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First you said this: "OS/2 2.0 written by IBM and... oh... just IBM... "

Now you're saying this: "Microsoft and IBM worked jointly on OS/2 1.x"

So excuse me a minute while I question your credibility.
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Next, you're claiming this: IBM rewrote massive (ie: most) portions of OS/2 without Microsoft's work or input for OS/2 version 2.0 and onwards.

The massive re-write was version 3.0 I'm afraid. And it was done my Microsoft. And it ended up being called Windows NT. Reference. IBM needed to rewrite as well: but not to remove MS code. It was because of their initial bad decision to target the 286 - and the need to modernize for the 386 (protected mode, pre-emptive multitasking, etc.)
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Switching topics for a second: why do you think companies fund research in universities? For shits and giggles?

No, I dont. But that doesnt mean the company innovated.. *explaination omitted*

They have a research department, and a research budget, and areas they target for research. They funded some good research, and brought it to frution as a product. Your definition of innovation seems to simply exclude any and everything done by Microsoft. To each their own. Peace to you brother.
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Those innovations though, simply do not include the ones listed by the OP.

So your purpose is just to pedantically keep rubbing his nose in it (with dubious facts and logic, if I may add)?

Check out the National Air and Space Museum (not the one in the middle of DC, it's about a half hour away in VA). http://www.nasm.si.edu/UdvarHazy/.

When I was there, they had a space shuttle, a Concorde, and an SR-71 (which RULED)

Yeah, but not a real space shuttle...

Agreed. The Intrepid is a great museum, and one of my favorite places in the world. But it's very specifically a museum of durable things. Military aircraft and supersonic transports that are designed for all-weather.

The Space Shuttle is the very definition of a Hangar Queen. It takes tens of thousands of man hours of re-fitting for each flight. The tiles are delicate, and it's not really designed to be exposed to the elements long term. It might be able to be, but given it's track record, do we really want to risk it when there are only three remaining in existence?

Yes, they probably *could* get it into the hangar bay of the Intrepid, but given the shuttle's size, they may actually have to dismantle the ship to do so.

The Essex Class carrier has a deck elevator with dimensions of 60 ft x 34 ft. It's maximum load weight was 40,000 Lbs. The shuttle orbiter by comparison is 122.17 ft by 78.06 ft and weighs 151,205 lb.

In other words, the orbiter weighs in (empty) at triple the capacity of the Intrepid's elevators. Even if they didn't use the elevators and used some kind of crane instead, it's still 78.06 ft on it's smaller dimension vs the deck opening's larger dimension which is 60 ft.

They'd have to dismantle either the Intrepid or the orbiter to get it inside. Even if they did, the hangar deck is hardly climate controlled to begin with...

To use the Intrepid site, they'd either have to dismantle part of the ship to get it inside, then extensively retrofit it to provide a climate controlled environment, or they'd have to build a new facility on the Pier along side Intrepid just to house the Shuttle. The Intrepid gets most of it's operating budget from admissions, memberships, and the occasional grant. I don't think it's going to go away tomorrow, but I do get the distinct impression that compared to the Smithsonian, or the Kennedy Space Center (both government funded), it's hanging on my the margins.

The 500 year rule makes sense to me. These are invaluable pieces of human history. The Apollo Command Modules are in the same class. The National Air And Space Museum in D.C. makes sense as a location for one. They already have the Columbia module from Apollo 11, which I assume we would want to maintain to the same standards. However, they also already have the orbiter prototype Enterprise, so it seems to make more sense to spread the three remaining orbiters to allow as many people as possible to have access to them as possible. Perhaps one one at Kennedy Space Center, and one in Houston, and one on the West Coast somewhere?

New York City would allow millions of people to have access. And Intrepid is the premier aerospace site in the city. But it's just not equipped or funded for something like this.

The Aerospace museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base may also be appropriate, but it has a distinct military aerospace bias.

Likewise Vandenberg Air Force Base in California could be a great site, as it was almost a second launch site for the Shuttle. Having an orbiter wind up there permanently could be very apropos. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any museum or public exhibit at Vandenberg, which is a shame. Edwards Air Force Base (Secondary shuttle landing site) and White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico could be appropriate for similar reasons. But again, they're both military bases, and not terribl

No, it wasn't that interesting and it was terribly ignorant of their own history.

On one hand we have the Winter Counts that show those peoples saying exactly when they got to South Dakota, pushing out the Cheyenne and taking control of the Black Hills.
http://wintercounts.si.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hills

And the religion has them being created there, and the Black Hills remain the push button issue with the Lakota because they claim to always have been from there, created there, etc, even though they didn't live there and it was taboo to sleep in the Black Hills.

I'd guess that 1/8th of the folks on the Reservation follow some of the old mythology and know some of the language. Theres more of a pan-American Indian religion over the last 40 years with tribes who had nothing to do with the Buffalo and horse cultures getting excited about Buffalo, thats a real shame because its destroying their own heritage.

Lakota religion lacks the morality lessons that the mainstream religions have for a base, the only one that remains important still is Pte Ska Win.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Buffalo_Calf_Woman

It really amazes me that the same guy who went on an on about how magical the iPad is, was once this guy:

These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You'd actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/sj1.html

I guess owning your own content distribution platform really gives you a sense of spirituality.

FYI modern humans have been around for 200,000 years or so. http://humanorigins.si.edu/

int gender; // should really be a bool, need to fix that at some point.

That's not a bug -- it's a feature. Some life forms (e.g. slime molds) have more than two "genders".

It is a solid oxide fuel cell. There is nothing magical.

It is presented like it is a brand new invention and that they are the only ones making the product, however R&D on this technology has been going on since the 1960s by big companies like Westinghouse, GE, and tens of other companies all over the world. DOE has a 10-year old still-active program dedicated just to SOFCs. There is a book about solid oxide fuel cells.

There is no platinum or other precious metals. It is ceramic oxides and nickel, similar to alkaline cells except these run at much higher rates per unit area which promises to make them cheaper than other types of cells. Read the links above for the materials. The electrodes are "inks" only during manufacturing - they are heat treated to form stable solid materials. Recently, developments in materials science has brought them close to commercialization (manufacturing cost and durability have been issues). Of the perhaps 50 companies attempting to commercialize this technology, it seems that the Bloom company is just the one that happens to be funded by silicon valley investors.

This is not to say the technology is not exciting and potentially can improve our use of fossil fuels. The same cells can also be run in the reverse direction as electrolyzers, applying renewable/nuclear (non-fossil) electricity to split water and carbon dioxide to create fuels (link1 link2).

Whoever wrote this didn't do their work...the smithsonian already owns the Enterprise: http://www.nasm.si.edu/UdvarHazy/

... and it is possible that the Enterprise, a shuttle prototype that never made it to space, will also be available.

Really, the Enterprise? And does Mr Pickens suppose that the National Air and Space Museum will give it back to NASA so that it can be sold? Somehow I find that highly unlikely.

The Craters of the Moon flows are eruptions from the rift, which, though it was helped by it, does not require input from the Yellowstone hotspot to remain hot and rifting.

That's an interesting opinion. My view is that well, yes, it might require input from the Yellowstone hotspot.

I looked through the paper and don't see any evidence to support a present-day connection with Craters of the Moon.

Except that that the plume comes up to Yellowstone and then is dragged out underneath most of the Snake River plateau, including the Craters of the Moon.

Here's the thing. There are three factors that seem relevant and supporting of my hypothesis here. First, caldera eruptions seem to have ended in the area about 4 million years ago. So where did the residue come from? Did it really stay hot for 4 million years? Second, it is a large volume of hot olivine-bearing basalt. That's a further indication that both the magma was very hot and dry (olivine reacts in the presence of water). The link describes a number of "eruptive episodes" dating back from 2,000 to 8,000 years ago (just the last part of the Craters of the Moon's history). Adding up the estimated volumes, I get roughly 20 cubic km of basalt. That compares to 1,000 cubic km for the last caldera eruption (and subsequent filling of the hole by another 1,000 cubic km). Sounds like a lot less except that the flow rates are near equivalent. If the Crater of the Moon activity had gone on for the last 600,000 years rather than just the 6,000 year period, then it would also yield roughly 2,000 cubic km of material. Third, the current study shows the magma plume not only coming up to Yellowstone, but subsequently being dragged back along the Snake River plateau, including the Craters of the Moon.

OTOH after Googling around a bit, apparently the basalt flows separate into chemically distinct groups which would be contrary evidence. This link also cites 30 cubic km as the total volume of the flows in question from 15,000 years ago to present (and would, if extended to the past 600,000 years give a flow of 1,200 cubic km, more than enough to fill the caldera, but not as much as the combination of caldera eruption and subsequent fill).

The point is that we have a significant amount of hot magma, a potential source lying just 30-50 miles below, and the only other explanation requires the magma to stay hot for somewhere around four million years. Chemical composition of the lava indicates that it most likely doesn't have a direct link to the underlying magma body. So an alternate hypothesis is that a similar process exists like what allegedly is occurring at Yellowstone. Bits of the underlying body bubble up and flow to the surface.

The 640k quote was relevant in 1981, when it seemed like a lot. It also was due to a limitation of the 8086 CPU's 20 bit address bus.Here's an excerpt from a 1993 interview where Gates clarifies his quote.

In real mode, the 8086 can only address 1 MB of RAM, out of which 384KB is reserved for video RAM. Hence the 640k restriction on memory (640=1024-384).
Using extended and expanded memory managers, it was possible for DOS programs on the 286 and higher CPUs to access memory beyond 1 MB by mapping it into pages in the upper memory area.

If you've ever played DOOM or Duke3D back in the day, you might be familiar with these :-)

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/SmallMammals/default.cfm?cam=NMR

The one reason we're fucking up there environment is that there's about 6.5 BILLION people and growing. That many of a species that without modern technology and medicine should by rights number in the tens or hundreds of thousands just isn't going to be sustainable.

I was actually agreeing with what you were saying ... up until you started going all population control.

The main reason that population control goes all wacky, is when you run the numbers, EVERY man, woman and child could live in the state of Texas, with NOBODY else on the planet ... and that is with everyone having about 1200 sq ft around them. Start grouping people into families, and the size needed to hold everyone gets smaller. Now, just start going up ... you get the picture.

Also, how many insects are around? They don't have any "modern technology" and yet "at any time, it is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive." Your argument that humans are overpopulated just doesn't hold water.

However, if you continue to feel that humans are overpopulating the Earth, please lead the way in reducing the population instead of telling everyone else what they should do.

My response would be 'goodluckwiththat'

The museum can't play fast and loose with the law.

It can't play fast and loose with its donors - or significant works go elsewhere and donors sue for recovery.

Time for a reality check:

When Paramount presented the original Enterprise model from the Star Trek series to the Smithsonian do you think the gift came without restrictions?

Horse droppings are a semiconductor.

Have they been used to make an effective bistable switch? (There's on in the Smithsonian's chips collections apparently, http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/index2.htm).

I'm assuming that this device is a fraud/hoax too, but it's interesting to see that there is actually quite a lot of interesting science behind the story if that's the case - presumably they're using eumelanin (as I suspect it's dark hair mainly in Asia) which makes one think twice when papers like http://www.google.com/search?q=cache%3AwE7RiTJ0DDAJ%3Aarxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F0704.3977 are considered - it seems almost possible, stranger things have happened! We are particularly adept at producing these long thin layered strands.

Except primates are not all vegetarians. Many use sticks to dig out insects, chimpanzees hunt and use sticks to dig out termites to eat.

Falcon

The Udvar-Hazy Center (Smithsonian Air & Space Annex) is a must see if you're near DC. http://www.nasm.si.edu/UdvarHazy/

Attractions include a space shuttle, a Concorde, an SR-71 Blackbird and hundreds of other aircraft, spacecraft, missiles, engines and so on. Also has a 6-story IMAX.

SciTrek in Atlanta used to be a winner but I hear they closed.

The U of Hawaii telescope at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii is a neat thing to go see, but it is only rarely open to the public so schedule carefully. Plus how many places can you drive from sea level to 13,000 feet in just a few hours?

If you make it to the DC area and like the Air & Space museum on the National Mall, take a day to visit the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space museum where they have everything they couldn't fit into the National Mall site. http://www.nasm.si.edu/UdvarHazy/

Just let me know if they spot a ring that looks like it's been braided.

Here you go.

That's part of why I love slashdot. For so many people that ask for something seemingly impossible, there seems to be someone who either has the answer or knows someone that does.

Bless you uber-nerds!

Here you go.

It would be so cool if the Centaur sceletons of Volos were real

More like 150 kw. [pdf] A lot of power, but not enough to power a city. From :

Besides its speed, the most remarkable thing about ENIAC was its size and complexity. ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 8.5 by 3 by 80 feet (2.6 m × 0.9 m × 26 m), took up 680 square feet (63 m2), and consumed 150 kW of power.[8] Input was possible from an IBM card reader, and an IBM card punch was used for output. These cards could be used to produce printed output offline using an IBM accounting machine, an example of which would be the IBM 405.

S'funny - the Smithsonian'll charge you to obtain their collection, too:

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/rights/index.cfm

You don't suspect there's a degree of hypocrisy in the Wikimedia stance, do you?

In one case, the Smithsonian's National Zoo has a facility in Front Royal, Virginia:

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/ConservationAndScience/CRC/FrontRoyal/default.cfm

They might know a thing or two about dealing with historical items, and they do have a museum devoted to air and space flight. (That said, the fact that NASA are asking for suggestions at all is encouraging.)

We still have Armstrong's boot alongside other historically significant foot wear such as Dorothy's red shooes. We could attach the boot to the bottom of the probe and called it a restoration project.

Great... I volunteer!!! It will cost oh well, let me see... About $200 million... Pay up uncle Sam!!!

They spend money on stranger things... Who wants to help me...

We still have Armstrong's boot alongside other historically significant foot wear such as Dorothy's red shooes. We could attach the boot to the bottom of the probe and called it a restoration project.

It will take only about six months to completely destroy RIAA and MPAA if as few as 20% of the people do this.

I have already been doing this for at least the last two (2) years. I have not bought a new CD since 1997 and I quit going to the movies (at least MPAA studio movies) and buying DVDs two (2) years ago (the only film I saw recently was an IMAX movie "Fighter Pilot" at the National Air and Space Museum Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center). I don't pirate the films or music either. I just turned them off; I don't listen anymore. I spend my free time on the Internet in study of various technical, political, economic, and scientific topics of interest and exercising outdoors and away from my desk. I hope the MAFIAA does fail and receives the comeuppance that they so richly deserve.

The accident was not a huge deal in terms of end result. Not much radiation was released. But it was far closer to a huge disaster than anybody at the time thought.

Originally, people didn't think that a meltdown had occurred. It was only many years later during the cleanup that people realized a significant fraction of the core had indeed melted (about half) and ~20 tons had drained into the bottom of the containment vessel -- the start of a worst-case scenario where the vessel is breached. They slowed down the reaction just in time to stop it, but had they waited a few more hours before realizing what was going on (that much of the core was not covered by cooling water), the story would be completely different.

Basically, they were lucky that the design was so over-engineered. That's the real triumph here. Three Mile Island is both an example of the safety of the design (that it survived so much abuse) and the fragility of the design (that a small problem coupled with operator error could come that close to yielding a worst-case scenario).

I don't think it is fair to describe the accident as "exaggerated". That's too simple. Exaggerated in its effect on the public, yes, absolutely. Exaggerated in terms of what happened in the core, no. It was a genuine meltdown of part of the core. That fact was severely underestimated, if not denied, for almost 10 years until the bottom of the core was uncovered in the cleanup. At that point people were shocked it had gotten that bad.

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.

As far as I can tell, he didn't say 640k would be enough for anyone, and that problem was due to the processor only having 20 bit addresses. But Gates definitely is contradicting himself. It's like he wants to take credit for the memory layout until people hammer him on it, then says IBM did it.

And Gates also tells conflicting stories. In the article you mention, he says IBM laid out the memory to have a 640k limit. In a 1993 Smithsonian Institution interview, he says that he did it. Boastful, forgetful, a fucking liar? Who knows.

What's maddening is that nobody involved in this debate seems to realize that:

1. We solved resonance and pogoing issues in the 1960s vis-a-vis the Saturn V stack.

2. We can simply dust off the Apollo 18-20 J-series mission plans and the Apollo X/ALSS/AES/LESA studies, and execute them.

3. All we need to actually get back to the Moon is a Saturn V stack updated with newer materials and automation technologies.

4. SRBs are insanely dangerous due to their non-throttalability, and should not be man-rated beyond the poorly-designed Shuttle stack.

We knew all this *more than 40 years ago* (we ignored the SRB issue back then, which led directly to Challenger); how can these people be so ignorant?!

Here's a link to just a few of the studies which were done of follow-on missions. Here are links to Apollo X, ALSS, AES, and LESA.

Stephen Baxter's Voyage is an interesting alternate history based upon some of these mission plans (although he's way too hard on the Germans, IMHO).

The bottom line - if NASA want to go back to the Moon (far better to offer a $20B X-Prize for the first organization to put 30 men on the Moon for a year and a day, and return them safely to Earth), all they have to do is to start building modernized Saturn Vs, Apollo CMs, SMs, & LMs.

While I don't believe that any are still in service, there were many pneumatic postal systems in the world. New York's ran until the '60s, Paris had one until 1983, Prague until 2002!

Between the infrastructure cost and emerging technologies they stopped making financial sense.

Someone has found a couple of them: http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/chipfun/graff.htm

yea, that video gave me the chills. at first it looked sorta like the alien from Independence Day, but about 100 times creepier. but once i actually understood what i was seeing, i was just in awe at the beauty of such a bizarre living creature. these kinds of discoveries just emphasize the reason we need to support ecological conservation all the more. imagine all of the millions of other bizarre and beautiful creatures out there still unknown to science.

for those who are interested in other video clips of Magnapinnidae, here's a page with several short clips and screen captures. most of them are poor quality, as they seem to be VHS-rips, but the 6th and 8th clips are pretty amazing.

Your link didn't make it, but it's a good find. I didn't know the Smithsonian collected computer documentation. As the description of this item points out: "Although Windows 3.0 proved to be successful, Microsoft wished to continue developing a 32-bit operating system completely unrelated to IBM's OS/2 architecture. To head the redesign project, Microsoft hired David Cutler and others away from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).".

All of that footage was either a 6 inch model or some cheesy computer graphics?

The original Enterprise model specifications:

Length, overall: 3.3 m (11 ft)
Diameter, saucer: 152 cm (60 in)
Length, engine pods: 185 cm (72.25 in)
Length, secondary hull: 135 cm (53.5 in)
Height: 80 cm (32 in)
Weight: 90 kg (200 lb)

It is currently on display in the gift shop at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC:

http://www.nasm.si.edu/visit/concessions/shops/enterprise.cfm

This was the last year for our pull-the-lever voting machines.

Invented here in upstate New York and first used in Lockport in 1892. Vote: The Machinery of Democracy

I will miss them.

Each little lever snapping into place with a loud and satisfying "Clack!" and revealing a clear and unmistakable red X.

There was never any ambiguity about what you had done and everything was reversible until you pulled the one big Big lever and exited the booth.

Generally speaking, with a dial, the mid-range is safe and the extremes are dangerous.

The position of a lever has equal clarity and the lever itself has enough resistance that it cannot be moved accidentally.

These are lessons you can teach a child.

How about the fact that the 640K limit was actually a limitation of the hardware.

That is revisionist truth. It is true that the IBM PCs memory mapped their video card memory at 640KB. It is also true that (of the docs I read at the time) PC DOS manuals recommended using DOS calls for I/O instead of applications diddling with memory themselves. DOS, however, was not much of an OS and applications were allowed to diddle with the video card memory directly.

In other words, it was the same sort of situation with regards to installation of programs - they ignored guidelines, but since the guidelines were not enforced (until Microsoft Vista) no one cared.

The 640KB "limitation" was due to misguided programmers poking directly into video card memory. A stupid practice at best, but standard practice at the time and ignored by PC DOS for "performance" reasons, so it flourished.

It was NOT a hardware limitation.

I found a quote that was much worse:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/gates.htm

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.

Only to the dimwitted ... Notice also how he takes credit for IBM's system design.

The neanderthal geek of 1902 made a game of seeing how far and - need it be said? - how cheaply - the electric lines could take him:

a sack of nickels, a cast iron butt and bladder was all you needed to make the run from New York to Chicago.

The Portland Loop is eight miles.

In 1917 there were 45,000 miles of track - but the bloom was off the rose.
A Streetcar City

Who do you think bullt Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo? Not NASA.

NASA had much of the design work done in house though, right? Not really.

Get rid of NASA, and who 'runs' the ongoing space programs? Duh. I say keep NASA, for all its failings. The choice is NASA or just contractors.

No choice.

Not the rover, the rovers were on 15-17. This was more like a high-tech wheelbarrow.

http://www.nasm.si.edu/collections/imagery/Apollo/AS14/a14met.htm

I'd be interested to see a progression timeline of the light vs. heat ratio from the various methods we've used.

Here you go. To convert lumens per watt to an efficiency ratio, divide by 680 (1 watt of pure green light - the kind the eye is most sensitive to - is 680 lumens).

Note three things:

1. Incandescents are nowhere near the 10% efficiency mentioned in the article summary. Maybe 5-6% for the better halogen/xenon bulbs.
2. Not mentioned on this chart is CRI. Lighting sources below roughly 70 CRI are often considered undesirable for residential indoor light.
3. Efficiency and CRI are often a tradeoff.

Ruby
rails
Ruby on rails
Soap
Ajax
Ajax soap
Python
Perl
Java

Is it any wonder normal people think we're strange? (Ignore the rest of this comment, as it presently has too few characters per line (currently 8.5) but thankfully I can paste slashdot's retarded "error" message in the comment to correct this travesty)

I understand there are some bugs in the TRS-80 Model 100 ROM Code that Bill put together. Perhaps with time away from Microsoft he might be able to track them down and patch them?

My very limited understanding is that Bananas are originally from an area in India where the native jungle is disappearing

The Banana is native to Southeast Asia and Australia not just India. According to Botany 2004 bananas were "first cultivated in the Mediterranean region ca. 650 A.D". However some botanists believe bananas once grew in Oregon.

I don't believe the article claims this is "the first practical airplane that's certified for highway driving," the article even mentions and has a photograph of a previous craft, the "Aerocar." Here's another one: http://collections.nasm.si.edu/code/emuseum.asp?style=browse&currentrecord=1&page=search&profile=objects&searchdesc=A19500086000&quicksearch=A19500086000&newvalues=1&newstyle=single&newcurrentrecord=1

Not that we expect slashdot editors to, well, edit.

And hyrdocarbon is an organic compound isn't it?

So is plastic

Plastic was originally made from carbohydrates, specifically cellulose, and thus plants such as trees. Kodak the camera company used a method of making Cellulose acetate, a type of plastic, in 1908. If you're old enough you may recall Cellophane, the plastic wrap for sandwiches and such, it got it's name from what it was made from, cellulose. Today there's renewed interest in bioplastic.