Posts by Christian Berger 4850 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007
Well what's particularly odd is that it's not in a module IBM used to combine tubes and passive components into modules which could be easily replaced:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RoehreIBM_090325.jpg
However the IBM701 doesn't seem to have. It had modules modules just like in that picture. Therefore I believe it's an IBM 701 or a very close relative.
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_141510.html
How about guessing what this is:
http://casandro.dyndns.org/theregister/image.jpg
Particularly note the logo of that company, which already existed before WW II.
Whoever guesses it first gets free entrance to the museum this device is in, and perhaps even the right to sleep on my couch. However I need to warn you, it's in Germany.
Yes and those even have links to descriptions of those computers on them.
So 2 is a Packard Bell PB-250 from 1961 using delay lines.
3 is a PDP-12
4 is a PDP-8/E
5 is a PDP-10
6 is from a Honeywell 316
8 is again from a PDP-10
9 is from the Honeywell again
10 is from a PDP-8/I
Not linked are:
1 probably some dual pentode or dual triode
11 is a barrel or drum printer
So please if you do something like that, don't just use easily accessible pictures.
I mean the first Blackberries were amazing devices. Monochrome screen, Querty keyboards, but they were always tied to a Blackberry server which was closed and unobtainable for a normal Geek.
If they had offered an "Open" version of their devices, which essentially was just a high efficiency smart terminal, there would have been a growing market for that. With their current strategy they will only get the large, but shrinking number of Outlook/Exchange users.
There are different markets. If I want a large screen and a numeric keypad (which actually exists on some notebooks) I'll get a desktop machine.
However if you want to have a portable device, you need to make some compromises. That's why laptops have tiny keyboards and screens, as well as low power CPUs. Only that way you can reach 5+ hours on a battery still light enough to be carried with you.
That's why I got an IBM X40 as a portable device. The only thing I'm missing would be integrated UMTS, but that didn't make any sense when it came out.
Probably a multi-pronged attack. I'm pretty sure they already have some Linux kernel running on their development prototypes. How else should they test them?
What Nokia would have to do is to "unbundle" their Hardware and their Software, at least internally. So they can bring out the same device with multiple operating systems.
They already marketed their product when it wasn't ready. When you became a customer, you got a free mobile phone as well as 240 DM credit for your bill. Subscription cost nearly 10 DM a month with a minimum subscription duration of 24 months....
So... you got a free phone. They were quite popular for the few weeks they did it.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33228
I still fail to see what Office Software is supposed to be useful for. So far the main use I got was spreadsheet software which we used to draw up "architectural" plans in the archive I used to work. With it you can easily show the rectangular structure of the rooms and note where which cabinet was. (important in an archive!)
Other than that, if you want text on paper, use LaTeX. It works and is way less hassle than any Office package.
Does it shift 40 GBits of data from SSDs to the NIC? That's something which DMA can already do. The Linux Kernel has had zero copy for years. You tell the SSD to DMA the sector into RAM, you tell the NIC to get it and send it out. There's not that much to it.
And for dedicated hardware it's still lame. Digital VTRs were able to handle a Gigabit already by the late 1980s and they actually had to process the video, shuffling around the bits and applying all sorts of error protection. Now 40 gigs is certainly harder, but a 40 fold increase in 20 years is not really impressive.
I have a phone, which I'm mostly using as an UMTS dongle for my laptop. I don't store any data on it, nor do I do any processing with it.
The question is, why does the operating system have to be considered "firmware"? Why can't they just do it like on PCs, where you have an essentially open system of partitions you can install whatever operating system you want onto, while still having a small core "BIOS" for the essential stuff close to the hardware? It would be trivial to build a device which had a read-only "restore" partition you could restore your OS from if anything goes wrong, by pressing some obscure button combination.
This day and age it shouldn't be possible to brick an open system just like it's near impossible to brick a PC.
If you don't like the way Apple is treating you then just don't buy their products.
One of the reasons why I don't have an Android device yet is that all manufacturers which would have had interesting hardware threaten to void the warranty should I actually use them. (deploy alternative firmware) Since this is not acceptable, I'm not buying one of their devices. Period
If you think Apples reaction to such problems is not acceptable to you, simply don't buy their products.
I'm not sure how it would have went. We'd probably have gotten OS/2 which only was marginally better than Windows NT.
What would have tipped the tide if there were any good unixoid operating systems around, but those still were in their infancy. People back then did want something unixoid, Sun has proven that with their workstations. However few people could afford it. A Unix cheaper than DOS, running on about the same hardware might have changed something.
Yes, that might be one of the points. Another one might be the dependence on bad libraries. Felix von Leitner once replaced the libc with his own version which immediately resulted in much smaller executables.
I mean I used to write software in Pascal on DOS, and it was fairly small. An executable file rarely had more than a few kilobytes, despite using a language which checked for integer overflows.
It wasn't much use except for running a webbrowser. I did most of my work on DOS. At least starting Windows only took 3 seconds on my 486 DX2-80 with a whopping 28 Megs of RAM.
I still wonder, what is is that makes modern Windows versions so bloated? I mean Windows didn't really gain any useful features. It still only starts programs providing them with a GUI. There still is no usable shell, no network transparency for applications, no nothing.
Well there are multifeed dishes where you can mount up to about 12 LNBs so you can receive multiple positions. I myself have 28° East, 19° East, 13°East and 10° East. I mostly use the first two.
I'm lucky enough to live close to the spot beam so 80cm is enough in my area. At my parents place 100cm are the minimum. We have a separate dish there for that position
I do have cable, but since its mostly encrypted, I'd need not only very expensive CI-slot enabled DVB-C cards and quite a bit of monthly subscription fees. For that I'd get roughly about what I can get from a cheap 19° East dish.
Well you were one of the lucky few to have perfect reception. Where I lived the BBC never came in analogue at all. And even the terrestrial channels for my area were weak.
However I have to say the BBC is a bit cheap when it comes to bandwidth. They typically stuff an SD channel into 2-3 MBit/s. In Germany for example 4 are about the minimum for larger stations, and public television often reaches up to 10 MBit/s for longer (many seconds) peaks. At least over satellite. Terrestrial transmission is another point, that's actually not taken very seriously with a single digit viewer share. Germany is pretty much hooked on free to air satellite.
However quality isn't the main problem, it's convenience. Back in the old days you had to use framegrabber and manually tune your receiver. Now you just have a little card with 2 antenna inputs which will dutifully record everything you want at the touch of a button. You can even pre-set it to record whatever you want. And the material lands on your hard disk without any additional quality loss. Digital TV is like a download service, but free and legal.
In the olden days when the German phone network was still state run, there was a pledge to give everyone access to a certain minimal level of service. I think at the time of privatisation it was ISDN. Unfortunately after privatisation this hasn't been updated. If they kept it at the pace of time, we'd now have 16MBit everywhere, perhaps even more.
Like when you need to make some sort of "generation change". Like when the first generation of engineers leaves, but has left a mess for the next generation. In such situations you are unlikely to be able to attract and/or hold a "next generation".
So if you look at a company, try to find out how sustainable it is. Try to look into the internal infrastructures and try to find out how easy it is to maintain it. Creative Chaos can be a very good thing, but when its interpreted as "look for the most current version of the business critical VBA code somewhere on 10 possible workstations and paste it into your spread sheet", it's not.
This is a real danger for not to large companies.
Well you are still doing well in the UK. When you have science shows you actually have scientists. Here we have shows where people tell you that compasses work because there are large iron deposits on the north pole!
There are no researchers on German TV, only tiny cheap teams running around with DV camcorders making stuff they don't care about.
Even presentation is by far more horrible. You have live continuity announcers on all large stations. No station in Germany has that any more. If a channel breaks down, and someone notices, all you get is a slide and no announcer. On some not to small stations, breakdowns even go unnoticed, particularly if it's something like the wrong audio.
So cherish the fact that you still have live shows about astronomy, that TV doesn't just shout at you, and that you actually have television producers who _care_ about what they do.
The problem is how much you spend on your infrastructure. You can easily increase your bandwidth with technologies like MIMO or adaptive antennas or by simply setting up more and smaller cells.
However that frequency range is fairly useless for such technologies as you need comparatively large antenna arrays.
The main advantage of Broadcast TV is that it has always been open. There are (nearly) no proprietary systems. Everybody is allowed to record and store shows as much and as long as they want to.
As long as copyright still is as restrictive as it is, and DRM is legal, there will be a need for broadcast.
Broadcast always was a way of dealing with copyright. We pay collectively for the station to buy broadcast rights, so we can all get a copy. We also pay the station to hire producers and talents, or commission works so we can all enjoy it.
The people who aren't stuck with Windows for things like "vendor lock-ins" have left years ago. The rest doesn't care what they are using.
So Microsoft can either drop the old Win32 ecosystem and build a new one, or will be stuck maintaining that forever. We are talking about ecosystems here. The API is just a condensation point. The other main parts are the users and the developers. The move towards Metro is the user end of that, the changes on Visual Studio tries to get rid of the developers.
Actually you'd think one button would work, however for that you need proper morse keys which aren't just pressed like a button, but moved up and down in a precise manner. I doubt it's possible to emulate that on a touch screen.
Also there are less experienced operators. They might not get their timing right at decent speeds. So having 3 buttons certainly makes sense.
They did think that through and it actually is a fairly interesting idea.
First of all I agree on that processing the data in the cloud is a bad idea.
However the problem lies within stupid customers. They just aren't able to access their data via some sane way. They can't point their browsers to an IP address or an mDNS hostname. And even if they could, many of them don't have IPv6 yet, so they will not be able to access it from their mobile phones.
Well I know it's hard to defend the IPv6 opponents, but their views are entirely different than yours. They want the Internet to be split into 2 parties. One is Amazacegooglebook, the sole provider of services. They need about one half of the IPv4 space for their load balancers, while the rest of the addresses will be allocated to NA(P)T routers to allow users to access the services of Amazacegooglebook. All Information on the Internet needs to pass through them, because of the nature of NA(P)T. Direct communication is of course impossible.
While this reminds anyone who has seen online services like Compuserve, Quantumlink, MSN and AOL (the later 2 having moved to the Internet) of the reasons why the Internet took off while those services gradually disappeared, this seems to be what IPv6 opponents want. That's why they spread FUD about IPv6.
One lucky thing about this, is that the people who already have IPv6 can enjoy a network free of those people. It is, in many ways, a lot like the Internet used to be in the early 1990s, only faster.
Hmm, I think Facebook already uses both IPv6 and IPv4, so do many if not all Google services. You'd be surprised to see how many services are already available via IPv6.
You also seem to misunderstand that it's not a "migration". Just like companies who got e-mail didn't turn off their fax machines. Of companies that got fax machines didn't stop receiving letters. People will keep their old IPv4 connections, just like mobile phone users still keep SMS and GSM telephony around.
However it's so much easier to start new services via IPv6. For example building a decentralized network is a pain on IPv4, however it makes sense if you want to do things like social networks. With IPv6 this can be done trivially.
Recovering old IPv4 ranges might save you a few months, but that would actually be a migration effort. You'd need to change the IP-adresses which is a _lot_ of work.
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