I've read several stories about the sudden shift from netbooks with Linux to netbooks with Windows XP. And there are arguments about price or accusations of shenanigans, and the observation of the user base being lazy.
The problem would be to make the inductors able to dissipate the DC power; it is the same kind of overloading that is expected to melt the transformers. However, putting in series capacitors that can withstand a high enough voltage, might be more feasible.
As well as managing to shut down the grid in time. I'm wondering, would there not be a possible intermediate step on the way back to have cities run pumps and such at reduced power from local sources, until the inter-ties are back in action?
Looking around in the news, there's this story about the US$ 683 trillion's worth of derivatives, that no-one's quite sure about who owns or who owes all this money. So the Fed steps in, and manages to do 300 billion here and 750 billion there, and thus there is now somewhere like US$ 682 trillion. Within a couple of significant figures anyways.
Take one down and pass it around, as it were.
I wonder if maybe DRM hasn't been a big part of the problem. The shiny discs that we used to know as "CDs" back in the day, actually had a standard format on them, and they would carry the "Compact Disc" logo as trademarked by Philips. Now, a few years ago, EMI and others started with their "Digital Restriction Management" which meant that the discs no longer were allowed to carry the good old "Compact Disc" logo. Instead the logo was just quietly removed, sometimes replaced with a different, publisher-defined one, signifying the hardware-enforcement of the standard admonition against unauthorised copying or broadcasting.
Even though this has been reversed in the last few years; the few CDs I have from 2007 and 2008 actually have the "Compact Disc" logo again.
The point is, the DRM train seems to have left and gone for good. It isn't just a matter of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, it is more like closing the barn door after the barn has burned down. Pull the weeds, start over...
An even easier and more obvious explanation is that there is hardly any new music worth listening to in the quantities provided by a disc. What might be OK for three minutes is not the same as will work for an hour, and the push is ever faster and ever onwards. There's just not the attention span there anymore it seems.
What might work would be to bring back the concept albums, but you need artists that can sing and play -- not just sound like some soft-porn star faking an orgams -- for more than three minutes in a row for that.
"You're in a maze of little functions, all alike. In the distance you hear somebody practicing throwing chairs."
And all of the functions have at least seven arguments, and one of these is a pointer to variable-length structs that have to be populated before calling the function. Another argument that always appears is an opaque pointer referring to SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES, which may be, and usually is, set to NULL becuse no-one is arsed to go through the necessary contortions of obtaining the required credentials.... stuff works anyways.
I used to just write 5-line C programs for calculating stuff. Faster than figuring out where I've misplaced the calculator this time, besides, bc chokes on floating-point numbers.
Now I've automated this but the junk-filter doesn't want to show it here.
Good for throwaway calculations
Besides those, there are certain formulae that recur (transistor biasing, 4040 frequency division, LM317 voltage regulator resistors....) so that these grew into smaller complete programs from the early start.
On wanting to show some longer C program code, I got the "too many junk characters" -- well the characters are just the ones they should be, since it is OK for the compiler. The lameness filter sez otherwise.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
No, still in use, but these aren't counting. It's not like one goes chmod 000, chmod 001, chmod 002
Then there's the ancient but still serviceable kit using IEEE-488, which has documentation showing commands in octal, but just like chmod numbers, these are mostly with distinct meaning, 0137 is untalk, 044 is Listen address 4 etc.
Complex numbers on the other hand...
Teleportation device with bug reports? Lets hope, for all that is good and well, that the bugs are just software and not, for example, flies, making it into the teleportation system.
Too much unpleasant prior art for that.
As for the device featured, I definitely want some!
Free as in beer
Free as in GPL software
Free as in trade
Free as in lunch
Free as in saved ("The truth shall set you free")
Free as in nothing left to lose
Possibly more variants exist
So I've dusted off the 468 scope again, the one I bought for 40 kroner or so, some years ago and had another investigation of its malfunction. It looks like there is something wrong with the ROMs as it doesn't get very far from start-up to halt. (pins 29 and 33 on the 8085 going both LOW). I've managed to find some memory dumps of these on the Internet, so I'll try burning 2764s and connecting these, then see what happens next.
This is not going to work, as there is no competing with free. If any news site starts requiring payments, most readers will go somewhere else that doesn't pay. Charging for access to a site that still emits advertisements is a very hard sell.
And if the news outlets all start charging at the same time, the readers will start reading (and writing) blogs instead. And perhaps even pay "tips" to those blogs they like.
The harder one tries to squeeze the more it will slip past one's fingers...
Yes, and both phosphorus and arsenic are Group V, with 5 electrons in their outer shell so they can be expected to have chemical properties that are similar. But the main material of living things, carbon, will more than likely be the same, for reasons of carbon's unique abilities to form complex compounds.
Silicon-based life with phosphor or arsenic? Apart from this sounding very much like the list of main ingreidents for N-type semiconductor material; silicon, while in Group IV like carbon, with 4 electrons io their outer shell, does not form the same complex molecules as carbon. There is silane, SiH4, analogous to methane, CH4, and silicon dioxide, SiO2, the analogy to carbon dioxide, CO2, and a handful of others, but larger molecules such as sugar or protein analogues just do not form easily from silicon, or fall apart too easily.
There are not that many other elements that possibly oould replace carbon.
I think that is IE6. Once upon a time I had a similar problem with VG's, one of the Norwegian newspapers' discussion forums. Some friendly debaters then recommended I use Opera... that fixed that particular problem. Of course, later I've found out that Firefox also retains edit-box text; now the next level of competition is seen in this webmail client that we sometimes have to use at work, when I hit the wrong key and everything goes away and no bringing it back...
Same thing happened here. It began with cartoon characters, then continued with various other names from space, mythology, and fiction. The problem with cartoon characters is that one seems to run out of them too quickly. And I don't think naming a server Marvin or Kenny ever was such a good idea either...
Somehow naming the various NAS boxes after satellites made a bit of sense too. Other objects of the heavens also will do, then watch out for the naming collision: Is it Pluto the dog or Pluto the former planet?
Any program which runs right is obsolete.
