Slashdot Mirror

Supreme Court Chief Justice William A. Rehnquist has a book, All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime that is about these issues. Here is a quote from a speach he gave at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1999:

There are obviously conflicting principles or public policies at work in this area of civil liberty in wartime. There may be some who think that here, as elsewhere, the more civil liberty the better. But neither presidents nor courts have ever operated on this principle. Wartime presidents are inclined to prefer claims based on military necessity to claims of individual liberty, and courts come to the rescue of civil liberty only after the war is over. There is a certain irony in this last fact, but the history of our nation suggests that both the nation and civil liberty have survived pretty well, if not totally unscathed, under it. Whether this is because of the actions of the Presidents and the courts, or in spite of them, I am not prepared to say.

So, we can expect to lose 'rights', and we can expect to gain some of them back when the 'war' is over. The problem being, our current war has no defined ending, and it has already been explained to the American citizens that this will be a long drawn out war full of secracy. The longer a war goes on, the more rights that are taken in the name of that war. It is esp. damning that dissonates is being actively suppressed, with the Bush clan warning our media to 'act responsibly' and advising against such things as playing BinLaden's videos. At the end of wartime, we never regain back all that we have lost.

WOW is right.
I noticed you used 'Has' in the subject line instead of 'Had'.
Nice touch.
It would be nice to save that puppy for historical reasons,
maybe for the Smithsonian Institution.

However, notwithstanding the possibility of web browsing refrigerators and the like, the 'small tools for specific purposes' approach that would have to be favoured for embedded applications fits in nicely with the traditional Unix ethos rather better than for Windows. Will MS systems *really* find their way into toasters and lawnmowers any time soon?

Apparently, that is what Bill Gates eventually wants to do ...

Santos-Dumont continued to work on dirigibles, but finally achieved his dream of flying in a heavier-than-air craft in October of 1906, when his 14 Bis flew a distance of 60 meters at a height of 2 to 3 meters. As far as the world knew, it was the first airplane flight ever and Santos-Dumont became a hero to the world press. The stories about the Wright brothers flights at Kitty Hawk and later near Dayton, Ohio, were not believed even in the US at the time. (emphasis added)

1906 was three years after kitty hawk.

Hallucigenia sparsa. The Smithsonian seems to agree with you: http://www.nmnh.si.edu/paleo/shale/phallu.htm.

Flashback: 1989 - Intel releases the i860 64-bit microprocessor, dubbed a "Cray on a chip" (okay, so it was only a Cray 1, and I think it was only a third as quick as that, but hey - it's a "Cray"!) I even remember some of the RMIT ubergeeks designing a kick-ass computer based upon the i860... Unfortunately, I don't think it was ever built.

2001 - Intel releases the "i860" chipset to support the latest of its flagging 32-bit microprocessor range. Intel's 64-bit microprocessor, the "Itanium", is due for release real soon now...

</irony>

I agree with you that Cray was not only about pushing the limits of technology--he was working on the Gallium Arsenide Cray-5 at the time of this death--but also about innovation in computer architecture.

A great example is the CDC 6600, his first parallel computer for Control Data Corporation. It had many innovations that only later came into popular use. It was a parallel processor, essentially a pipelined machine. It had a pure register load/store architecture, with a hardwired zero register, similar to many future RISC designs. There are many more, but I gotta run....

The typewriter helped office standardization, and even created specialized jobs, ie. the clerk typist.

In a way, the typewriter was as big an impact on business as the computer.

Also, the typewriter may have been the first piece of office equipment ever brought home.

Otherwise known as the giant squid. Reaches lengths of up to (we think) 20m. It is these creatures that we normally attribute those huge sucker marks to. Bits of giant squids have been found washed up on shore, in the bellies of whales, or in fishermans nets. Check out the Smithsonian Institutions page on this creature. What still eludes us is any observation of one of these creatures still alive, although there was a horrible horror movie made about it (and no, it didn't star Capt. Nemo).

Address to Univerity of VA: http://www.am eri canhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/montic/metcalfe.htm
NPR program: http://www.realaudio.com/conte ntp /npr/nf6A16.html

Invented by Bell Labs in the early 60's(?), and called the Rocketbelt, it could only maintain airborne for less than a minute, so you can imagine the altitude this puppy could get.

More info here and here.

Therefore, the strategy is not to build the super-fort, the one that keeps bad guys out no matter what. That doesn't work.

Instead, modern thinking on security is all about layered defenses which raise the cost of attack to (hopefully) unacceptable levels to the attacker(s), as well as preserving flexability and resiliancy.

Although IANAMH (I am not a military historian), I have read enough to generally agree with these ideas. I don't disagree with Schneyer's main thesis, I just am not that surprised by it.

Here is a fairly interesting article called From Sandbags to Computers: What's New in Field Fortifications and Protective Structures. Maybe we can analogize some of modern military tactical theory to cyber-defense.

---
In a hundred-mile march,

The resident computer historian at the Smithsonian is Paul Ceruzzi; a very knowledgeable guy. So they already have someone, but other museums might not.

disks, tape, cds... they all have a relatively short lifespan. picture storing data in mice, just feed them and keep them warm. ev en if th e parents die the children will have the artificial chromosomes... (that is unless they recombine, in which case all of your documents or whatever are worthless....)

At some point, design, industrial or graphic or UI or whatever, becomes as distinctive as a story or movie or song. If we can protect one form of creativity, why not the other?

Does this open the (heavily extrapolated) gateways for the "legalization" of sampling in music?

What scares me about this ruling is the impact it might have against the little guy, it lessens the legal ramifications for the theft of good ideas. If a small company has something great and HUGEcorp has no legal impetus NOT to knock it off and put the little guys out of business, don't think HUGEcorp won't. The big guys would be protected by the ability of their pocketbook to raise a louder fuss. Which is almost what the ruling seems to ask them to do.

One of the ironies of great industrial design is the complete invisibility of it. If you make a perfect tool, there is no way to contain the idea behind that tool. People all over the world know the classing Honeywell round Thermostat, but who designed it?*

* Henry Dreyfuss, who also designed two of the most recognizable and iconocized telephones, and a bunch of other things you already know but might never have thought about. http://www.si.edu/ndm/exhib/hd/start.htm

Go and search for 'tesla'. It told me I got 11 hits, but it would not display any of them. Is anyone else having this problem?

Try the smithsonians history of electricity . No mention of Tesla here either.

As for those of you who claim Tesla was never mentioned in your textbooks, well, my serway physics text names Tesla as the inventor of AC polyphase, the approach to transmitting electricity that 'won out'.

I think my electrical circuits text also covers Tesla; certianly all my EE instructors named him.

As for those of you who claim your education did not include him, well, I was taught about Tesla in both my physics and EE classes. I guess that is what I get for going to a community college. :-)

Go and search for 'tesla'. It told me I got 11 hits, but it would not display any of them. Is anyone else having this problem?

Try the smithsonians history of electricity . No mention of Tesla here either.

As for those of you who claim Tesla was never mentioned in your textbooks, well, my serway physics text names Tesla as the inventor of AC polyphase, the approach to transmitting electricity that 'won out'.

I think my electrical circuits text also covers Tesla; certianly all my EE instructors named him.

As for those of you who claim your education did not include him, well, I was taught about Tesla in both my physics and EE classes. I guess that is what I get for going to a community college. :-)

HANS SOLO PETRIFIED AND FROZEN!!!

Take a look here at the Smithsonian to see how Edison is basically given credit for the total use of electricity in the world! Wow!

-Michael

Is this better? http://www.si.edu/resource/tours/comphist/gates.ht m#tc44

Microsoft and the Mouse

DA: Now Microsoft is primarily a software company, but you actually got into some important hardware development with the Mouse. Do you want to say a few words about that?

BG: Microsoft was playing a much broader role[laughs] than just doing software for this machine. I mean whether it is the keyboard, the character set, the graphics adapter, or even the memory layouts. I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit.

It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within -- oh five or six years people were complaining.

Another thing that Microsoft did, in terms of getting these new machines out there and really showing off what new uses they could be put to, was we came out with our own mouse product. The mouse was invented by Doug Englebart back at Stanford Research Institute. Xerox used it in the Alto, the research machine that PARC built, has a three-button device. The Star had a two-button mouse. And then went Apple went and did a mouse, they did a single-button. We believed the two-button concept was the right approach. So, we went to a Japanese company, Alps, got them to do some design work, paid the patent fees to SRI and Xerox for this, and came out with this as a low-cost add-on. So, even on a character-mode display, being able to move the cursor around in a natural way, we thought was a big advantage. We tied it to Word so that we had a bundle with Word and the Mouse. But then people who didn't like the Mouse thought they shouldn't buy Word. So, it was a little bit of a problem.

When we first brought this out we ordered 50,000 and it took over a year to sell the first 50,000. Today we sell many, many hundreds of thousands in a month. But, at first it looked like maybe we had made a mistake. This did go on to be a very profitable thing for us and we continued to evolve the design going to a sleeker and sleeker appearance over time.

In my original post to Slashdot, boldly titled I Got News for All of You, I made the following rash, unsubstantiated claim:

Overlapping windows were thought up in the '40s, the mouse in the '50s, and WYSIWYG in the '60s, before PARC existed.

A clever Anonymous Coward noted that I was a dumbass and provided no references to back up my statements. Some might argue that merely saying, "You didn't document your sources so what you say is shit!" fails to constitute stimulating intellecutal discourse. It's nothing more than small-minded heckling.

Some might even suggest that you can provide a counter proposition of your own, and if you then "up the ante" and back your own position with documented sources, you've pretty effectively proven your point and made your opponent look like a hothead besides.

I would like to thank my anonymous benefactor for not doing that to me, because I made several mistakes. Then again, within the context of the discussion, I believe the A.C. was implicitly defending the position that the whole WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers; a shorthand for describing the essential ingredients of a modern GUI) shebang was invented at Xerox PARC, which would be even more wrong than I was.

My primary source of information is the book (please forgive me) Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything, by Steven Levy. Sure, it's about the Mac, but really, how can you have any kind of meaningful discussion of GUI based computing without mentioning the Mac?

Yes, I was wrong. It was not multiple windows that were invented in the 1940s, it was information surfing. Vannevar Bush, in his July 1945 Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think describes the sort of ad-hoc, stream-of-consciousness, associative method that characterizes the way we access information on the Web. Bush envisioned a work station with multiple screens, not multiple windows.

I was also wrong about the mouse being invented in the 1950s. Douglas Englebart didn't invent the mouse until the mid 1960s, when he was at SRI. Here's an interesting Smithsonian Institution interview with Douglas Englebart.

Sometime after 1966, Alan Kay at the University of Utah (later to join PARC) designed a "personal" computer called Flex that featured high-resolution graphics, icons and multiple windows. However, Kay himself admits (in Insanely Great) its interface was "repellent to users." Kay went on to work on the Alto and Macintosh.

In his own words, Jeff Raskin developed an idea for a graphical, multi-font WYSIWYG computer interface based on a bitmapped display in the mid-1960s, which is described in his 1967 Penn State thesis, A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System. I couldn't find a link to the thesis itself, but it is referenced in the database of the Software Patent Institute Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple.

Xerox PARC was founded in the year 1970. According to Levy, the Alto prototype was built at the end of 1972. Here's a nice A HREF="http://www.research.microsoft.com/users/blam pson/38-AltoSoftware/WebPage.html">artic le about the Alto.

Here is another interesting site with a number of links to articles on History of Computing

So, in the end, I was wrong about multiple windows, wrong about the mouse, right about WSIWYG, and right about all of these existing before the creation of PARC. I apologize for not checking my facts before posting.

Finally, to my "small-minded heckler", thank you.