once it's up and running it should be as solid as DSL in any civilized country and you'll never think about it until you leave. And if you do have problems, at least the beer is good.
ellbee
ellbee
Protecting against replay attack will become easy as the technology improves. The standard technique is to bury a "secret" (serial number) on the RFID tag, then use a series of yes/no challenges which the tag has to answer correctly using its secret until the reader is convinced of the tag's authenticity - the more questions asked, the more sure the reader is. The "secret" is never transmitted.
This requires slightly more complicated circuitry on the tag, but nothing out of the realm of near-future possibility.
ellbee
I've since built some even larger systems; I've no doubt that it's possible to scale Internet streaming media distribution to millions or even tens of millions of simultaneous viewers using today's technology and protocols.
ellbee
The Zen Technology CD drives shoot a single laser through a difraction grating; last I checked they were reading seven tracks at a time. That's why Kenwood drives have the highest throughput yet spin slower (and are quieter, etc) than other manufacturers.