Amen! Let them read it all, don't spoon feed. My folks did not have a lot of books, especially SF, around, but I did have a library card. I found the wonders of the SF section and pretty much read from end to end. Did not have anybody to recommend or criticize except myself. My small-town library back in the 50s had mainly Wells, Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (now there's a real trip for you!), and a fair amount of Heinlein. As an older person now, I love most anything by Orson Scott Card (despite his religion and politics) -- his Songmaster is possibly my favorite novel of all time. (After "The Novel" by Michener)
In 1960, when I was a freshman at Carnegie Tech, I encountered the venerable (at that time) IBM 650 that was the workhorse of computing at the school. It was the first computer I used. The 650 was hardly what one would call a mainframe, aside from its physical size and weight. It was not very powerful at all. I believe the 650 computer from IBM dated from ~1956. It was a huge vacuum tube machine, and would have been very difficult to keep running. Carnegie replaced their 650 with a Bendix G20 (ever hear of that?) in 1961. The G20 was an early transistor machine.
Hearing about the 650 again brings back fond memories, but this story is very misleading on the face of it. Certainly, nothing of the original 650 could have still been present in 2007.
Perhaps you don't live in one of those places where the ISPs impose data caps on their service. In many (most?) parts of the world, one signs up contractually for so much speed, and so much data. The ISP counts every byte sent and received, and when the data cap is exceeded, either the access is cancelled, or the speed is seriously cut back, and it costs more $$ after that limit to get more data at the same speed. That can be very harmful to your neighbor if he has carefully planned his usage and contracted for that usage. You can cost him money. That is the harm.
The post apparently did not give much information. It did not mention that the incident involved Israeli journalists translating Hebrew into English. I think most of the commenters are reacting as though the translation was from English to Dutch. Here is a link to the Jerusalem Post article: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1192380743991&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull.
But things get even more confusing when it is pointed out that Babelfish does NOT translate Hebrew. So, what are the real facts here?
Yes, lead is very dangerous, and should be eradicated from the environment. That effort has been going on for years -- to remove lead paint from older housing.
But surely the distribution of the lead-painted toys among the population has to be much lower than the distribution of lead-laden automobile emissions were years ago.
What is silly is to attribute all this to some dark conspiracy.
This reaches a new low of silliness! When leaded gasoline was supreme, millions of cars spewed lead particles into the atmosphere all around people for them to breathe in, and that is what made lead so widespread in humans. The danger from lead paint on toys is that the child will put the toy in his mouth and chew on it, releasing some lead into his system. Lead paint on toys does not emit lead vapors into the atmosphere in any great amount.
Leaded gasoline poisons everyone. Lead in paint poisons the owner of the painted object, not everyone.
In the end you still have to take a leap of faith to believe in it. No, not a leap of faith. Evolution is not a religion, though evidently there are those who would make it so. More than a hundred years of accumulated observations and evidence establish evolution as a scientific theory. Scientific theories do evolve over time as new evidence is gained. That does not make them shaky -- it is the way they become more solid and real.
Ah yes, the good old Pickett log-log slide rule. I had an aluminum Pickett in high school, but I got the real thing, a K&E bamboo log-log decitrig rule when I went off to college in 1960. The bamboo rule was so much more smooth in operation.
I used it throughout college, for my BS and PhD. I even wore the leather scabbard hanging from my belt with pride. Surely that was the mark of the nerdly geek of the day. I continued to use the sliderule for some things even after the advent of electronic calculators. Much easier to set up a quick multiplication or division than with a calculator, if you did not need many digits.
Yes! Find a mentor among your management chain and/or your management peers. Many will enjoy the opportunity to pass on their wisdom and to help create a good legacy in you. It worked for me when I was transitioning from engineer to manager -- I had a very good boss who was ecstatic to pass on what he thought were the best principles. I kept that in mind throughout my career.
"Gravity" is not a theory. "Gravity" is an observable. There is a "theory of gravitation" which encompasses the observations and reasoning which try to characterize and explain how gravity arises and how it has its effect.
Wow! This really brings back memories. I spent many, many hours playing this game back in the day when Teletype was king! Even today, I find myself in situations where I feel "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike." I think finding this code is a really valuable event for the study of computing history.
And it is so silly for people to pick on FORTRAN. FORTRAN is not what is important here. Many programs of many types were written in Fortran back in the day. I wrote lots and lots of FORTRAN myself when I was studying physics. There are probably still more lines of FORTRAN code being executed every day than of any other programming language.
As some wag once said: "I don't know what it will be called, and I don't know what it will look like, but there will always be a FORTRAN!"
But I did learn about optimizing instruction fetches by scattering the compiled code around the circumference of a magnetic drum so that the drum would have rotated around beneath the read head in time for the next instruction.
Given the description of a 360 emulating a 1401, I find this comment a bit difficult to follow. IIRC, none of the 370, 360, or 1401 was a drum-based computer, and the code run in each would not be optimized by consideration of location in memory.
I do remember stories back in the old days, of 360 emulating 1401 emulating 650 (an even older machine). The 650 was a drum machine, and relied greatly on SOAP (Symbolic Optimizing Assembly Program) to develop assembly language programs which were then allocated on the drum surface in optimum manner. (The 650 had the one + one addressing scheme of operand address + the next instruction address) I first learned programming writing assembly code for the 650 in my freshman "Theory of Computing" course at Carnegie Tech (1960). Ahh, those were the days! We were all taught to visualize how the machine worked in detail as we developed our programs, and when they sprung something called Fortran on us in the second semester, I found it very difficult to transition to those funny programming constructs.
And, back in those days, writing self-modifying code was a standard technique -- one which I have long-since abandoned for all the trouble it can actually cause. Real programmers debug using octal dumps! (I spent a lot of time with CDC machines, and they were octal based, not hexadecimal).
But I have to say the overall best programming experiences I ever had in 40+ years of activity have been using Java. I really, really like Java, more for all the wonderful shared libraries of useful code than anything else. What a tremendous boost to productivity! I remember when one had to reprogram every littlest algorithm to suit the environment one found oneself in, and nothing could be shared.
I used the AAA mapping service online last fall for a 12-day 4400-mile roadtrip, and it was great! I carried my laptop with me, and could log on from wherever I stayed to update the routing when plans changed, particularly when I made hotel reservations a day or two ahead and got detailed to-the-door directions.
The directions never steered me wrong. I was very pleased.
I am sure today if you get a paper triptik from the local AAA office, they probably just do the online thing for you while you wait.
But,with the "Add a Destination" feature of Google maps, one can work out a pretty good plan for a whole multiple-day, multiple-stop trip, too. That is what I am doing for my 6000-mile trip later this year.
Chipped keys have been around for years. I had one for my 1999 Lexus. I think this story applies to the newer "keys" that operate by proximity, rather than by being inserted.
With either type of chipped key, the cost of replacing the key is very high. I am reminded of an incident I witnessed about 3-4 years ago at my Lexus dealer while I was waiting for service to be finished on my car: In comes a fellow, all excited that he had just managed to buy a nice Lexus for a ridiculously low price at a police auction. (No doubt it was a vehicle confiscated from a drug dealer or something.) Trouble was, the car he bought had no key with it. He came into the dealer with the VIN hoping to get a replacement key issued. The parts man did a lot of manual searching, and catalog thumbing and told the man the cost of a new key would be $3000+! Seems not only a new key was needed, but a complete replacement of the main computer module for the car. I don't know when I have seen someone more disappointed and frustrated as the fellow who got such a good deal on the Lexus.
After more than 40 years, Fortran still keeps chugging. Fortran will never die!
But seriously, programming languages are not only what this is all about. Surely every programmer of a few years experience has used many different languages to develop programs.
I am one of those customers of Telecom NZ who will get the refund. I have been unhappy for weeks now after signing up for "Go Large". The original "Go Large" plan was accompanied by a document explaining their traffic management policies. The traffic management policy specified certain types of traffic that would be managed and other types of traffic would not be managed. Their error was to have managed all traffic, contrary to their stated policy.
But instead of changing the service to match the policy they stated, they have revised the policy to match what they have been doing. I think that sucks.
I think this comment is exactly right. From a day-to-day perspective, the specialized topics of computer science just never come into play anymore. I was/am in the "software" business for more than 30 years, and even taught computer science in a large American university. Out in the workaday world, the things that people do in the course of building software applications just don't include most of the topics of computer science.
In the old days, when I started out, most everything that people created in software was brand new, and the hardware inadequate, so it was always a challenge to analyze and optimize and determine just the right way to accomplish what you needed to do. And there was little ability to share or reuse. In those days, we all had to do our math to get the job done.
Today, for most situations, there are existing, sharable solutions that are good enough to do the job available for the taking and reuse. Hardware has become so fast, capable, and cheap that much optimization and tuning is not necessary. Don't get me wrong, I think it is great, and the power of the individual to create interesting and useful applications has been magnified orders of magnitude.
However, I think there are still issues of understanding what the right training and education is needed for what most people want to do. Many probably take CS when they really want to take programming, or web design. Frankly, in my recent years, the young programmers I have known have very often not had university training at all. They look at computer technology and web development and such as "a really easy way to make lots of money -- why do I need to go to university?".
Here in NZ the penny was phased out years ago, and just in 2006, the 5c piece was also eliminated. So, for cash transactions the cost is always rounded to 10c. Each retailer posts their rounding policy at the checkout.
The rounding is not done on each item, but on the total. So items are still priced with 5, 7, 9 and such cents in the last place.
For electronic transactions, the exact sum is charged without rounding. And literally everywhere you can do your business with electronic payments, so the need to possibly lose a few cents due to roundup occurs relatively infrequently. About the only thing I regularly use cash for is parking meters, and in some cities even parking meters take electronic transactions.
A key issue in making currency change more acceptable in the US would be to have electronic payment become far more widely used than it is today. (I just moved to NZ from the US, so I am aware of the difference.)
I would like to add L6 to the list, though it is now lost in the mists of time. It was another language from Bell Labs back in the 60s, trying to pin down useful linguistic concepts relative to processing linked list data.
L6 did not achieve any real-world adoption as far as I know. How many of the other languages listed did achieve real-world use? (names beginning with C excepted from consideration)
Slashdot Mirror
Amen! Let them read it all, don't spoon feed. My folks did not have a lot of books, especially SF, around, but I did have a library card. I found the wonders of the SF section and pretty much read from end to end. Did not have anybody to recommend or criticize except myself. My small-town library back in the 50s had mainly Wells, Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (now there's a real trip for you!), and a fair amount of Heinlein. As an older person now, I love most anything by Orson Scott Card (despite his religion and politics) -- his Songmaster is possibly my favorite novel of all time. (After "The Novel" by Michener)
Hearing about the 650 again brings back fond memories, but this story is very misleading on the face of it. Certainly, nothing of the original 650 could have still been present in 2007.
Perhaps you don't live in one of those places where the ISPs impose data caps on their service. In many (most?) parts of the world, one signs up contractually for so much speed, and so much data. The ISP counts every byte sent and received, and when the data cap is exceeded, either the access is cancelled, or the speed is seriously cut back, and it costs more $$ after that limit to get more data at the same speed. That can be very harmful to your neighbor if he has carefully planned his usage and contracted for that usage. You can cost him money. That is the harm.
But things get even more confusing when it is pointed out that Babelfish does NOT translate Hebrew. So, what are the real facts here?
What? You don't watch Robin Hood on TV? Just look what that evil sheriff does to his people!
Yes, lead is very dangerous, and should be eradicated from the environment. That effort has been going on for years -- to remove lead paint from older housing.
But surely the distribution of the lead-painted toys among the population has to be much lower than the distribution of lead-laden automobile emissions were years ago.
What is silly is to attribute all this to some dark conspiracy.
This reaches a new low of silliness! When leaded gasoline was supreme, millions of cars spewed lead particles into the atmosphere all around people for them to breathe in, and that is what made lead so widespread in humans. The danger from lead paint on toys is that the child will put the toy in his mouth and chew on it, releasing some lead into his system. Lead paint on toys does not emit lead vapors into the atmosphere in any great amount.
Leaded gasoline poisons everyone. Lead in paint poisons the owner of the painted object, not everyone.
Ah yes, the good old Pickett log-log slide rule. I had an aluminum Pickett in high school, but I got the real thing, a K&E bamboo log-log decitrig rule when I went off to college in 1960. The bamboo rule was so much more smooth in operation. I used it throughout college, for my BS and PhD. I even wore the leather scabbard hanging from my belt with pride. Surely that was the mark of the nerdly geek of the day. I continued to use the sliderule for some things even after the advent of electronic calculators. Much easier to set up a quick multiplication or division than with a calculator, if you did not need many digits.
Yes! Find a mentor among your management chain and/or your management peers. Many will enjoy the opportunity to pass on their wisdom and to help create a good legacy in you. It worked for me when I was transitioning from engineer to manager -- I had a very good boss who was ecstatic to pass on what he thought were the best principles. I kept that in mind throughout my career.
I think that "forway" is meant to be "foray"
"Gravity" is not a theory. "Gravity" is an observable. There is a "theory of gravitation" which encompasses the observations and reasoning which try to characterize and explain how gravity arises and how it has its effect.
Wow! This really brings back memories. I spent many, many hours playing this game back in the day when Teletype was king! Even today, I find myself in situations where I feel "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike." I think finding this code is a really valuable event for the study of computing history.
And it is so silly for people to pick on FORTRAN. FORTRAN is not what is important here. Many programs of many types were written in Fortran back in the day. I wrote lots and lots of FORTRAN myself when I was studying physics. There are probably still more lines of FORTRAN code being executed every day than of any other programming language.
As some wag once said: "I don't know what it will be called, and I don't know what it will look like, but there will always be a FORTRAN!"
Where did this come from? The word "repeal" does not appear in TFA.
Given the description of a 360 emulating a 1401, I find this comment a bit difficult to follow. IIRC, none of the 370, 360, or 1401 was a drum-based computer, and the code run in each would not be optimized by consideration of location in memory.
I do remember stories back in the old days, of 360 emulating 1401 emulating 650 (an even older machine). The 650 was a drum machine, and relied greatly on SOAP (Symbolic Optimizing Assembly Program) to develop assembly language programs which were then allocated on the drum surface in optimum manner. (The 650 had the one + one addressing scheme of operand address + the next instruction address) I first learned programming writing assembly code for the 650 in my freshman "Theory of Computing" course at Carnegie Tech (1960). Ahh, those were the days! We were all taught to visualize how the machine worked in detail as we developed our programs, and when they sprung something called Fortran on us in the second semester, I found it very difficult to transition to those funny programming constructs.
And, back in those days, writing self-modifying code was a standard technique -- one which I have long-since abandoned for all the trouble it can actually cause. Real programmers debug using octal dumps! (I spent a lot of time with CDC machines, and they were octal based, not hexadecimal).
But I have to say the overall best programming experiences I ever had in 40+ years of activity have been using Java. I really, really like Java, more for all the wonderful shared libraries of useful code than anything else. What a tremendous boost to productivity! I remember when one had to reprogram every littlest algorithm to suit the environment one found oneself in, and nothing could be shared.
I used the AAA mapping service online last fall for a 12-day 4400-mile roadtrip, and it was great! I carried my laptop with me, and could log on from wherever I stayed to update the routing when plans changed, particularly when I made hotel reservations a day or two ahead and got detailed to-the-door directions.
The directions never steered me wrong. I was very pleased.
I am sure today if you get a paper triptik from the local AAA office, they probably just do the online thing for you while you wait.
But,with the "Add a Destination" feature of Google maps, one can work out a pretty good plan for a whole multiple-day, multiple-stop trip, too. That is what I am doing for my 6000-mile trip later this year.
With either type of chipped key, the cost of replacing the key is very high. I am reminded of an incident I witnessed about 3-4 years ago at my Lexus dealer while I was waiting for service to be finished on my car: In comes a fellow, all excited that he had just managed to buy a nice Lexus for a ridiculously low price at a police auction. (No doubt it was a vehicle confiscated from a drug dealer or something.) Trouble was, the car he bought had no key with it. He came into the dealer with the VIN hoping to get a replacement key issued. The parts man did a lot of manual searching, and catalog thumbing and told the man the cost of a new key would be $3000+! Seems not only a new key was needed, but a complete replacement of the main computer module for the car. I don't know when I have seen someone more disappointed and frustrated as the fellow who got such a good deal on the Lexus.
Be wary of electing another Texan to the presidency!
After more than 40 years, Fortran still keeps chugging. Fortran will never die! But seriously, programming languages are not only what this is all about. Surely every programmer of a few years experience has used many different languages to develop programs.
But instead of changing the service to match the policy they stated, they have revised the policy to match what they have been doing. I think that sucks.
In the old days, when I started out, most everything that people created in software was brand new, and the hardware inadequate, so it was always a challenge to analyze and optimize and determine just the right way to accomplish what you needed to do. And there was little ability to share or reuse. In those days, we all had to do our math to get the job done.
Today, for most situations, there are existing, sharable solutions that are good enough to do the job available for the taking and reuse. Hardware has become so fast, capable, and cheap that much optimization and tuning is not necessary. Don't get me wrong, I think it is great, and the power of the individual to create interesting and useful applications has been magnified orders of magnitude.
However, I think there are still issues of understanding what the right training and education is needed for what most people want to do. Many probably take CS when they really want to take programming, or web design. Frankly, in my recent years, the young programmers I have known have very often not had university training at all. They look at computer technology and web development and such as "a really easy way to make lots of money -- why do I need to go to university?".
The rounding is not done on each item, but on the total. So items are still priced with 5, 7, 9 and such cents in the last place.
For electronic transactions, the exact sum is charged without rounding. And literally everywhere you can do your business with electronic payments, so the need to possibly lose a few cents due to roundup occurs relatively infrequently. About the only thing I regularly use cash for is parking meters, and in some cities even parking meters take electronic transactions.
A key issue in making currency change more acceptable in the US would be to have electronic payment become far more widely used than it is today. (I just moved to NZ from the US, so I am aware of the difference.)
I would like to add L6 to the list, though it is now lost in the mists of time. It was another language from Bell Labs back in the 60s, trying to pin down useful linguistic concepts relative to processing linked list data. L6 did not achieve any real-world adoption as far as I know. How many of the other languages listed did achieve real-world use? (names beginning with C excepted from consideration)
... and there is the recent absolute dreck Stormbreaker. What a horrible movie it was.