That depends on the compiler. There are still plenty of programmers who use compilers that support 16-bit integers. Sometimes that's all that's available, or there are time/space reasons to select 16-bit code generation.
I'd argue that it was their fault. ValuJet had the final and ultimate responsibility for the safe operation of their aircraft. If they outsource part of their business, they are still responsible for selecting a qualified vendor and making sure that the job was done right. Too many companies attempt to evade accountability for their actions by blaming their contractors.
Not necessarily. If you ask me where the red-light district is in my town, I can tell you. It's a well-known fact to residents of the town. If you say "I wish to commit $CRIME, where can I obtain the necessary $TOOL", then maybe I shouldn't answer you.
I'm curious how they update all the maps when a large earthquake moves a big chunk of the Earth's crust by many meters. With modern navigation systems like GPS, it's a significant change. If you were an airline pilot landing in bad weather, you might want to know if the runway had moved 10 meters to the left and down.
The question should be why didn't the parents teach their child gun safety and responsibility before giving them a gun or having unsecured guns in the house. Many of my relatives had guns when they were teenagers, for hunting and plinking. Their parents made sure that they understood that guns were not toys, how to safely handle firearms, and that they were mature enough to be entrusted with a firearm. None of them ever shot anyone or committed any crimes.
If you are really concerned about security, get rid of all your coax, cat5 and wireless hardware and replace it with fiber optics. That's what they use in modern facilities that have serious issues with security.
One of the early exploits for these techniques was to tap into the power lines supplying embassy code rooms and other sensitive areas. Teletypes and coding machines would generate electrical noise on the power line when they were being operated. With some clever analysis, it was often possible to determine what was being typed or printed on the machine. Other avenues of attack were the acoustic and RF emanations of the equipment.
It's hard to increase the clock rate on busses. On a chip, clock rates generally increase as transistor size decreases. The physical size of external busses is more of a constant. This makes it difficult to increase the clock rate of signals on the bus. When working with wires or traces on a printed circuit board, the choice is usually "short and fast" or "long and slow". As clock rates increase, wires behave more like RF transmission lines. Simple things like pins on an integrated circuit package or connectors for plug-in I/O adapters can introduce impedance bumps that can disrupt the transmission of signals. That's part of the reason why it's easy to design a motherboard with lots of ISA slots but a motherboard with PCI slots has to limit the number of PCI slots to 3 or 4. When dealing with front-side busses running at hundreds of MHz, the electrical design gets very critical.
It's interesting how old chip designs don't disappear, they often survive in other forms. Looking at my calculator collection, I can find examples of the 6502, ARM, Z-80 and 68000 being used as the core CPU in modern products.
Then there are the uncounted numbers of anonymous microcontrollers in just about everything you can think of. How many are in your PC, let alone your entire house and car?
It was one of the only chips available with a version that was fabbed using Silicon-on-Sapphire, making it ideal for space applications that required radiation hardening.
It may be a law, but it's a bad joke. It usually only gets enforced when some prominent politician gets embarrassed by someone taping his indiscreet cell phone conversations. There are millions of existing, and legal, receivers and scanners that can listen to analog cell phone calls. Rather than secure their broken networks, the cell phone carriers "fixed" the problem (bad publicity) by lobbying Congress for a law that criminalized listening to certain radio frequencies. This changed the decades old federal policy that you could listen to any radio frequency as long as you did not disclose the content to a third party.
It also takes away FCC "limits of interferance" as well. Are you willing to die, so some hobbyiest can get his jollies "taking control" of the emergency frequencies?
It happens already, with conventional radio equipment. There are plenty of loons in places like Los Angeles who get their jollies by interfering with other radio users, including the police.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to re-channel a surplus radio.
A software-defined radio effectively replaces most of the guts of a radio with a computer program running on a specialized computer. Similar to how a microprocessor can replace a room full of hardwired relay logic with a program.
With the right software, it takes control away from the FCC and Congress. The SDR doesn't care if the software that you download isn't type accepted by the FCC or does things that Congress doesn't like, like listening to their cell phone calls.
The data transfer rate problem can be solved with money. Recording heads can be designed with a large number of independent tracks. Wider tape allows for more tracks. Better tape handling and servo systems support higher tape speeds. All of this costs serious money, but it can be done.
The orbit determination and navigation required quite a bit of non-trivial computation. It isn't the sort of stuff that you are going to do with a slide rule. In addition, mission control needed the computers to process incoming telemetry, check for alarm conditions, and drive the many console displays.
Linux also sucks, it just sucks less than Windows.
UNIX was innovative stuff in the 1970s. An elegant and portable time-sharing system that could run on small computers. Guess what, it is almost 2005. The design decisions that made sense in the 1970s are showing their age, badly.
Your best bet is to take a course in computer architecture or pick up a textbook on the subject, esp. one that has a good survey of older computers that introduced significant architectural advances.
The IBM 360/91 was an important high-performance member of the IBM 360 family. The CDC 6600 was also an innovative system from the same era.
Don't underestimate the IBM 360 series of computers. They had I/O capabilities that surpass many modern computers. The Space Shuttle's on-board computers were based on a mutated version of the 360 architecture. Many of the architectural advancements in microprocessors were just recycled ideas from the IBM 360 series and other large computers from the 1960s.
PC operating systems suck on many levels. They are expensive, insecure, prone to failure, hard to repair, fragile, inefficient, and are unable to offer guarantees to applications. You can't build reliable, cost-effective and efficient systems on such a poor foundation.
They had IBM 360s and other big iron on the ground to do the heavy-duty calculations. If you have a choice between doing something on the ground and doing it on board the spacecraft, it's almost always better to do it on the ground.
An underground bunker will protect you from just about anything other than a direct hit. Even something as simple as a slit trench will provide substantial protection.
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That depends on the compiler. There are still plenty of programmers who use compilers that support 16-bit integers. Sometimes that's all that's available, or there are time/space reasons to select 16-bit code generation.
I'd argue that it was their fault. ValuJet had the final and ultimate responsibility for the safe operation of their aircraft. If they outsource part of their business, they are still responsible for selecting a qualified vendor and making sure that the job was done right. Too many companies attempt to evade accountability for their actions by blaming their contractors.
Not necessarily. If you ask me where the red-light district is in my town, I can tell you. It's a well-known fact to residents of the town. If you say "I wish to commit $CRIME, where can I obtain the necessary $TOOL", then maybe I shouldn't answer you.
I'm curious how they update all the maps when a large earthquake moves a big chunk of the Earth's crust by many meters. With modern navigation systems like GPS, it's a significant change. If you were an airline pilot landing in bad weather, you might want to know if the runway had moved 10 meters to the left and down.
If it's stupid, and it works, it isn't stupid.
Ted Kennedy has killed more people with his car than I have with my evil "assault" rifle.
The question should be why didn't the parents teach their child gun safety and responsibility before giving them a gun or having unsecured guns in the house. Many of my relatives had guns when they were teenagers, for hunting and plinking. Their parents made sure that they understood that guns were not toys, how to safely handle firearms, and that they were mature enough to be entrusted with a firearm. None of them ever shot anyone or committed any crimes.
If you are really concerned about security, get rid of all your coax, cat5 and wireless hardware and replace it with fiber optics. That's what they use in modern facilities that have serious issues with security.
One of the early exploits for these techniques was to tap into the power lines supplying embassy code rooms and other sensitive areas. Teletypes and coding machines would generate electrical noise on the power line when they were being operated. With some clever analysis, it was often possible to determine what was being typed or printed on the machine. Other avenues of attack were the acoustic and RF emanations of the equipment.
It's hard to increase the clock rate on busses. On a chip, clock rates generally increase as transistor size decreases. The physical size of external busses is more of a constant. This makes it difficult to increase the clock rate of signals on the bus. When working with wires or traces on a printed circuit board, the choice is usually "short and fast" or "long and slow". As clock rates increase, wires behave more like RF transmission lines. Simple things like pins on an integrated circuit package or connectors for plug-in I/O adapters can introduce impedance bumps that can disrupt the transmission of signals. That's part of the reason why it's easy to design a motherboard with lots of ISA slots but a motherboard with PCI slots has to limit the number of PCI slots to 3 or 4. When dealing with front-side busses running at hundreds of MHz, the electrical design gets very critical.
Then there are the uncounted numbers of anonymous microcontrollers in just about everything you can think of. How many are in your PC, let alone your entire house and car?
It was one of the only chips available with a version that was fabbed using Silicon-on-Sapphire, making it ideal for space applications that required radiation hardening.
The Pentium Pro was the first member of the generation that includes the Pentium II and Pentium III.
It may be a law, but it's a bad joke. It usually only gets enforced when some prominent politician gets embarrassed by someone taping his indiscreet cell phone conversations. There are millions of existing, and legal, receivers and scanners that can listen to analog cell phone calls. Rather than secure their broken networks, the cell phone carriers "fixed" the problem (bad publicity) by lobbying Congress for a law that criminalized listening to certain radio frequencies. This changed the decades old federal policy that you could listen to any radio frequency as long as you did not disclose the content to a third party.
It happens already, with conventional radio equipment. There are plenty of loons in places like Los Angeles who get their jollies by interfering with other radio users, including the police. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to re-channel a surplus radio.
With the right software, it takes control away from the FCC and Congress. The SDR doesn't care if the software that you download isn't type accepted by the FCC or does things that Congress doesn't like, like listening to their cell phone calls.
They can do that whether or not you keep logs, unless you have money and a damn good lawyer.
The data transfer rate problem can be solved with money. Recording heads can be designed with a large number of independent tracks. Wider tape allows for more tracks. Better tape handling and servo systems support higher tape speeds. All of this costs serious money, but it can be done.
The orbit determination and navigation required quite a bit of non-trivial computation. It isn't the sort of stuff that you are going to do with a slide rule. In addition, mission control needed the computers to process incoming telemetry, check for alarm conditions, and drive the many console displays.
UNIX was innovative stuff in the 1970s. An elegant and portable time-sharing system that could run on small computers. Guess what, it is almost 2005. The design decisions that made sense in the 1970s are showing their age, badly.
The IBM 360/91 was an important high-performance member of the IBM 360 family. The CDC 6600 was also an innovative system from the same era.
The Space Shuttle uses the IBM AP-101. See Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience.
Don't underestimate the IBM 360 series of computers. They had I/O capabilities that surpass many modern computers. The Space Shuttle's on-board computers were based on a mutated version of the 360 architecture. Many of the architectural advancements in microprocessors were just recycled ideas from the IBM 360 series and other large computers from the 1960s.
PC operating systems suck on many levels. They are expensive, insecure, prone to failure, hard to repair, fragile, inefficient, and are unable to offer guarantees to applications. You can't build reliable, cost-effective and efficient systems on such a poor foundation.
They had IBM 360s and other big iron on the ground to do the heavy-duty calculations. If you have a choice between doing something on the ground and doing it on board the spacecraft, it's almost always better to do it on the ground.
An underground bunker will protect you from just about anything other than a direct hit. Even something as simple as a slit trench will provide substantial protection.