Of course, if the Apple ][ predates the IBM PC like you said, the whole thing is moot.
The Apple ][ predates the IBM PC by several years. So does the TRS-80; both it and the Apple ][ came out in 1976, as I recall. The IBM PC wasn't until somewhat later, and even when it did come out it was aimed more at businesses than at home users, since IBM didn't think that home users were a worthwhile market to pursue.
Now I know what the Justice Department can do once it finishes with Microsoft:)
The Justice Department has already been talking to Intel, over their refusal to renew licences on certain technologies to competitors, I think.
This was a couple of years back, before the Microsoft trial got into full swing. The difference was, Intel went and talked to the Justice Department to work out a compromise beforehand, and came to some mutually agreeable results. (Involving relicencing some technology they had patents on, and allowing some other people to use their fabs, I think.) Nothing that really affected Intel directly, except that they couldn't lock out their competitors as much as they'd like.
Unlike Microsoft which steadfastly from the beginning refused to bow to anything that might actually affect the way they did business. Intel was willing to deal, and so in the end had a lot less problems with the results.
-- Bryan Feir
Re:sure, but also good science
on
Hubble Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
HST has contributed more (IMHO) to astronomy than *any* other satellite, ever.
Well, there are challengers to that, though they don't get anywhere near the level of media support... The Japanese HALCA satellite, part of the VSOP project, is a radio telescope up in orbit. While putting a radio telescope up in orbit doesn't get you the same sort of improvement as you get for optical wavelengths, what it does give you is much longer baselines for VLBI.
In VLBI, you take the signals from two or more radio telescopes watching the same object, correlate the signals, and check for interference patterns. The resolution you can get is based on the distance between the telescopes: effectively, you get the resolution you'd get if you have a telescope as big as the longest distance between sites. And when you have a satellite in high orbit, that can be a long distance. Combining HALCA with dozens of radio telescopes all over the world has produced radio images that have hundreds of times the resolution of the Hubble.
The Russians were supposed to be doing this with their RadioAstron satellite five years ago, but I'm sure everybody knows what the Russian space program has been like lately. RadioAstron may still launch, and there are already plans for a next-generation space VLBI mission...
BTW: In about 5 years -- 2004 -- the same calculations show that I'll be using the equivelent of a 2.8 Ghz PII system...and that's behind the curve. Top of the line systems will be about as fast as a PII running at 7.5 Ghz
Well, there are problems with raw clock speed. I realize you said 'as fast as', implying you weren't expecting the raw MHz levels, but just to check with other people...
At 1GHz, a cycle time is 1ns. In 1ns, light will travel roughly 30cm... about a foot. Electrical signals in traces about half that. So if your high-speed bus lines are more than six inches long, the clock at one end of the board will be a full cycle ahead from the other end. At 7.5 GHz, the electrical signals will travel 2cm: less than an inch. With the synchronous CPU designs in use now, everything running at the higher speed has to be smaller than that amount.
Solutions? The usuals: decrease the feature size to shrink the CPU; integrate more circuitry onto the CPU itself to avoid long traces; separate the CPU clock from the system clock even further... the unusual one is to design a more asynchronous CPU, that doesn't require a single clock standard across the whole chip. While there's been a fair bit of work done on that, it requires throwing out one of the great simplifying design assumptions, and makes verifying the correctness of the design a whole lot harder.
...or ask N. Tesla, who's work is often ignored and credit given to Edison.
...or ask L. Erikson if he celebrates Columbus Day.
I'll grant you Tesla, though I was trying to restrict my examples to this century, just to point out that no matter what many may think, people in general aren't really any more understanding than they were during the Renaissance. Nor are they really any less understanding in general; people weren't any stupider or worse, they just had different priorities. The Church wasn't out to deliberately suppress scientific research during this time; they were trying to maintain their own political power. Suppressing talk that cast doubts on their perfection was a means to an end, and a means still used by a number of large organizations today.
Today, there is a scientific community that embraces change and progress, and happily sheds old ideas for new ones.
And if you believe that, I've got a some swampland just off the coast of Florida to sell you.
Do you have any idea how many years it took for ideas like Continental Drift to be accepted by mainstream science? How many decades 'standard' ideas like Clovis First (the idea that all the American Indians crossed the Bering Strait 11 000 years ago) lasted despite evidence that they were wrong simply because too many people were emotionally attached to the idea to give it up? (Parts of South America were inhabited more than a thousand years before Clovis First says they could have been.) How much damage was done to effective research in Quantum Mechanics because Einstein himself couldn't abide by the random factors in the theory he helped lay the foundations for?
It's often said that any real progress in science takes at least a generation; long enough for all the old scientists who are attached to the old ideas to get replaced. Trust me, we've seen lots of evidence for that in this century alone.
Bruno was actually written up in Scientific American several years ago now; that's where I first heard of him. (No, I don't know which month off-hand, but it was almost certainly pre-1986.) He was a trouble-maker in many ways as well.
When you get right down to it, Galileo was put under house arrest because Bruno had been using Galileo's discoveries as part of his arguments against the Church. Galileo himself wasn't all that active politically, and the political side of the Church probably would have ignored him completely if Bruno hadn't used Galileo's observations of the moons of Jupiter as proof that not everything revolved around the Earth, and then went on to challenge the other teachings of the Church. (The Church didn't really care if people believed in the Copernican model; hell, the Church financed Copernicus. But they really took exception when anyone challenged the idea of the Earth being the spiritual centre of the universe. Which Bruno did.) Bruno's agitation helped fuel the anti-science leanings of the Church at the time, and made life a whole lot harsher for many other scientists at the time.
Bruno himself was an interesting thinker; unfortunately, when he got the Church's attention, he ended up taking a number of others down with him.
-- Bryan Feir
Re:The Snow Crash intellectual virus a reality?
on
Snow Crash
·
· Score: 1
Yes, Pyramid printed the first chapter of Snow Crash in one of its issues back when it was still a paper publication. They also had a short intro about the 'Snow Crash Virus' in there, how quickly it had run through the Steve Jackson Games offices. When I get home, I could look up the issue, I've got it there.
-- Bryan Feir
(I hate N-I-S. I hate N-I-S. But only when it stops. (To the tune of the traffic lights song.))
Hitachi did a couple of 'extended' variants on the Zilog Z-80 as well. The Hitachi HD64180 is a souped-up Zilog Z-80, and later reissued as the Zilog Z-180. Includes a simple two-segment MMU which allows for access to greater than 64K, several new instructions, and a whole lot of internal special-purpose memory-mapped registers that control things like the on-board serial ports. A great chip for embedded work; I've been brushing up on Z-80 assembly code that I used on an old friend's TRS-80 model I years ago, because we found one of these as a controller chip inside a high-end VCR.
Hitachi has done this sort of thing before; the Hitachi 6309 is essentially a souped-up Motorola 6809, as many of the old TRS-80 Coco fans know...
Won't work. Canada respects the US's Crypto export laws, so it's still the same. Except that your violating canadian law instead of US:-)
Not exactly. Canada respects the U.S. export restrictions... on software that was imported from the U.S. Any strong encryption we get from stateside we get on the condition we don't export it anywhere they wouldn't. Anything developed here in Canada, or elsewhere outside the U.S., does not fall under U.S. export restrictions and can be exported legally.
Convince your upper managment that standardization is bad.
No, it's not standardization that's bad... it's homogenization. Having everything working off the same standards is a good thing. Being held hostage to a single supplier is a bad thing. Most companies won't stand for it with other components, why do it for software?
eBay acknowledged that the JavaScript exploit works, but minimized its importance.
"We know it's there, but you have to put it all in perspective," said eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove. "We have a very open environment that lets individuals describe what they're selling, and JavaScript is there so people can make the best of their abilities to describe an item."
Kinda like Einstein added in the cosmological constant to keep the universe from expanding;-) Funny how preconceptions keep you from seeing the truth.
Something like that, yes... for that matter, Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect (the one he won the Nobel prize for) was the first paper to ascribe a physical reality to the 'quanta' that Planck had assumed were just an artifact of the math. So in a very real sense, Einstein helped found Quantum Theory... a theory he spent much of his later life fighting tooth and nail against.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, if the Apple ][ predates the IBM PC like you said, the whole thing is moot.
The Apple ][ predates the IBM PC by several years. So does the TRS-80; both it and the Apple ][ came out in 1976, as I recall. The IBM PC wasn't until somewhat later, and even when it did come out it was aimed more at businesses than at home users, since IBM didn't think that home users were a worthwhile market to pursue.
-- Bryan Feir
Now I know what the Justice Department can do once it finishes with Microsoft :)
The Justice Department has already been talking to Intel, over their refusal to renew licences on certain technologies to competitors, I think.
This was a couple of years back, before the Microsoft trial got into full swing. The difference was, Intel went and talked to the Justice Department to work out a compromise beforehand, and came to some mutually agreeable results. (Involving relicencing some technology they had patents on, and allowing some other people to use their fabs, I think.) Nothing that really affected Intel directly, except that they couldn't lock out their competitors as much as they'd like.
Unlike Microsoft which steadfastly from the beginning refused to bow to anything that might actually affect the way they did business. Intel was willing to deal, and so in the end had a lot less problems with the results.
-- Bryan Feir
HST has contributed more (IMHO) to astronomy than *any* other satellite, ever.
Well, there are challengers to that, though they don't get anywhere near the level of media support... The Japanese HALCA satellite, part of the VSOP project, is a radio telescope up in orbit. While putting a radio telescope up in orbit doesn't get you the same sort of improvement as you get for optical wavelengths, what it does give you is much longer baselines for VLBI.
In VLBI, you take the signals from two or more radio telescopes watching the same object, correlate the signals, and check for interference patterns. The resolution you can get is based on the distance between the telescopes: effectively, you get the resolution you'd get if you have a telescope as big as the longest distance between sites. And when you have a satellite in high orbit, that can be a long distance. Combining HALCA with dozens of radio telescopes all over the world has produced radio images that have hundreds of times the resolution of the Hubble.
The Russians were supposed to be doing this with their RadioAstron satellite five years ago, but I'm sure everybody knows what the Russian space program has been like lately. RadioAstron may still launch, and there are already plans for a next-generation space VLBI mission...
-- Bryan Feir
BTW: In about 5 years -- 2004 -- the same calculations show that I'll be using the equivelent of a 2.8 Ghz PII system...and that's behind the curve. Top of the line systems will be about as fast as a PII running at 7.5 Ghz
Well, there are problems with raw clock speed. I realize you said 'as fast as', implying you weren't expecting the raw MHz levels, but just to check with other people...
At 1GHz, a cycle time is 1ns. In 1ns, light will travel roughly 30cm... about a foot. Electrical signals in traces about half that. So if your high-speed bus lines are more than six inches long, the clock at one end of the board will be a full cycle ahead from the other end. At 7.5 GHz, the electrical signals will travel 2cm: less than an inch. With the synchronous CPU designs in use now, everything running at the higher speed has to be smaller than that amount.
Solutions? The usuals: decrease the feature size to shrink the CPU; integrate more circuitry onto the CPU itself to avoid long traces; separate the CPU clock from the system clock even further... the unusual one is to design a more asynchronous CPU, that doesn't require a single clock standard across the whole chip. While there's been a fair bit of work done on that, it requires throwing out one of the great simplifying design assumptions, and makes verifying the correctness of the design a whole lot harder.
-- Bryan Feir
...or ask N. Tesla, who's work is often ignored and credit given to Edison.
...or ask L. Erikson if he celebrates Columbus Day.
I'll grant you Tesla, though I was trying to restrict my examples to this century, just to point out that no matter what many may think, people in general aren't really any more understanding than they were during the Renaissance. Nor are they really any less understanding in general; people weren't any stupider or worse, they just had different priorities. The Church wasn't out to deliberately suppress scientific research during this time; they were trying to maintain their own political power. Suppressing talk that cast doubts on their perfection was a means to an end, and a means still used by a number of large organizations today.
Today, there is a scientific community that embraces change and progress, and happily sheds old ideas for new ones.
And if you believe that, I've got a some swampland just off the coast of Florida to sell you.
Do you have any idea how many years it took for ideas like Continental Drift to be accepted by mainstream science? How many decades 'standard' ideas like Clovis First (the idea that all the American Indians crossed the Bering Strait 11 000 years ago) lasted despite evidence that they were wrong simply because too many people were emotionally attached to the idea to give it up? (Parts of South America were inhabited more than a thousand years before Clovis First says they could have been.) How much damage was done to effective research in Quantum Mechanics because Einstein himself couldn't abide by the random factors in the theory he helped lay the foundations for?
It's often said that any real progress in science takes at least a generation; long enough for all the old scientists who are attached to the old ideas to get replaced. Trust me, we've seen lots of evidence for that in this century alone.
-- Bryan Feir
Bruno was actually written up in Scientific American several years ago now; that's where I first heard of him. (No, I don't know which month off-hand, but it was almost certainly pre-1986.) He was a trouble-maker in many ways as well.
When you get right down to it, Galileo was put under house arrest because Bruno had been using Galileo's discoveries as part of his arguments against the Church. Galileo himself wasn't all that active politically, and the political side of the Church probably would have ignored him completely if Bruno hadn't used Galileo's observations of the moons of Jupiter as proof that not everything revolved around the Earth, and then went on to challenge the other teachings of the Church. (The Church didn't really care if people believed in the Copernican model; hell, the Church financed Copernicus. But they really took exception when anyone challenged the idea of the Earth being the spiritual centre of the universe. Which Bruno did.) Bruno's agitation helped fuel the anti-science leanings of the Church at the time, and made life a whole lot harsher for many other scientists at the time.
Bruno himself was an interesting thinker; unfortunately, when he got the Church's attention, he ended up taking a number of others down with him.
-- Bryan Feir
Yes, Pyramid printed the first chapter of Snow Crash in one of its issues back when it was still a paper publication. They also had a short intro about the 'Snow Crash Virus' in there, how quickly it had run through the Steve Jackson Games offices. When I get home, I could look up the issue, I've got it there.
-- Bryan Feir
(I hate N-I-S. I hate N-I-S. But only when it stops. (To the tune of the traffic lights song.))
Hitachi did a couple of 'extended' variants on the Zilog Z-80 as well. The Hitachi HD64180 is a souped-up Zilog Z-80, and later reissued as the Zilog Z-180. Includes a simple two-segment MMU which allows for access to greater than 64K, several new instructions, and a whole lot of internal special-purpose memory-mapped registers that control things like the on-board serial ports. A great chip for embedded work; I've been brushing up on Z-80 assembly code that I used on an old friend's TRS-80 model I years ago, because we found one of these as a controller chip inside a high-end VCR.
Hitachi has done this sort of thing before; the Hitachi 6309 is essentially a souped-up Motorola 6809, as many of the old TRS-80 Coco fans know...
-- Bryan Feir
Won't work. Canada respects the US's Crypto export laws, so it's still the same. Except that your violating canadian law instead of US :-)
Not exactly. Canada respects the U.S. export restrictions... on software that was imported from the U.S. Any strong encryption we get from stateside we get on the condition we don't export it anywhere they wouldn't. Anything developed here in Canada, or elsewhere outside the U.S., does not fall under U.S. export restrictions and can be exported legally.
-- Bryan Feir
Convince your upper managment that standardization is bad.
No, it's not standardization that's bad... it's homogenization. Having everything working off the same standards is a good thing. Being held hostage to a single supplier is a bad thing. Most companies won't stand for it with other components, why do it for software?
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,353 21,00.html
The summary about eBay's response:
eBay acknowledged that the JavaScript exploit works, but minimized its importance.
"We know it's there, but you have to put it all in perspective," said eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove. "We have a very open environment that lets individuals describe what they're selling, and JavaScript is there so people can make the best of their abilities to describe an item."
-- Bryan Feir
Kinda like Einstein added in the cosmological constant to keep the universe from expanding ;-) Funny how preconceptions keep you from seeing the truth.
Something like that, yes... for that matter, Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect (the one he won the Nobel prize for) was the first paper to ascribe a physical reality to the 'quanta' that Planck had assumed were just an artifact of the math. So in a very real sense, Einstein helped found Quantum Theory... a theory he spent much of his later life fighting tooth and nail against.
-- Bryan Feir