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Anyway, the Feds had a bunch of export control laws to prevent Commies from getting Big Computers that they could use to design better Nukes, as well as laws to prevent Commmies (and Americans) from getting crypto.

• Those of us who were on Usenet 20 years ago remember the first Kremvax announcement (after the Russians had gotten a couple of Vaxes.)
• The Cray-1 Supercomputer was about the speed of the Pentium 133 doorstop I'm typing on right now (while my regular PC is getting fixed.)
• The Cray-2 supercomputer was pretty similar to some of the formerly-high-end graphics cards you can get for about $50 these days.
• The Sony Playstation 2, when it was about to out, violated the Supercomputer export control rules, which is why they were suddenly bumped up a couple of times.
• Gimongous Privacy-Invading Database Computers of the 1980s had less storage than that iPod in your pocket, and the user interfaces were less friendly.

Fundamentally, computers do keep getting faster, but they've been Fast Enough for Government Work for a long time - Moore's Law says that just about anything you can buy at WalMart is faster than a high-end niche-market governments-and-big-corporations computer of a decade ago. The ideal computer for terrorism isn't some supercomputer - it's three pounds of wetware that's really pissed off. The way to deal with it is not to clamp down on exports of technology or circle the wagons into a laager to keep the enemy hordes out or declare anybody with interesting oil reserves to be a Rogue State - it's to stop acting like an Evil Empire and pissing people off by supporting oppressive governments around the world.

Babbage's Analytical Engine (which first computer programmer was Ada Byron, daughter of Lord Byron).

Sounds a lot like the Hacker's Diet, written by an engineer for engineers. In it, he uses the concept of an "eat watch," an imaginary watch whose alarm goes off when you've eaten what your body needs. People who are too skinny have eat watches that go off too soon. Overweight people have eat watches that go off too late. The trick is to compensate for a faulty eat watch by carefully tracking and adjusting what you eat vs. what you really need. It's the classic engineering problem of tuning a system with inherent feedback. I lost 35 lbs in 10 weeks on his plan - highly recommended.

But since this article is about exercise, I'll also mention that he includes a very good exercise plan as a supplement to the diet. See the same page linked above. It's easy stuff that you can do without any extra equipment in your own home. Like the diet plan, it's very structured so that you always exercise at your level and can move up as you improve to increase the effectiveness of the workouts.

That said, I still prefer getting out of the house over doing something inside. My wife and I walk in a park for an hour about 5 days a week, and I try to do at least something like basketball or biking on the weekends. Works for me.

Barring a genetic or hormonal issue, when you eat, you're taking in calories. Your body burns off some doing its normal metabolic processes, some goes out when you piss and crap, and the rest takes up residence in your fat ass.

The trick is, then, to only consume what you need. Or, less than you need, and your body will eventually relent and burn off some of that fat, and you'll lose weight.

Ladies and gentlemen, time to run up John Walker's(1) bandwidth bill some more, get his name in the papers again, and introduce some more people to The Hacker's Diet.

Available in both North American and European mirrors, The Hacker's Diet takes a practical, pragmatic, engineer's approach to losing weight, and more importantly, maintaining that new weight, both stably and comfortably.

In fact, it even has a section on basic excercise to get you somewhat fit. Not to get you starring in a Bally's Total Fitness commercial. Just able to run up a flight of stairs without passing out. Fit, as in, healthy, instead of fat, as in unhealthy. Gosh, what a concept.

Now we'll do the webblog plug, too. Mark Pilgrim(2) wrote a great writeup of The Hacker's Diet twice, last August and an extended, much more blunt version last October. Here's the October version. Go read it.

Then get off your ass, sit outside, and read the book. Download the PalmOS apps to your Visor, your Clio, or your Zaurus with POSE. And do something about that Mr. Fatty-Fat-Fat nickname.

(1) John Walker, founder of AutoDesk. (2) Mark Pilgrim, that guy who got fired because of his weblog, and who wrote Dive into Python. (3) And why does Slashcode strip out superscript and underscores? Weak.

Back in 1978, when I studied PL/1 at SSU in Minnesota, I went nuts trying to figure out why my program, the first assignment of the class, wasn't working. I re-read every punch card (yes, punch cards!) and I still couldn't find the bug. Between each run of the program, I had to wait 30 minutes for my "job" to get it's turn (good ol' batch processing).

I focused all of my energies on card 47, column ten - the debugger was sure that there lay the problem. It was just what I expected, though, a period! Finally, a classmate came into the lab, and I asked if I could see his card #47. I held the two cards up to the light, and sure enough, there was a difference. My card and his had a different punch pattern for column 10! Turns out that I had a comma and not a period, but the print head on the card punch machine was broken, and wouldn't print any descenders, so what looked like a period was actually a comma!!

I dropped the class the next day, and never took another programming course. I have been programming ever since, but never again in PL/1.

Woohoo! IAAAA (I Am An Amateur Astronomer). =) Anyway, I have two main things to say. The first is a rant about the media blowing things out of proportion, and the second is some tips on how to look for a meteor shower.

I hope it is really great this year, but please nobody assume that it's going to happen just because it's in a newspaper or on the news.

Astronomy's one of those cost-benefit things where 99 out of 100 times there's a warning and you get up at 3 in the morning and nothing happens. The other time you see something and it's either average, or spectacular and a life-long memory.

In 1966, everyone assumed that the Leonids had died, because they hadn't shown up at all in the 30's. A relatively small number of people went out at the time that they were predicted, and they saw a really awesome display.

The Leonids were again predicted to be really big in 1999, to the point where CNN was showing Japanese people in downtown Tokyo setting up deck chairs on the roof of office blocks. The whole thing fizzled, and immediately afterwards lots of the editorial media started complaining that nothing had happened. The same thing was predicted again for last year, and nothing really happened on the spectacular scale of what was expected.

This year, someone else has predicted that it'll happen by using a slightly different system. Like I said I hope it's right. I'll definitely be up in the morning watching with friends from my local club, and if nothing happens we'll drag out the telescopes nad look at other stuff in the sky.

We never bother bringing the media in on possibly "big" events anymore, though, because they just blow the entire general public's expectations out of proportion and then blame astronomers for being wrong when it doesn't come off. If something happens then we all get to see it and tell the media after it's happened - if we're lucky, someone got a good photograph.

So don't get your hopes up. Anyway, for everyone who does go out and look, here's some pointers:

• Try to find a group of people - ideally people who are interested in observing of some sort, but otherwise just grab some friends. Astronomical observing is so much more fun when there are other people around to enjoy it.
• Take some binoculars if you have them - they'll give you something to do if there aren't any meteors straight away, or at all. You can see so much more in the sky with binoculars. Magnification isn't important, but the size of the objective lens is, because the bigger it is the more light it collects and the more you can see.
• Find somewhere dark. The darker, the better. Get away from civilisation, get away from streetlights. Don't use a torch because a flash of it wrecks anything up to an hour's worth of your eye's dark adaption. If and when you need to use a torch, use a red filtered one, since red light has the least effect on your eyes. (Putting some red cellophane over an ordinary torch usually works okay.) Be careful of interior car lights that come on when you open the door - they're annoying.
• Take lots of warm clothes, and be prepared to be up all night. Several layers of clothes is good, because the air pockets trap in body heat. Also grab a warm hat, gloves, and generally as much as you can find. You don't have to wear it straight away but have it nearby for when you get cold. (Which often happens when you're outside at night and not moving around much - especially when moving into the winter like the northern hemisphere is.)
• Take along a thermos and put hot coffee in it, or something similar. You'll want it after a while and having it there is much better than going inside. Also having a deck chair or a rug, or something else to lie back on for looking up is good. It gets a bit difficult straining your neck back all the time.
• The Leonids are called that because they fly out from about that part of the sky. When the Earth's going through space, it's like the dust splattering on a windscreen, and the central point of that splattering (for this shower) is Leo. You might see them all over the sky, but they can all be traced back to this one point. If you want to know where and when Leo is, you could use a star map program like this one (I don't think there are any decent open source ones available, but please tell me if anyone knows of one), or try a website like this one. Even if Leo's not visible, you might still see meteors - they'll just look like they're coming from below the horizon.

Have fun. =P And if you're still interested, go and find a local astronomical society. Local ones are usually better than big ones because you get to actually go out and do stuff.

Exercise is still important, but the "effort ratio" between eating n+m calories and working m calories off over just eating n calories is so huge that you could just forget that first option.

On the other hand, it's been said that exercising regularly enables your body to regulate your food intake better. That is, if you get enugh exersise, you won't be hungry unless you really need food.
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This site has some stuff to show you a map of the stars based on observing point and day.

Also, regarding telescope, you might find using binoculars from the moon and space station a good start. I found the jump in orders of magnification a bit abstract when I was a kid.

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EUDEM - The European Union in Humanitarian DEMining is another anti-landmine group, which provides a clearinghouse for technical information.

...under the desk exercise regimens. Unfortunately there are largely prohibited by recent harassment legislation.

More seriously, try visiting The Hacker's Diet. It has done (and is continuing to do) wonders for me.

Remember, exercise, while good for you, doesn't cut the weight as well as eating less (or more accurately, eating BETTER).
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Compaq dropping MAILWorks?

From the story:

"ABSTRACT

Threats to privacy are often seen as efforts launched by governments or large corporations, using their power to circumscribe individuals' rights. Yet often individuals voluntarily surrender their privacy for promises of security or, more frequently, pure convenience. Based on technologies already available or certain to appear within the next few years, this paper explores how much convenience could be gained, and how much privacy lost as these technologies enter the mainstream."

From the story:

"ABSTRACT

Threats to privacy are often seen as efforts launched by governments or large corporations, using their power to circumscribe individuals' rights. Yet often individuals voluntarily surrender their privacy for promises of security or, more frequently, pure convenience. Based on technologies already available or certain to appear within the next few years, this paper explores how much convenience could be gained, and how much privacy lost as these technologies enter the mainstream."

It can be done. See The Autodesk File, a collection of memos from the early days of Autodesk. Autodesk started out with thirteen programmers working out of their homes, coordinated almost entirely by E-mail. AutoCAD was written in that environment.

As Autodesk became more successful, they continued to insist on literacy. From an Autodesk job ad of 1986:
You'll be literate, and able to communicate complicated technical concepts in simple and readable language. Your work documentation will meet the standards of the best tech writers and be suitable for immediate inclusion in our user manuals. You'll be able to express yourself clearly and persuasively, whether in a design session or while speaking with prospective customers at a trade show.

That's how it's done.

John Walker wrote a piece on the economics of launch systems that says, basically, it makes more sense to launch a lot of little rockets frequently than it does to launch a few big rockets occasionally. The argument is that recurring costs of industrial processes go down with volume more than enough to make up for any economies of scale that might be lost by launching only one satellite per rocket. Certainly microelectronics in low earth orbit requiring frequent "on demand" replenishment launches is at odds with the large booster approach.

John Walker isn't the first to make this argument. Since the early 80s aerospace professionals know have been pointing out that rocket engines have materials limits and tolerances no more demanding than a VW engine made in Brazil costing under $1000 per unit. The big difference is volume production. So this seems obvious to a number of very intelligent folks.

I've never seen a good refutation of this argument. I really wonder why Andy Beal et al chose the big booster approach. What were they thinking?

I believe that if you have a patent you're required to enforce it and protect it against violations and other infringements. Otherwise, you may be deemed to have surrendered or otherwise nullified it. That doesn't mean that they couldn't have licensed it to Barnes and Noble for a token sum, of course, but I fail to see why they'd want to.

A point made by John Walker (founder of Autodesk) in his Autodesk File (North American mirror) is that software companies are regrettably low on patents when compared to industrial or hardware companies of similar size. These patents are used defensively, in a cross-licensing scheme, if a violation is made.

Consider this example: company A uses technology possibly patented by company B. Company B sues. The lawyers will work out a deal where company B is licensed technologies of equal value from company A's patent portfolio - it may go all the way to a full exchange of licenses for all marketable technologies from both companies. Intel and Digital did this relatively recently.

The problem is that if company A doesn't have a strong or viable patent portfolio, it cannot protect itself against patent infringement suits. It may be required to actually shell out cash to settle a suit, which is against the interest of the shareholders (and may lead to the sacking of the management, besides).

While Bezos may be the largest single shareholder, he isn't the only one, and his share will decrease over time. Not to mention that he probably has no desire to lose his shirt in the short term, either.





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However, if you look on the Computer Tools page, under "Why So Many Versions?" you'll see a delightful rant about how Microsoft's pattern of incompatible upgrades to Excel has made it impossible to write simple spreadsheets that work in all versions.

Reminds me of a short story by Kelvin (John Walker) "We'll Return, After This Message"
Not great fiction, but it is interesting to read it ten years later in light of this story and the SETI at Home news.