For those of us who are trapped in the dead-end jobs that require installing Windows Server 2whatever on new hardware, the joy of the F6 diskette is fleeting, replaced by the realization that our new hardware has dispensed with the obsolete, but needed, floppy drive.
The exercise of creating a USB key that mimics a floppy drive with those F6 drivers is nontrivial. Just give me a floppy, or tell Bill and the Redmond Insults to change the installer ever so slightly and look at all media for those cursed drivers.
And yes, I have several different ways to do that, and several different keys that do it. I'm just recovering from an extended rollout. Thank God it wasn't something painful, say RH9.
Extend this to alternative voice services providers, and you basicly end upsplitting off the local loop and turning it into a seperate business. A bit of regulation and oversight is required it seems, but for what I can tell, such a setup is doing wonders for competition in both telephony and internet access markets in Europe.
Um, in America, it's called 'unbundling', I think. Whatever, for most telco voice providers, the FCC ruled on this quite a while ago under Congressional mandate. You can indeed choose another voice provider over your wires, and indeed can choose another DSL provider for network access if anyone offers such service. The telcos have mostly lost the local loop monopoly, which may be part of the motivation to pull fiber to the home, along with video services.
None of which has anything to do with Net Neutrality. IMHO.
I know of one company here that moved its shipping and production from the Phoenix area partly because of the run-up in housing prices. They relocated to some podunk cowtown in Iowa.
Of course, they also relocated 'cause FedEx saud they would give them better service if they moved to the Midwest. Come to find out, FedEx meant Memphis. Darn.
But the employees the moved (way most of them) love it. And being the employer of 2500+ in a town with a population of 5000 makes you very welcome. Except for the Wal-Mart you brought along...
Interesting. I hacked away at Darwin to see if it would run on Intel a bit before Apple bit Intel for chips. Almost worked, but i needed those modules that bypassed the TPC stuff...
Apple doesn't really *need* copy protection for PPC - based Darwin. It really only ran on Apple Hardware, and OS upgrades might not be where the money is for Apple.
Now that OS X runs on Intel relatively plainly, they might have need of something like copy protecton, but if there's hooks to BIOS or TPC stuff, problem solved.
Having a 'family license' isn't a demonstration of 'no copy protection' if you need Apple hardware to run it.
Imagine Microsoft brings out versions of Vista that can only run on specific vendors' platforms, say a version for Dell, one for HP/Compaq, one for Sony, etc. Any feature that Dell had that HP users wanted would spark a war to crack the code.
Referring to future phone as if it reminds you of those 'paper clackers' you made as a kid when most of your audience probably doesn't have a clue what a 'paper clacker' is: -1 irrelevant.
Idea of smelling your caller's environment: -1 obnoxious.
Figuring out the difference between 'the winning design' and 'the winner of the competition when they are two different designs: priceless.
Quickly scanning that article on the San Diego election:
1. The voter log differs from the votes cast... Of course, it is possible that some voters failed to cast ballots. Perhaps they got in the booth, looked at the machine, and realized they forgot the remote. Failure to complete or even start a ballot is more obvious to me than 'lost votes' due to a machine issue. People are way buggier than even Diebold voting machines.
2. Machines that wouldn't start is a much more serious concern to me. I suspect many people didn't come back to vote. Defective equipment will cause more lost votes than many other causes, and this may select certain voters; for instance, unemployed voters may be able to wait or come back more often than employed (especially self-employed voters).
3. The Montgomery County, Maryland incident points to faulty software. Sheesh.
4. The Palm Beach/Broward election snafu is interesting. No paper trail makes recounting pointless. Change the law? NO! Change the machines. PS - seems ES&S has as much trouble as Diebold.
5. The Miami/Dade election note is interesting. Noi votes tallied called a 'virtual impossibility' Had the author asked about a voter log or something like that, they could have reported if election workers had even one signature or check mark of a single voter arriving and casting a ballot. AN otherwise fairly good report seems uncertain and incomplete here. Darn.
6. Apparently, in New Nexico, they have that renowned and rare Microsoft Sequel 6.5 system. I bet that's a mess.
You know, in Maine we had the ballot boxes *locked*. Seems we could do the same thing with electronic devices. And your ATM has two access systems. One for the tech to wrangle Windows (Dontcha miss OS/2 on your ATM?), and another for the cash vault. Surely our voting machines could have one lock for the tech to resolve problems, and another for the clerks to extract the memory card and tally votes. Eh?
This whole elctronic voting thing is a fiasco so far. We need to slow this down and do it right. Or just stick to optical scan ballots. They do in fact work.
1. It does seem like RAID5+ at the file level. More redundant, so it seems cooler to me.
2. Has anyone read an article on Google's file system? This sounds a lot like it. Multiple stripes, recovery with less than N-2 parts, and Google uses it to improve performance first, with copies worldwide more or less. I think the article was in Wired, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
Not such a good test. Off is Off.
Try leaving the monitor on for 10 hours, in standby. Then see how quickly it comes 'on'.
Most CRT monitors leave a low voltage on the CRT filament, to keep it a bit warm, and sometimes a bit of keep-alive voltage in the high-voltage section, tho that isn't so useful today. The other logic and such is easy to start up, so while the filament comes to full temp in perhaps 5 seconds, everything else is alive and well.
Flat panel monitors usually don't suffer from the delay in getting the backlight or plasma warmed up and fully on. Another good reason to spend 5x the cash and use 3x the natural resources to buy that HD panel. Go for it!
rick
Sheesh. Time to make plastic fiber to replace Cat5. Something around 10GB oughta be possible over plastic for, say, 5km or less. I'm betting it's already out there.
Then we can consider optical connects for HDTV, all audio, etc. More copper saved?
Of course, it will probably take 2 pounds of copper to manke enough plastic fiber to replace 1 pound of copper wire.
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For those of us who are trapped in the dead-end jobs that require installing Windows Server 2whatever on new hardware, the joy of the F6 diskette is fleeting, replaced by the realization that our new hardware has dispensed with the obsolete, but needed, floppy drive.
The exercise of creating a USB key that mimics a floppy drive with those F6 drivers is nontrivial. Just give me a floppy, or tell Bill and the Redmond Insults to change the installer ever so slightly and look at all media for those cursed drivers.
And yes, I have several different ways to do that, and several different keys that do it. I'm just recovering from an extended rollout. Thank God it wasn't something painful, say RH9.
rick
Extend this to alternative voice services providers, and you basicly end upsplitting off the local loop and turning it into a seperate business. A bit of regulation and oversight is required it seems, but for what I can tell, such a setup is doing wonders for competition in both telephony and internet access markets in Europe.
Um, in America, it's called 'unbundling', I think. Whatever, for most telco voice providers, the FCC ruled on this quite a while ago under Congressional mandate. You can indeed choose another voice provider over your wires, and indeed can choose another DSL provider for network access if anyone offers such service. The telcos have mostly lost the local loop monopoly, which may be part of the motivation to pull fiber to the home, along with video services.
None of which has anything to do with Net Neutrality. IMHO.
rick
I know of one company here that moved its shipping and production from the Phoenix area partly because of the run-up in housing prices. They relocated to some podunk cowtown in Iowa.
Of course, they also relocated 'cause FedEx saud they would give them better service if they moved to the Midwest. Come to find out, FedEx meant Memphis. Darn.
But the employees the moved (way most of them) love it. And being the employer of 2500+ in a town with a population of 5000 makes you very welcome. Except for the Wal-Mart you brought along...
Suppose Bangalore has any Wal-Marts?
rick
Ah, but we wanted the true Apple rev, with all the goodies. I believed my partner in crime that Aqua wasn't part of GNU-darwin... jerk.
Silly, though. We coulda lived with the GNU rev.
rick
Interesting. I hacked away at Darwin to see if it would run on Intel a bit before Apple bit Intel for chips. Almost worked, but i needed those modules that bypassed the TPC stuff...
Apple doesn't really *need* copy protection for PPC - based Darwin. It really only ran on Apple Hardware, and OS upgrades might not be where the money is for Apple.
Now that OS X runs on Intel relatively plainly, they might have need of something like copy protecton, but if there's hooks to BIOS or TPC stuff, problem solved.
Having a 'family license' isn't a demonstration of 'no copy protection' if you need Apple hardware to run it.
Imagine Microsoft brings out versions of Vista that can only run on specific vendors' platforms, say a version for Dell, one for HP/Compaq, one for Sony, etc. Any feature that Dell had that HP users wanted would spark a war to crack the code.
Uhoh. Hope nobody from M$ is reading this...
rick
Referring to future phone as if it reminds you of those 'paper clackers' you made as a kid when most of your audience probably doesn't have a clue what a 'paper clacker' is: -1 irrelevant.
/. that's gone in the handbasket.
Idea of smelling your caller's environment: -1 obnoxious.
Figuring out the difference between 'the winning design' and 'the winner of the competition when they are two different designs: priceless.
It's not just
rick
He probably heard 'windows' in Palo Alto, and gee, what a great idea! Brilliant!
Brilliant!
rick
Um, it's not so ugly. Colors and case design can be cleaned up in the design lab. that's easy to fix.
The screen could be larger, but who's really happy with anything less than 17"?
And is that the mother of all touchpads below the keyboard? woof!
Seriously, if this were in some pastel or benign colors, and a little slicker design, I'd hit it. I'd pay $300 or so if it were marginally powerful.
There is a market out there for simple. Of course, here I am waiting for Conroe or better, and plotting to saddle my wife with a Mac Intel Mini...
Never satisfied.
rick
Quickly scanning that article on the San Diego election:
1. The voter log differs from the votes cast... Of course, it is possible that some voters failed to cast ballots. Perhaps they got in the booth, looked at the machine, and realized they forgot the remote. Failure to complete or even start a ballot is more obvious to me than 'lost votes' due to a machine issue. People are way buggier than even Diebold voting machines.
2. Machines that wouldn't start is a much more serious concern to me. I suspect many people didn't come back to vote. Defective equipment will cause more lost votes than many other causes, and this may select certain voters; for instance, unemployed voters may be able to wait or come back more often than employed (especially self-employed voters).
3. The Montgomery County, Maryland incident points to faulty software. Sheesh.
4. The Palm Beach/Broward election snafu is interesting. No paper trail makes recounting pointless. Change the law? NO! Change the machines. PS - seems ES&S has as much trouble as Diebold.
5. The Miami/Dade election note is interesting. Noi votes tallied called a 'virtual impossibility' Had the author asked about a voter log or something like that, they could have reported if election workers had even one signature or check mark of a single voter arriving and casting a ballot. AN otherwise fairly good report seems uncertain and incomplete here. Darn.
6. Apparently, in New Nexico, they have that renowned and rare Microsoft Sequel 6.5 system. I bet that's a mess.
You know, in Maine we had the ballot boxes *locked*. Seems we could do the same thing with electronic devices. And your ATM has two access systems. One for the tech to wrangle Windows (Dontcha miss OS/2 on your ATM?), and another for the cash vault. Surely our voting machines could have one lock for the tech to resolve problems, and another for the clerks to extract the memory card and tally votes. Eh?
This whole elctronic voting thing is a fiasco so far. We need to slow this down and do it right. Or just stick to optical scan ballots. They do in fact work.
rick
1. It does seem like RAID5+ at the file level. More redundant, so it seems cooler to me.
2. Has anyone read an article on Google's file system? This sounds a lot like it. Multiple stripes, recovery with less than N-2 parts, and Google uses it to improve performance first, with copies worldwide more or less. I think the article was in Wired, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
New? Maybe. Improved? Maybe. Cool? I want.
rick
Haven't we done this before? Wasn't it called AOL?
Seriously, I say let the telcos do what they want. Just don't call it Internet service.
Cause it ain't.
rick
Not such a good test. Off is Off. Try leaving the monitor on for 10 hours, in standby. Then see how quickly it comes 'on'. Most CRT monitors leave a low voltage on the CRT filament, to keep it a bit warm, and sometimes a bit of keep-alive voltage in the high-voltage section, tho that isn't so useful today. The other logic and such is easy to start up, so while the filament comes to full temp in perhaps 5 seconds, everything else is alive and well. Flat panel monitors usually don't suffer from the delay in getting the backlight or plasma warmed up and fully on. Another good reason to spend 5x the cash and use 3x the natural resources to buy that HD panel. Go for it! rick
I was thinking more along the lines of PVC.. simple is good.
Sheesh. Time to make plastic fiber to replace Cat5. Something around 10GB oughta be possible over plastic for, say, 5km or less. I'm betting it's already out there.
Then we can consider optical connects for HDTV, all audio, etc. More copper saved?
Of course, it will probably take 2 pounds of copper to manke enough plastic fiber to replace 1 pound of copper wire.
If it's not one thing, it's your mother.
rick