I don't think comparing earthquakes to asteroid impacts is a good metric. That being said I am sure if this thing were to impact a heavily crowded city such as Shanghai, London or New York, the effects would be much more devastating than the 10,000 you quoted. I am sure the energy from an asteroid of that size could very well level an entire city and kill millions. The devastation will surely impact the entire nation as well, both emotionally and financially.
If you read her Wikipedia article, there was evidence that she has had affairs while married. It is possible that she was screwing Babbage and he covered for her by claiming she was working with him.
I saw a special on TV not too long ago that covered the python problem in Florida. The idea that they cant spread further north is somewhat false. There is an outdoor habitat somewhere in north Georgia (I think) that tested the theory of the snakes inability to survive cold weather and found they were able to survive a Georgia winter. So the pythons could certainly spread throughout the southern US.
Also called dyed #2 heating oil or dyed #2 diesel. They add a red dye to the fuel which enables its presence to be detected in on-road vehicle tanks. Some rural gas stations and truck stops sell dyed #2 oil (as well as kerosene) out of a pump right next to the other fuel pumps. The heating oil taxes are much lower than road fuel taxes so its very tempting to put heating fuel in your tank which costs nearly half of what you normally pay. But during roadside inspections they will check the tanks for red fuel. God help you if you get caught, high fines and they may impound your vehicle. In Louisiana they charge you $100 per gallon of vehicle fuel tank capacity, even if they only find a trace. Many trucks have a 50-300 gallon capacity, OUCH! They do however allow you to fill tanks of off road vehicles like site trucks, construction/farm equipment as well as the refrigeration systems on reefer trailers. It just cant be in the tank of a vehicle that normally travels on a public road.
I had the flu a few years back, took 2 weeks to shake it. My work only allots 5 days for sick leave per year. After that its either take vacation days to be compensated or take unpaid leave. I took a few sick days for the worst of it and then sucked it up the following week and just came in to work. I did not want to cut into my vacation time. Call me selfish but that's that way its is. And I doubt I spread it because I always wash my hands, keep away from the coffee pot and sit in a cubical. Thankfully i don't get sick very often.
I have a number of old tech kicking around and I am about to inherit a few more gems.
Stuff I have: -AT&T 3B1 and PC7300 (the 7300 boots, I have a video on YouTube and all of the pictures/video on Wikipedia are mine, the 3B1 had a bad HDD) -Next Station (Played with it for a bit before I needed room and boxed it up) -2x DEC Dumb terminals (used to have the both of them connected to my Linux box, served as a quasi triple head monitor setup.) -Sun SPARCstation IPC (had it running OpenBSD and an AUI -> 10BaseT adapter) -ADM 42 Terminal (doesn't work and never got around to fixing it yet) -Misc 286/386/486 systems and main boards. -Some SGI stuff I snagged off ebay for cheap, five origin 300 systems, an SGI 1000 1U PIII server, an Onyx2 and an Octane 2. All for less than $400. I have one of the Origin 300's working the Octane and the 1000 but admittedly I haven't played with them much at all.
About to acquire for free from work: MITS Altair 8800b (mint condition in a box, still trying to see if they have the 8" floppy drive) IBM System/23 Datamaster with printer, manuals and disks (fucking amazing collection). Franklin Ace 1200 with software and monitor. Wyse Serial terminal
The Franklin is a very special find as it was the first computer I ever used when I was a kid. My father bought it new and we used it for a year or so until he bought a Canon 8086 (cant figure out what model it was) which was taken to work and replaced with an AT&T PC6300. I dont know what he did with the Franklyn but I was stunned when I found one here at work. I still am looking for a PC6300. I have many fond memories using one, did most of my grade school home work on it using Q&A word processor.
Unfortunately I haven't played with much of my vintage toys for a while since I got my own place. Its all at my mothers house as of now. Within the next few years I plan on buying a house and setting up a vintage computer lab, who needs a dining/living rooms anyway.
I know A123 is still doing business, we got an RFQ from them the other day.
About a year ago we were working with them on their new battery technology. The challenge was to weld the battery electrolyte fill port in a moisture and oxygen free environment. We have a glove box but the big problem was to leak test the cell before it left the environment and that was the hard part. The glove box environment is 90% argon and 10% helium which is used as a trace gas for helium mass spectrometer leak testing. The part goes into a vacuum oven antechamber and held under vacuum (and baked if necessary, usually to get rid of vapors from glues and moisture) until its safe to open the door in the glove box chamber. Once you hermetically seal a part you need the trace gas to already be inside the part and that is why there is a 10% helium mix. The sealed parts are put into a bell-jar on the leak detector and the leak rate is measured in atm-cc/sec, around 5x10^-5 is when liquid water begins to leak. Below that is where you want to be in the 10^-8/10^-9 range or better. The problem is If your environment is already contaminated with helium how do you test a part for leaking helium? There are other methods we use for parts but that requires the part to be removed from the glove box. If the battery is not sealed 100% it will be ruined if any moisture or oxygen gets into the battery. If we catch the leak inside the box then we can repair it.
I believe that was the major bottleneck in the process, welding shut the battery electrolyte fill port and checking the seal without introducing the battery to air. They could have two glove boxes with a vacuum antechamber joining them, one filled with the trace gas mixed in, the other without trace gas but helium is a pain in the ass to pump out. you would have to do a gas purge and then vacuum it out and possibly another purge then leak check the part.
We did the development on the job and I don't know what happened after we gave them our solutions.
I would say its more about convenience. Many movies I used to download were simply not easily available outside of renting/buying the DVD/VHS. Even if it was only available on DVD/VHS I did not care to buy it because how many times would I actually watch it? Maybe once or twice. It wasn't worth the 10-20 bucks for the physical media because I would watch it once then let it sit on a shelf and collect dust for the rest of its life. A bad investment if you ask me. TV series are sometimes worth buying because you get more for your money and some shows are so great you could watch it over and over a hundred times and not get bored.
Movie channels on cable are not worth it because the schedule is canned and any movies I would like to watch are never or rarely on. Sure there are some great series like Bill Mar, Dexter and Game of Thrones but its not worth the $300+ your paying per year for those channels.
Netflix and HULU will hopefully offer a more sane method of watching movies and TV shows that are/were hard to find. But the catalogs are still lacking. I went to the BBC iPlayer the other day and searched for The Young Ones, Fawlty Towers, Keeping up Appearances and Black Adder. Found nothing. WTF. If Netflix suddenly carried all of the TV shows and movies I would like to watch I would easily shell out $50+ per month to watch everything I want commercial free and uncensored. I would dump cable.
In the end its all about ease of access. I want to watch what I want, when I want, where I want and how I want. I pray for they day when I can pull out my tablet and watch Fawlty Towers then an old cheesy movie like the Golden Voyage of Sinbad and then something more modern like Its always Sunny in Philadelphia. That does not exist as of today and the reason why people still download. I stopped downloading only because everything I would like to watch is already on a disk array, the rest is on my DVR or borrowed/given to me by a friend.
Movie theaters are the last place on earth I would want to be. The last time I went was because I knew i was getting laid afterward. Fuck theaters.
Seriously. How do we not need phones anymore? On average the engineer here at work spends half his day on the phone, he actually clocked it once. Try spending 4+ hours on various calls using a mobile.
Desk phones aren't going anywhere unless you spend a majority of time away from your desk. And for fucks sake, corporate IM? We have Office 365 here at work and the boss wanted to have people use Lync. Guess what? No one cared for it and I think only a few dozen IM's were ever sent. Its still running on everyone's PC but it sits idle while the phone is constantly used. My guess is since we have no speakers on our PC's (company policy) the alert sound never did its job and IM's went unanswered until the phone was called. You always hear a ringing phone, in fact its almost a reflex to pick it up. Even of the Lync window pops up or an alert bubble appears for some reason people tend to ignore them because its not a blaring phone ring.
I think you mean: two little, one little, four little, three little, six little, five little, eight little, seven little, ten little, nine little edian bytes
One of my biggest complaints about any traffic light is the sometimes ridiculously short yellow lights. Near my home there is a traffic signal on the main road that only changes if a car is present at the intersection waiting to turn. The yellow light is barely 2 seconds, no where near enough time for a vehicle traveling 30MPH (~48km/h). I have seen heavy trucks rolling along when that idiotic light changes and the truck has choice but to roll right through that intersection, your not stopping 20+ tons rolling along at 30mph in 2 seconds.
I always wanted a 4th "warning" light before the yellow, I have seen them somewhere in Europe, maybe it was the UK. At most city intersections the flashing "don't walk" for pedestrians usually precedes the yellow light so if your in a heavy vehicle you can determine that you need to reduce your speed and anticipate a yellow -> red light. But outside of cities there are few sidewalks and even fewer pedestrian signals. The 4th signal can be simple to add and does not require replacing existing lights. You illuminate the yellow light while the green light is still lit, or flash the yellow light. Then the green light goes out, yellow steady and finally red. Gives a nice warning to drivers further down the road to slow down. Maybe even try to establish a standard time length for the 4th signal, say 5 seconds until yellow.
I wouldn't say misinformed. I never stated any of this was true. Perhaps I should have put my "making this up as I go along" disclaimer at the top. of my post. For years we have been hearing how big hardware and software companies have to keep selling faster and better software/hardware to turn a profit and how switching for a pay-as-you-go model is better. We are at the point where CPU's dont need to be much faster, 1.6GHz Atoms are enough for any basic task. Selling a canned PC design with $2000 worth of features for This is Intel we are talking about. Haswell processors are not shipping for many months from now, but Intel started merging Linux kernel enhancements to take full advantage of Haswell (even graphics which is not used by the server market) a few months ago. For free. And of course, by making this Windows only, Intel loses all small business server market which currently runs Linux (occasionally BSD) on commodity (i5/i7 LGA 1155) / workstation (i7 LGA 2011) systems. This is not an insignificant market, as these chips give 1/3rd as much of margin as a Xeon gives, but is a 20 times larger market.
You lost sight of the line between the server and PC market. I am sure Xeon's wont come crippled because their market is completely different. If they do at some point, I am sure you would call VendorX and they would send you a secure USB stick/dongle/binary/key that enables unlocking of features under Linux. Maybe through a secure hypervisor that sits between the hardware and OS, similar to the PS3. I can see Dell or HP selling cheap servers to small businesses. Need more power? just call 1-800-upgrade and we will give you an unlock code for two more Cores and an extra 16GB for $599.99 or 19.99 a month. No need to send a tech out to plug in a second CPU in or add RAM, its already in the box waiting to be unlocked. Again, what I am saying is pure fiction. But I am sure someone at Dell, HP, MS IBM or some other large tech company hasn't thought of this before.
I am sure Intel will continue to sell processors as usual. Hopefully this soldered-on-permanently nonsense turns out to be the new Atom line of CPU's and not the future of all Intel CPU's. My post was more "grim future alarmist" than actual fact, again I made it up. It could turn out to be total fantasy. But there is no saying Intel in partnership with Dell or HP and MS to pursue some form of pay-as-you go canned PC for the masses who simply want a cheap PC with the option to unlock more power as they see fit.
I have done the same. By the time you want to upgrade, your current motherboard is a generation or two behind so its not worth it. BUT I doubt Intel is going to solder on different chips to give different speeds/cores/cache. This is a move to take control of how they sell you a CPU.
Anyone remember the rumors that Intel is going to sell crippled CPU's and for a fee you can unlock more cores, cache or speed? This is what they are doing here. Intel is going to make a "Range" of CPU's just like the i3/5/7, but more likely they will market them as: Basic, Premium and Performance. Each CPU class is just a single chip, no models or stepping. They will be sold with a default crippled setting based on what the OEM or Intel decides to sell it for. So a Performance "i7" board might have 4 cores, 4.5GHz max speed, 20MB L3 cache and HD8000 graphics. Dell buys the Premium board from Intel for just $100 bucks and sells it inside a $400 PC. Sounds cheap right? But Dell ships the board with only 2 cores enabled, 2GHz clock speed, 10MB L3 cache and HD4000 graphics (im making this up here). Dell sells the CPU "upgrades" and Intel gets a cut (A big one I would imagine).
Joe user buys his shiny new Windows 8 Dell all-in-one touch Performance PC and wants more speed. So he loads the Dell/Intel store app and plops down $50 to bump the speed another 500MHz, or for a sweet deal he can save $25 and just drop $175 to get 4GHz. For an additional $300 he can also unlock the other two cores, double the speed for less than a new computer! Or how about a Black Friday special where he can unlock 4GHz and all the cores for the low low price of $450! If he is feeling like having bragging rights he can unlock all the cache (20MB), additional 500MHz to 4.5GHz (exclusive to the extreme package only!) and cores by purchasing the Extreme bundle for the low-low price of $999.99!
So of course they want to kill the enthusiast market. They cheat the CPU makers by taking a low cost CPU, adding some comparably cheap cooling and have a CPU that can perform as fast or faster than their high end $500-$1000 CPU that has only a slight gain (money wise) over the cheaper CPU's. You want to overclock? Sorry buddy but you have to pay for the speed now, maybe wait until after Christmas when vendor X has a sale and you can snag the Extreme package for just $899.99 instead of $999.99. Or you can rent the extreme package for just 29.99 a month, cancel at any time!
And of course the software to do this is Windows only and requires a trusted, signed, licensed, bonded, married, insured EFI image to unlock the cores during run-time. Sorry Linux (BSD, BeOS, Plan9 etc.) but your going to have to put up with Atom like performance as only "TRUSTED" images can unlock CPU cores during run-time. God forbid some evil Linux hacker figures out how to bypass the Intel locks and gets all that computing power for free! Maybe run Linux in a VM under a trusted OS, that's your answer.
Then from there we can buy 5TB hard drives for $25 with 500GB enabled, but have to pay an additional $300 to access the rest of the 4.5TB. Or just rent cloud storage! Why worry about memory capacity when memory makers can just make 32GB sticks and then sell them for 4GB prices and gouge for the additional 24GB? "Sorry but Angry Birds Battlestar Galactica has run out of memory. Visit the Dell store and for just $29.99 you can double your memory! or for the low trial price of $1.99, rent 4GB for two days!"
The future looks bright. That or maybe I just paid for an additional 750 lumens from my light bulb vendor, I keep loosing track what with all these tech upgrades and rentals I have going.
Back in the 80's (sometime after the Iran-Contra affair) my grandfather was contracted by a government contractor to design and stamp the cutter wheels used in secure paper shredders. Basically the shredder must produce paper shards no larger than 1/32 inches (0.79mm) wide and 1/8 inches (3.17mm) long. Pretty much dust comes out of the bottom of this thing. The wheels were stamped from big heavy rolls of steel stock and then heat treated. I can still remember the constant loud chatter from the 20 ton OBI press as it stamped out one cutter after another 6 days a week. It has a rather powerful 1/2 HP motor with a gear reduction head and a chain drive to the shredder mechanism. The frame was heavy 1/4 thick steel plate and the unit was housed in a nice heavy duty steel box. It does have limits on how many papers it can handle at once, something like 10 - 15 8.5x11 sheets at once before it jams.
We have a complete unit that was used as our paper shredder for years until it became too bulky. It weighs close to 80 lbs and must be suspended on a stand over a bag or bin, it doesn't fit under a desk. We also have a complete mechanism with chain and motor as well as a half assembled unit. We still have the shredder, but we now use one of those cheap staples bought cross cut shredders, does the job nicely. Those shredders were built to last and I bet there might be some still in operation at various government agencies.
Instead of worrying about tolerances and equivalent BAC levels, just come up with a field sobriety test that can detect if someone is too impaired to drive. The problem with a pot BAC is that people react differently to THC. One person might throw up and become stoned from a few good hits while another may feel little to noting at all from the same dose.
I have a friend who has two jobs, goes to school for his bachelors degree, has a wife and a new-born son. When I asked him how he copes he replied: "Copious amount of marijuana, bro." He smokes when he wakes up, smokes on his drive in to work, smokes during lunch, smokes on his way to night classes or his second job and a few hits at night before bed. Granted his case is unique, if I smoked as much as he does I would make a damn fine door stop. Then again I don't have his tolerance.
The cops have to be smart and throw the concept of BAC and breathalyzers out the window. They have to learn to spot the drivers who are legitimately too high to drive vs the veteran smoker who becomes superman juggling multiple jobs, school and a family while high.
The problem with your example is that the land of the US was never part of Canada. It would make sense if some other country came along and told Canada "This land is no longer yours. It now belongs to the Americans." And for the next few decades Canada puts up Americans crossing its borders, settling on its land claiming it for themselves. All the while the US government does nothing. So in a way Canada does have a right to be pissed at the US. But its more complex than that, the Americans were there first, a few thousand years prior, before the Canadians kicked them out by force. Plus god told the Americans that it was their promise land, so by right the land belongs to the americans. So who is right in this case? The Americans who want their "god given" land back or the Canadians who have settled and claimed that land for over 1300 years?
Another example would be if Native Americans launched missiles from their reservations into surrounding US communities. Another parallel were the IRA attacks on Northern Ireland. People get pissed when you take their land away.
And that is the truth behind Israel and Palestine. The Jews were there first about 3000+ years ago. Then the Arabs forced them out around 650 AD. 1300 years later, during WWI, the British gained control of Palestine and the Jews started coming back. After WWII it became apparent the displaced Jews and Holocost survivors needed a place to go and the British would not let them all into Palestine as there was an immigration quota in place. After the Jewish Zionist Terrorist organization, Lehi, carried out assassinations and bombings against the British in protest, the US and UN eventually forced Britain into establishing Israel in order to stop the violence.
No matter whose side you look at, each has a point. Its a catch 22 situation. The Jews established that land as theirs first. But the Arabs had control over the land for well over a 1000 years. After that much times passes you would think the Jews would just say fuck it, we can settle in the west. But the Zionist mentality is firmly rooted in the belief of the Jewish state, the "promise land". Basically no matter who says what, god gave them the deed to Israel and there is no higher authority that can tell them otherwise.
$300-$320? The original/. article was quoting prices of around $100, but it looks like it was more like wishful speculation. Where is the Ethernet port, memory or storage? Hell they don't even have an eSATA port which you can find on just about every motherboard these days. I can buy the parts to make a mini PC using an ITX board for less than $300 and that includes storage, memory and gigabit Ethernet plus eSATA. The CPU would be an AMD A series which has graphics that will wipe the floor with the i3's HD 4000.
The Extremetech article linked in the older/. summary shows mini PCIe slots on the board so expansion is not out of the question but there is no mention of them in the latest article. Thunderbolt is also pretty damn fast, 10Gbps, equivalent to the bandwidth of 2 PCIe 2.0 x1 slots. But if you really need expansion slots you could probably buy a micro ATX system for the same price.
What is the point of this system, size? No one will buy it as its marketed towards enthusiasts who know hardware prices and they wont touch this thing. If they want to charge that kind of money it better come with storage and memory, and a good deal of it to justify the $300 price tag. On Newegg, I can buy a Zotac ZBOX ID41 PLUS for $288 which is a 1.8GHz Atom, ION graphics, 250GB HDD and 2GB RAM.
If Intel is selling this thing as a barebones system, they better drop the price to $100, I would buy one for that price, would make a great mini server or control PC (for robotics, CNC etc.). If they added Ethernet and eSATA AND included RAM along with an SSD then the $300-$320 would be more appealing. Its now a turnkey system, just power it on and install your OS.
I work next to a Verizon data center out here in Farmingdale, Long Island (supposedly all the Verizon cell phone traffic for long island). They recently built extensions to the building and had two large diesel generators installed, a 15,000 gallon fuel tank along with two large cooling systems. Turns out they needed it.
During the aftermath they didn't run out of diesel because they bought in an additional on site 15,000 gallon fuel tank (in a 40 foot container). Plus they had semi trucks with sleeper tractors from out of state with trailers full of diesel ready to fill the tanks back up on site 24/7. Armed guards manned the premises 24/7 and lived out of a mobile home. They also bought in generator powered flood lights to keep the surrounding property lit up like it was day light. Those generators sounded like a pair of locomotives running, and probably because they use engines of similar size. My manager found out they burn 4000 gallons of diesel a day keeping the building going. They ran the generators until the 7th or 8th. So they burned something like 40,000+ gallons of fuel in that time frame.
If you have the money and the right infrastructure, you can keep the power going as long as you need.
I don't see Microsoft or Apple worrying how they will distribute Steam, because they don't*. I don't see why browsing to steampowered.com and downloading the client for your OS of choice should be any different than on Windows or Mac OS. The belief that everything should be in the repos is silly.
*Even if they were to make Steam available through their app stores its still the publishers responsibility to submit the app for distribution.
TSA has nothing to do with freight, they are responsible for the safety of the travelling public. US customs handles freight shipments into and out of the country. But I doubt it was them. Most of the freight comes into warehouses located on the outskirts of the airport off the Nassau expressway at the end of Rockaway blvd. I lived 5 minuted from JFK and know numerous people who worked in and around JFK, luggage handlers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, customs agent, freight company managers etc.
The best insight into freight theft came from a retired truck driver I know. Basically nearly all of the theft is committed by employees, managers and owners of the cargo companies. There are hijackings and sometimes a trailer is stolen but those are few and far between. The stories he told me (he was part of the theft problem, he wasn't ashamed about it) were often simple and mundane.
Stealing HP computers bound for Israel? Open the boxes, take computers out, replace with rocks and deliver to airport. Unhappy Jewish person gets a box of rocks.
How to steal 10 Playstation 2's (on launch day no less) bound for Best Buy's distribution center? Freight company stupidly hands him security seal to put on trailer door, he puts on seal but doesn't let it lock, freight employee is fooled and signs off. Stop truck remove a bunch of PS2's put seal back on trailer and actually let it lock. Best Buy stumped that PS2's were stolen en-route when seal was locked and signed off. They search trailer for holes or tampering but none found. Gets away with it and hocks PS2's for $800 each.
Steal designer cloths? Many college kids get part time jobs at clothing stores, usually lazy or ignorant of shipments. He steals 2 boxes from a shipment of 20 boxes. Clueless college kid receives 18 boxes, doesn't count them and signs for 20 boxes.
Designer hand bag shipment stored at warehouse? Company owner makes entire skid disappear from warehouse over night. Blames employees for theft.
The list could go on but those were the stories I remember. And it wasn't only him but many others who stole: warehouse workers, truck drivers, managers, bosses/owners. You name it, they stole it. So no doubt it was an inside job.
What happened to PCM otherwise known as Phase Change Memory or PRAM? From what I have read it can be written to like normal memory, address by address unlike flash that is block by block (very important for write speeds). It also boasts faster read and write times as well as one hundred million plus write cycles per memory location vs. flash is what, five thousand. PCM has a memory retention of 300+ years which makes it attractive for long term archival. It is also in production and shipping but density and capacity are not yet on par with nand-flash.
The only downside I see is that it sensitive to higher temperatures that would be encountered during soldering which would erase an already programmed chip. So they have to be programmed in-place vs burned and soldered like flash (or older (E)EPROM technology). It is also a bit challenging to make higher densities and it may be more costly than flash.
I would love to see a PCM disk that is directly attached via PCIe, no SATA overhead. Just an ASIC that presents itself as an ATA controller that has a bunch of PCM hanging off it. You could do it with an FPGA. Open-source SSD anyone? (just a little off topic idea)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think comparing earthquakes to asteroid impacts is a good metric. That being said I am sure if this thing were to impact a heavily crowded city such as Shanghai, London or New York, the effects would be much more devastating than the 10,000 you quoted. I am sure the energy from an asteroid of that size could very well level an entire city and kill millions. The devastation will surely impact the entire nation as well, both emotionally and financially.
If you read her Wikipedia article, there was evidence that she has had affairs while married. It is possible that she was screwing Babbage and he covered for her by claiming she was working with him.
I saw a special on TV not too long ago that covered the python problem in Florida. The idea that they cant spread further north is somewhat false. There is an outdoor habitat somewhere in north Georgia (I think) that tested the theory of the snakes inability to survive cold weather and found they were able to survive a Georgia winter. So the pythons could certainly spread throughout the southern US.
Also called dyed #2 heating oil or dyed #2 diesel. They add a red dye to the fuel which enables its presence to be detected in on-road vehicle tanks. Some rural gas stations and truck stops sell dyed #2 oil (as well as kerosene) out of a pump right next to the other fuel pumps. The heating oil taxes are much lower than road fuel taxes so its very tempting to put heating fuel in your tank which costs nearly half of what you normally pay. But during roadside inspections they will check the tanks for red fuel. God help you if you get caught, high fines and they may impound your vehicle. In Louisiana they charge you $100 per gallon of vehicle fuel tank capacity, even if they only find a trace. Many trucks have a 50-300 gallon capacity, OUCH! They do however allow you to fill tanks of off road vehicles like site trucks, construction/farm equipment as well as the refrigeration systems on reefer trailers. It just cant be in the tank of a vehicle that normally travels on a public road.
I had the flu a few years back, took 2 weeks to shake it. My work only allots 5 days for sick leave per year. After that its either take vacation days to be compensated or take unpaid leave. I took a few sick days for the worst of it and then sucked it up the following week and just came in to work. I did not want to cut into my vacation time. Call me selfish but that's that way its is. And I doubt I spread it because I always wash my hands, keep away from the coffee pot and sit in a cubical. Thankfully i don't get sick very often.
I have a number of old tech kicking around and I am about to inherit a few more gems.
Stuff I have:
-AT&T 3B1 and PC7300 (the 7300 boots, I have a video on YouTube and all of the pictures/video on Wikipedia are mine, the 3B1 had a bad HDD)
-Next Station (Played with it for a bit before I needed room and boxed it up)
-2x DEC Dumb terminals (used to have the both of them connected to my Linux box, served as a quasi triple head monitor setup.)
-Sun SPARCstation IPC (had it running OpenBSD and an AUI -> 10BaseT adapter)
-ADM 42 Terminal (doesn't work and never got around to fixing it yet)
-Misc 286/386/486 systems and main boards.
-Some SGI stuff I snagged off ebay for cheap, five origin 300 systems, an SGI 1000 1U PIII server, an Onyx2 and an Octane 2. All for less than $400. I have one of the Origin 300's working the Octane and the 1000 but admittedly I haven't played with them much at all.
About to acquire for free from work:
MITS Altair 8800b (mint condition in a box, still trying to see if they have the 8" floppy drive)
IBM System/23 Datamaster with printer, manuals and disks (fucking amazing collection).
Franklin Ace 1200 with software and monitor.
Wyse Serial terminal
The Franklin is a very special find as it was the first computer I ever used when I was a kid. My father bought it new and we used it for a year or so until he bought a Canon 8086 (cant figure out what model it was) which was taken to work and replaced with an AT&T PC6300. I dont know what he did with the Franklyn but I was stunned when I found one here at work. I still am looking for a PC6300. I have many fond memories using one, did most of my grade school home work on it using Q&A word processor.
Unfortunately I haven't played with much of my vintage toys for a while since I got my own place. Its all at my mothers house as of now. Within the next few years I plan on buying a house and setting up a vintage computer lab, who needs a dining/living rooms anyway.
All someone has to say in a hearing about loosening the proliferation grip is "terrorist". Then its game over.
Sad world we live in.
I know A123 is still doing business, we got an RFQ from them the other day.
About a year ago we were working with them on their new battery technology. The challenge was to weld the battery electrolyte fill port in a moisture and oxygen free environment. We have a glove box but the big problem was to leak test the cell before it left the environment and that was the hard part. The glove box environment is 90% argon and 10% helium which is used as a trace gas for helium mass spectrometer leak testing. The part goes into a vacuum oven antechamber and held under vacuum (and baked if necessary, usually to get rid of vapors from glues and moisture) until its safe to open the door in the glove box chamber. Once you hermetically seal a part you need the trace gas to already be inside the part and that is why there is a 10% helium mix. The sealed parts are put into a bell-jar on the leak detector and the leak rate is measured in atm-cc/sec, around 5x10^-5 is when liquid water begins to leak. Below that is where you want to be in the 10^-8/10^-9 range or better. The problem is If your environment is already contaminated with helium how do you test a part for leaking helium? There are other methods we use for parts but that requires the part to be removed from the glove box. If the battery is not sealed 100% it will be ruined if any moisture or oxygen gets into the battery. If we catch the leak inside the box then we can repair it.
I believe that was the major bottleneck in the process, welding shut the battery electrolyte fill port and checking the seal without introducing the battery to air. They could have two glove boxes with a vacuum antechamber joining them, one filled with the trace gas mixed in, the other without trace gas but helium is a pain in the ass to pump out. you would have to do a gas purge and then vacuum it out and possibly another purge then leak check the part.
We did the development on the job and I don't know what happened after we gave them our solutions.
I would say its more about convenience. Many movies I used to download were simply not easily available outside of renting/buying the DVD/VHS. Even if it was only available on DVD/VHS I did not care to buy it because how many times would I actually watch it? Maybe once or twice. It wasn't worth the 10-20 bucks for the physical media because I would watch it once then let it sit on a shelf and collect dust for the rest of its life. A bad investment if you ask me. TV series are sometimes worth buying because you get more for your money and some shows are so great you could watch it over and over a hundred times and not get bored.
Movie channels on cable are not worth it because the schedule is canned and any movies I would like to watch are never or rarely on. Sure there are some great series like Bill Mar, Dexter and Game of Thrones but its not worth the $300+ your paying per year for those channels.
Netflix and HULU will hopefully offer a more sane method of watching movies and TV shows that are/were hard to find. But the catalogs are still lacking. I went to the BBC iPlayer the other day and searched for The Young Ones, Fawlty Towers, Keeping up Appearances and Black Adder. Found nothing. WTF. If Netflix suddenly carried all of the TV shows and movies I would like to watch I would easily shell out $50+ per month to watch everything I want commercial free and uncensored. I would dump cable.
In the end its all about ease of access. I want to watch what I want, when I want, where I want and how I want. I pray for they day when I can pull out my tablet and watch Fawlty Towers then an old cheesy movie like the Golden Voyage of Sinbad and then something more modern like Its always Sunny in Philadelphia. That does not exist as of today and the reason why people still download. I stopped downloading only because everything I would like to watch is already on a disk array, the rest is on my DVR or borrowed/given to me by a friend.
Movie theaters are the last place on earth I would want to be. The last time I went was because I knew i was getting laid afterward. Fuck theaters.
Seriously. How do we not need phones anymore? On average the engineer here at work spends half his day on the phone, he actually clocked it once. Try spending 4+ hours on various calls using a mobile.
Desk phones aren't going anywhere unless you spend a majority of time away from your desk. And for fucks sake, corporate IM? We have Office 365 here at work and the boss wanted to have people use Lync. Guess what? No one cared for it and I think only a few dozen IM's were ever sent. Its still running on everyone's PC but it sits idle while the phone is constantly used. My guess is since we have no speakers on our PC's (company policy) the alert sound never did its job and IM's went unanswered until the phone was called. You always hear a ringing phone, in fact its almost a reflex to pick it up. Even of the Lync window pops up or an alert bubble appears for some reason people tend to ignore them because its not a blaring phone ring.
I think you mean:
two little, one little, four little, three little, six little, five little, eight little, seven little, ten little, nine little edian bytes
One of my biggest complaints about any traffic light is the sometimes ridiculously short yellow lights. Near my home there is a traffic signal on the main road that only changes if a car is present at the intersection waiting to turn. The yellow light is barely 2 seconds, no where near enough time for a vehicle traveling 30MPH (~48km/h). I have seen heavy trucks rolling along when that idiotic light changes and the truck has choice but to roll right through that intersection, your not stopping 20+ tons rolling along at 30mph in 2 seconds.
I always wanted a 4th "warning" light before the yellow, I have seen them somewhere in Europe, maybe it was the UK. At most city intersections the flashing "don't walk" for pedestrians usually precedes the yellow light so if your in a heavy vehicle you can determine that you need to reduce your speed and anticipate a yellow -> red light. But outside of cities there are few sidewalks and even fewer pedestrian signals. The 4th signal can be simple to add and does not require replacing existing lights. You illuminate the yellow light while the green light is still lit, or flash the yellow light. Then the green light goes out, yellow steady and finally red. Gives a nice warning to drivers further down the road to slow down. Maybe even try to establish a standard time length for the 4th signal, say 5 seconds until yellow.
I have to stop posting at work. I keep bouncing from write post to work and screw up. Oh well.
I wouldn't say misinformed. I never stated any of this was true. Perhaps I should have put my "making this up as I go along" disclaimer at the top. of my post. For years we have been hearing how big hardware and software companies have to keep selling faster and better software/hardware to turn a profit and how switching for a pay-as-you-go model is better. We are at the point where CPU's dont need to be much faster, 1.6GHz Atoms are enough for any basic task. Selling a canned PC design with $2000 worth of features for This is Intel we are talking about. Haswell processors are not shipping for many months from now, but Intel started merging Linux kernel enhancements to take full advantage of Haswell (even graphics which is not used by the server market) a few months ago. For free. And of course, by making this Windows only, Intel loses all small business server market which currently runs Linux (occasionally BSD) on commodity (i5/i7 LGA 1155) / workstation (i7 LGA 2011) systems. This is not an insignificant market, as these chips give 1/3rd as much of margin as a Xeon gives, but is a 20 times larger market.
You lost sight of the line between the server and PC market. I am sure Xeon's wont come crippled because their market is completely different. If they do at some point, I am sure you would call VendorX and they would send you a secure USB stick/dongle/binary/key that enables unlocking of features under Linux. Maybe through a secure hypervisor that sits between the hardware and OS, similar to the PS3. I can see Dell or HP selling cheap servers to small businesses. Need more power? just call 1-800-upgrade and we will give you an unlock code for two more Cores and an extra 16GB for $599.99 or 19.99 a month. No need to send a tech out to plug in a second CPU in or add RAM, its already in the box waiting to be unlocked. Again, what I am saying is pure fiction. But I am sure someone at Dell, HP, MS IBM or some other large tech company hasn't thought of this before.
I am sure Intel will continue to sell processors as usual. Hopefully this soldered-on-permanently nonsense turns out to be the new Atom line of CPU's and not the future of all Intel CPU's. My post was more "grim future alarmist" than actual fact, again I made it up. It could turn out to be total fantasy. But there is no saying Intel in partnership with Dell or HP and MS to pursue some form of pay-as-you go canned PC for the masses who simply want a cheap PC with the option to unlock more power as they see fit.
I have done the same. By the time you want to upgrade, your current motherboard is a generation or two behind so its not worth it. BUT I doubt Intel is going to solder on different chips to give different speeds/cores/cache. This is a move to take control of how they sell you a CPU.
Anyone remember the rumors that Intel is going to sell crippled CPU's and for a fee you can unlock more cores, cache or speed? This is what they are doing here. Intel is going to make a "Range" of CPU's just like the i3/5/7, but more likely they will market them as: Basic, Premium and Performance. Each CPU class is just a single chip, no models or stepping. They will be sold with a default crippled setting based on what the OEM or Intel decides to sell it for. So a Performance "i7" board might have 4 cores, 4.5GHz max speed, 20MB L3 cache and HD8000 graphics. Dell buys the Premium board from Intel for just $100 bucks and sells it inside a $400 PC. Sounds cheap right? But Dell ships the board with only 2 cores enabled, 2GHz clock speed, 10MB L3 cache and HD4000 graphics (im making this up here). Dell sells the CPU "upgrades" and Intel gets a cut (A big one I would imagine).
Joe user buys his shiny new Windows 8 Dell all-in-one touch Performance PC and wants more speed. So he loads the Dell/Intel store app and plops down $50 to bump the speed another 500MHz, or for a sweet deal he can save $25 and just drop $175 to get 4GHz. For an additional $300 he can also unlock the other two cores, double the speed for less than a new computer! Or how about a Black Friday special where he can unlock 4GHz and all the cores for the low low price of $450! If he is feeling like having bragging rights he can unlock all the cache (20MB), additional 500MHz to 4.5GHz (exclusive to the extreme package only!) and cores by purchasing the Extreme bundle for the low-low price of $999.99!
So of course they want to kill the enthusiast market. They cheat the CPU makers by taking a low cost CPU, adding some comparably cheap cooling and have a CPU that can perform as fast or faster than their high end $500-$1000 CPU that has only a slight gain (money wise) over the cheaper CPU's. You want to overclock? Sorry buddy but you have to pay for the speed now, maybe wait until after Christmas when vendor X has a sale and you can snag the Extreme package for just $899.99 instead of $999.99. Or you can rent the extreme package for just 29.99 a month, cancel at any time!
And of course the software to do this is Windows only and requires a trusted, signed, licensed, bonded, married, insured EFI image to unlock the cores during run-time. Sorry Linux (BSD, BeOS, Plan9 etc.) but your going to have to put up with Atom like performance as only "TRUSTED" images can unlock CPU cores during run-time. God forbid some evil Linux hacker figures out how to bypass the Intel locks and gets all that computing power for free! Maybe run Linux in a VM under a trusted OS, that's your answer.
Then from there we can buy 5TB hard drives for $25 with 500GB enabled, but have to pay an additional $300 to access the rest of the 4.5TB. Or just rent cloud storage! Why worry about memory capacity when memory makers can just make 32GB sticks and then sell them for 4GB prices and gouge for the additional 24GB? "Sorry but Angry Birds Battlestar Galactica has run out of memory. Visit the Dell store and for just $29.99 you can double your memory! or for the low trial price of $1.99, rent 4GB for two days!"
The future looks bright. That or maybe I just paid for an additional 750 lumens from my light bulb vendor, I keep loosing track what with all these tech upgrades and rentals I have going.
Back in the 80's (sometime after the Iran-Contra affair) my grandfather was contracted by a government contractor to design and stamp the cutter wheels used in secure paper shredders. Basically the shredder must produce paper shards no larger than 1/32 inches (0.79mm) wide and 1/8 inches (3.17mm) long. Pretty much dust comes out of the bottom of this thing. The wheels were stamped from big heavy rolls of steel stock and then heat treated. I can still remember the constant loud chatter from the 20 ton OBI press as it stamped out one cutter after another 6 days a week. It has a rather powerful 1/2 HP motor with a gear reduction head and a chain drive to the shredder mechanism. The frame was heavy 1/4 thick steel plate and the unit was housed in a nice heavy duty steel box. It does have limits on how many papers it can handle at once, something like 10 - 15 8.5x11 sheets at once before it jams.
We have a complete unit that was used as our paper shredder for years until it became too bulky. It weighs close to 80 lbs and must be suspended on a stand over a bag or bin, it doesn't fit under a desk. We also have a complete mechanism with chain and motor as well as a half assembled unit. We still have the shredder, but we now use one of those cheap staples bought cross cut shredders, does the job nicely. Those shredders were built to last and I bet there might be some still in operation at various government agencies.
Instead of worrying about tolerances and equivalent BAC levels, just come up with a field sobriety test that can detect if someone is too impaired to drive. The problem with a pot BAC is that people react differently to THC. One person might throw up and become stoned from a few good hits while another may feel little to noting at all from the same dose.
I have a friend who has two jobs, goes to school for his bachelors degree, has a wife and a new-born son. When I asked him how he copes he replied: "Copious amount of marijuana, bro." He smokes when he wakes up, smokes on his drive in to work, smokes during lunch, smokes on his way to night classes or his second job and a few hits at night before bed. Granted his case is unique, if I smoked as much as he does I would make a damn fine door stop. Then again I don't have his tolerance.
The cops have to be smart and throw the concept of BAC and breathalyzers out the window. They have to learn to spot the drivers who are legitimately too high to drive vs the veteran smoker who becomes superman juggling multiple jobs, school and a family while high.
"But Why?"
Why not?
The problem with your example is that the land of the US was never part of Canada. It would make sense if some other country came along and told Canada "This land is no longer yours. It now belongs to the Americans." And for the next few decades Canada puts up Americans crossing its borders, settling on its land claiming it for themselves. All the while the US government does nothing. So in a way Canada does have a right to be pissed at the US. But its more complex than that, the Americans were there first, a few thousand years prior, before the Canadians kicked them out by force. Plus god told the Americans that it was their promise land, so by right the land belongs to the americans. So who is right in this case? The Americans who want their "god given" land back or the Canadians who have settled and claimed that land for over 1300 years?
Another example would be if Native Americans launched missiles from their reservations into surrounding US communities. Another parallel were the IRA attacks on Northern Ireland. People get pissed when you take their land away.
And that is the truth behind Israel and Palestine. The Jews were there first about 3000+ years ago. Then the Arabs forced them out around 650 AD. 1300 years later, during WWI, the British gained control of Palestine and the Jews started coming back. After WWII it became apparent the displaced Jews and Holocost survivors needed a place to go and the British would not let them all into Palestine as there was an immigration quota in place. After the Jewish Zionist Terrorist organization, Lehi, carried out assassinations and bombings against the British in protest, the US and UN eventually forced Britain into establishing Israel in order to stop the violence.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Mandate_of_Palestine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_(group)
No matter whose side you look at, each has a point. Its a catch 22 situation. The Jews established that land as theirs first. But the Arabs had control over the land for well over a 1000 years. After that much times passes you would think the Jews would just say fuck it, we can settle in the west. But the Zionist mentality is firmly rooted in the belief of the Jewish state, the "promise land". Basically no matter who says what, god gave them the deed to Israel and there is no higher authority that can tell them otherwise.
$300-$320? The original /. article was quoting prices of around $100, but it looks like it was more like wishful speculation. Where is the Ethernet port, memory or storage? Hell they don't even have an eSATA port which you can find on just about every motherboard these days. I can buy the parts to make a mini PC using an ITX board for less than $300 and that includes storage, memory and gigabit Ethernet plus eSATA. The CPU would be an AMD A series which has graphics that will wipe the floor with the i3's HD 4000.
The Extremetech article linked in the older /. summary shows mini PCIe slots on the board so expansion is not out of the question but there is no mention of them in the latest article. Thunderbolt is also pretty damn fast, 10Gbps, equivalent to the bandwidth of 2 PCIe 2.0 x1 slots. But if you really need expansion slots you could probably buy a micro ATX system for the same price.
What is the point of this system, size? No one will buy it as its marketed towards enthusiasts who know hardware prices and they wont touch this thing. If they want to charge that kind of money it better come with storage and memory, and a good deal of it to justify the $300 price tag. On Newegg, I can buy a Zotac ZBOX ID41 PLUS for $288 which is a 1.8GHz Atom, ION graphics, 250GB HDD and 2GB RAM.
If Intel is selling this thing as a barebones system, they better drop the price to $100, I would buy one for that price, would make a great mini server or control PC (for robotics, CNC etc.). If they added Ethernet and eSATA AND included RAM along with an SSD then the $300-$320 would be more appealing. Its now a turnkey system, just power it on and install your OS.
I work next to a Verizon data center out here in Farmingdale, Long Island (supposedly all the Verizon cell phone traffic for long island). They recently built extensions to the building and had two large diesel generators installed, a 15,000 gallon fuel tank along with two large cooling systems. Turns out they needed it.
During the aftermath they didn't run out of diesel because they bought in an additional on site 15,000 gallon fuel tank (in a 40 foot container). Plus they had semi trucks with sleeper tractors from out of state with trailers full of diesel ready to fill the tanks back up on site 24/7. Armed guards manned the premises 24/7 and lived out of a mobile home. They also bought in generator powered flood lights to keep the surrounding property lit up like it was day light. Those generators sounded like a pair of locomotives running, and probably because they use engines of similar size. My manager found out they burn 4000 gallons of diesel a day keeping the building going. They ran the generators until the 7th or 8th. So they burned something like 40,000+ gallons of fuel in that time frame.
If you have the money and the right infrastructure, you can keep the power going as long as you need.
This.
I don't see Microsoft or Apple worrying how they will distribute Steam, because they don't*. I don't see why browsing to steampowered.com and downloading the client for your OS of choice should be any different than on Windows or Mac OS. The belief that everything should be in the repos is silly.
*Even if they were to make Steam available through their app stores its still the publishers responsibility to submit the app for distribution.
We cant stop. We're going to fast.
TSA has nothing to do with freight, they are responsible for the safety of the travelling public. US customs handles freight shipments into and out of the country. But I doubt it was them. Most of the freight comes into warehouses located on the outskirts of the airport off the Nassau expressway at the end of Rockaway blvd. I lived 5 minuted from JFK and know numerous people who worked in and around JFK, luggage handlers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, customs agent, freight company managers etc.
The best insight into freight theft came from a retired truck driver I know. Basically nearly all of the theft is committed by employees, managers and owners of the cargo companies. There are hijackings and sometimes a trailer is stolen but those are few and far between. The stories he told me (he was part of the theft problem, he wasn't ashamed about it) were often simple and mundane.
Stealing HP computers bound for Israel? Open the boxes, take computers out, replace with rocks and deliver to airport. Unhappy Jewish person gets a box of rocks.
How to steal 10 Playstation 2's (on launch day no less) bound for Best Buy's distribution center? Freight company stupidly hands him security seal to put on trailer door, he puts on seal but doesn't let it lock, freight employee is fooled and signs off. Stop truck remove a bunch of PS2's put seal back on trailer and actually let it lock. Best Buy stumped that PS2's were stolen en-route when seal was locked and signed off. They search trailer for holes or tampering but none found. Gets away with it and hocks PS2's for $800 each.
Steal designer cloths? Many college kids get part time jobs at clothing stores, usually lazy or ignorant of shipments. He steals 2 boxes from a shipment of 20 boxes. Clueless college kid receives 18 boxes, doesn't count them and signs for 20 boxes.
Designer hand bag shipment stored at warehouse? Company owner makes entire skid disappear from warehouse over night. Blames employees for theft.
The list could go on but those were the stories I remember. And it wasn't only him but many others who stole: warehouse workers, truck drivers, managers, bosses/owners. You name it, they stole it. So no doubt it was an inside job.
What happened to PCM otherwise known as Phase Change Memory or PRAM? From what I have read it can be written to like normal memory, address by address unlike flash that is block by block (very important for write speeds). It also boasts faster read and write times as well as one hundred million plus write cycles per memory location vs. flash is what, five thousand. PCM has a memory retention of 300+ years which makes it attractive for long term archival. It is also in production and shipping but density and capacity are not yet on par with nand-flash.
The only downside I see is that it sensitive to higher temperatures that would be encountered during soldering which would erase an already programmed chip. So they have to be programmed in-place vs burned and soldered like flash (or older (E)EPROM technology). It is also a bit challenging to make higher densities and it may be more costly than flash.
I would love to see a PCM disk that is directly attached via PCIe, no SATA overhead. Just an ASIC that presents itself as an ATA controller that has a bunch of PCM hanging off it. You could do it with an FPGA. Open-source SSD anyone? (just a little off topic idea)