Australian Geographic magazine has an article on these plants. Apparently they are in an area which also has lots of saltwater crocodiles, so not even humans can claim to be at the top of the food chain there! http://editorial.australiangeographic.com.au/ is the front page but the article does not appear to be on-line.
Yep, my experience was 1976, UNSW, elec eng department. Spacewar on the DEC GT40. You used the front panel key switches to play the game, which had to be downloaded to the computer from another PDP-11. To play the game, you had to specifically ask permission to enter the computer room, then state your quest, and if the sysadmin felt like it, you would be able to play it in a couple of minutes. Then you played your game, and thanked the person who set it up for you.
It was rumoured that the sysadmins who ran the cyber 72/26 played a similar game on the (round) consoles. But that must've been rare as the cyber was so unreliable it would likely crash several times in a given week.
Ah yes, and then there were the "phantom skullker" punch cards, over-punched with a skull and crossbones pattern. Students with way too much time on their hands.:)
or, Life Imitates Art.
There is a cave at Jenolan Caves (NSW, Australia) where the visitor's book is
kept in a plastic case.
The plastic case is one of my old 8 inch floppy disk boxes.
So yes, you can go caving and come across some old computer memorabilia!
No, Birds. Think of the birds! Birds sit on signs, crap on signs, nest on signs. Not any longer: Bird lands on sign. Sign detects small conductivity along top edge and blurts out annoying local species alarm call. But why stop at birds? everywhere you put the sign in train stations, the rear / underside could be sensitive to (say) rats and might squark some ultrasonic move-along signal.
In other news, a nerdy engineer turns into a superb personnel manager after the genes are corrected. The only problem is the manager now has no way of understanding the code and schematics previously thought to be "fully documented".
Every year, some streets of Sydney are shut down to cope with the City - to - Surf Fun Run. It starts early on a Sunday morning (usually in August) and is all over by lunch time at Bondi Beach. Everyone is pre-warned about the event for weeks, but there's always some D*H* who can't figure it all out and tries to drive in. So the only difference I can see with this one is they want to shut some streets down for longer.
The actual results of a federal election are usually one simple table. But getting those results! Especially when you include all the campaigns, the advertising, setting up and manning the booths, security of results, counting,.... not to mention the public service machinery behind it that has to instantly change their internal systems to match those of the new incumbents.
Sun's staff also recommend using GCC for your own development on Solaris, rather than using the Sun compiler.
Simple reason: GCC is far cheaper and it's sensible to make your code portable if you are not writing hardware-specific code.
The only time I would imagine that the Sun compiler would be one's choice, was if you either worked at Sun or you were OEMing some hardware driver (and needed to hook into someone else's work).
I was on a caving trip once, and one of the NiCd packs internally shorted when we were in a fairly small chamber. Fortunately a microtemp fuse cut off the offending battery before the pack melted, so we didn't get any poisonous gases.
But how would you go in the mine? What if a tantalum shorts out and the place gets filled with smoke?
Do you all get to play with the breathing apparatus, or what?
I realise the pictures are badly enhanced, but why could not the 'tubes' be lava tubes?
On earth, at least, these perfectly natural formations crop up in Hawaii, California, Australia (Queensland and Victoria), Madagascar, Mauritius and probably lots of other places.
So why could they not occur on Mars?
All it would need is a volcano with the right geochemistry, a bit of a slope and copious basalt flows.
Problem with the Bahamas stalagmites is they could have had periods of immersion in sea water. The article didn't say whether the stalagmites had spent their entire time in air or had undergone some period of immersion (there are drowned caves in the Bahamas).
If the stalagmite had been immersed in sea water for a while, possibly some modern carbonate penetrated the structure and stuffed up the 14C readings.
It seems to me that this is a strange type of virus. It's partially distributed by software (the block list) and partially by humans (the fear factor). Rather than mailing everyone with junk, they resort to scaring those who don't know any better into paying them for this rubbish. Maybe we should include the Mattel software in the virus lists?
You can probably find these beasts in garbage tips and landfill sites. I used to use one in the early 80's and its heads were worn out BEFORE we got it. We used to offer a tape to disk service in those days when floppies started becoming popular, and the only stuff which really caused problems were the old word processor (proprietary formatted) files. Even strings didn't help.
If you do find a junked one, apart from the obvious things to repair (all the electronics), the vacuum system is critical and the head can actually be ground back to some extent (polished). Then of course there are the problems of actual data conversion (EBCDIC or whatever: did they actually use a standard code or was the material stored as the binary image like we used to do with paper tapes?). That far back in time, chances are the coding scheme used was proprietary... although in the case of your system you may have the executables as well as the source. Methinks the printout would be more easily handled with OCR.
Too right! The problem for Linux is that it is available for so many different types of hardware! That's why (eg) Sun's adminf.. er, admintool works as well as it does. They don't have a squillion different types of video cards/audio thingys/disk drives to worry about.
DEVFS will go a long way to improving the clutter in/dev , at least if it gets supported by the major distributions AND hardware manufacturers. Where other os's admintools shine is where they have limited hardware choice.
There are also natural (unmodified) microorganisms which consume what we would call toxic waste. These things are starring performers, concentrating heavy metal compounds in hydrothermal areas (read: warm mineral water flowing through fractures deep in rock) into ore bodies. They have interesting life chemistry; some are killed by oxygen; some gain energy from the sulphide - sulphate conversion process leaving behind the heavy metal as their waste product but in a more chemically stable state. The novelty with the original posting is that a new type of microorganism has been created with characteristics of BOTH rad-hard AND heavy metal stabilizing features. However, I suspect that such organisms may be found naturally in the sub-soil of uranium mine areas such as the ones in Kakadu National Park in tropical north.au (if only people spent the time to look for such things first). -JR
Probably not much appreciated outside of Australia, but I'd nominate the Blue Sky Industries version of e, grep, roff, sort which ran on CP/M on a Z-80. The programs behaved like their namesakes because we missed *nix after we left Uni, and couldn't afford the real thing. That was around 1979.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, not only the lyrics but also the ringtones would you believe.
http://www.metrolyrics.com/set-the-controls-for-the-heart-of-the-sun-lyrics-pink-floyd.html
Australian Geographic magazine has an article on these plants. Apparently they are in an area which also has lots of saltwater crocodiles, so not even humans can claim to be at the top of the food chain there! http://editorial.australiangeographic.com.au/ is the front page but the article does not appear to be on-line.
Yep, my experience was 1976, UNSW, elec eng department. Spacewar on the DEC GT40. You used the front panel key switches to play the game, which had to be downloaded to the computer from another PDP-11.
:)
To play the game, you had to specifically ask permission to enter the computer room, then state your quest, and if the sysadmin felt like it, you would be able to play it in a couple of minutes. Then you played your game, and thanked the person who set it up for you.
It was rumoured that the sysadmins who ran the cyber 72/26 played a similar game on the (round) consoles. But that must've been rare as the cyber was so unreliable it would likely crash several times in a given week.
Ah yes, and then there were the "phantom skullker" punch cards, over-punched with a skull and crossbones pattern. Students with way too much time on their hands.
Immortalised by Vangelis in Albedo 0.39
or, Life Imitates Art.
There is a cave at Jenolan Caves (NSW, Australia) where the visitor's book is kept in a plastic case.
The plastic case is one of my old 8 inch floppy disk boxes. So yes, you can go caving and come across some old computer memorabilia!
No, Birds. Think of the birds! Birds sit on signs, crap on signs, nest on signs. Not any longer: Bird lands on sign. Sign detects small conductivity along top edge and blurts out annoying local species alarm call.
But why stop at birds? everywhere you put the sign in train stations, the rear / underside could be sensitive to (say) rats and might squark some ultrasonic move-along signal.
In other news, a nerdy engineer turns into a superb personnel manager after the genes are corrected. The only problem is the manager now has no way of understanding the code and schematics previously thought to be "fully documented".
There used to be a bug in SNOBOL 4 (1979) that caused a stack fault if you called the divide routine.
The SNOBOL 4 compiler was written in FORTRAN 77 so I guess no-one really wanted to look at it.
A shame really, it was a neat language for its time. But these days you can do a lot better in PERL.
Every year, some streets of Sydney are shut down to cope with the City - to - Surf Fun Run.
It starts early on a Sunday morning (usually in August) and is all over by lunch time at Bondi Beach.
Everyone is pre-warned about the event for weeks, but there's always some D*H* who can't figure it all out and tries to drive in.
So the only difference I can see with this one is they want to shut some streets down for longer.
The actual results of a federal election are usually one simple table.
But getting those results! Especially when you include all the campaigns, the advertising, setting up and manning the booths, security of results, counting,.... not to mention the public service machinery behind it that has to instantly change their internal systems to match those of the new incumbents.
I thought DDR RAM was a bit contentious? With patents and such - or am I confused?
Sun's staff also recommend using GCC for your own development on Solaris, rather than using the Sun compiler.
Simple reason: GCC is far cheaper and it's sensible to make your code portable if you are not writing hardware-specific code.
The only time I would imagine that the Sun compiler would be one's choice, was if you either worked at Sun or you were OEMing some hardware driver (and needed to hook into someone else's work).
I was on a caving trip once, and one of the NiCd packs internally shorted when we were in a fairly small chamber. Fortunately a microtemp fuse cut off the offending battery before the pack melted, so we didn't get any poisonous gases.
But how would you go in the mine? What if a tantalum shorts out and the place gets filled with smoke?
Do you all get to play with the breathing apparatus, or what?
On earth, at least, these perfectly natural formations crop up in Hawaii, California, Australia (Queensland and Victoria), Madagascar, Mauritius and probably lots of other places. So why could they not occur on Mars?
All it would need is a volcano with the right geochemistry, a bit of a slope and copious basalt flows.
Dave Bunnells web site will show you: http://www.goodearthgraphics.com/virtual_tube/virt ube.html
If the stalagmite had been immersed in sea water for a while, possibly some modern carbonate penetrated the structure and stuffed up the 14C readings.
It's partially distributed by software (the block list) and partially by humans (the fear factor).
Rather than mailing everyone with junk, they resort to scaring those who don't know any better into paying them for this rubbish.
Maybe we should include the Mattel software in the virus lists?
- JR
I used to use one in the early 80's and its heads were worn out BEFORE we got it.
We used to offer a tape to disk service in those days when floppies started becoming popular, and the only stuff which really caused problems were the old word processor (proprietary formatted) files. Even strings didn't help.
If you do find a junked one, apart from the obvious things to repair (all the electronics), the vacuum system is critical and the head can actually be ground back to some extent (polished).
Then of course there are the problems of actual data conversion (EBCDIC or whatever: did they actually use a standard code or was the material stored as the binary image like we used to do with paper tapes?).
That far back in time, chances are the coding scheme used was proprietary... although in the case of your system you may have the executables as well as the source.
Methinks the printout would be more easily handled with OCR.
Good luck!
- JR
The problem for Linux is that it is available for so many different types of hardware!
That's why (eg) Sun's adminf.. er, admintool works as well as it does. They don't have a squillion different types of video cards/audio thingys/disk drives to worry about.
DEVFS will go a long way to improving the clutter in /dev , at least if it gets supported by the major distributions AND hardware manufacturers.
Where other os's admintools shine is where they have limited hardware choice.
- JR
There are also natural (unmodified) microorganisms which consume what we would call toxic waste. .au (if only people spent the time to look for such things first).
These things are starring performers, concentrating heavy metal compounds in hydrothermal areas (read: warm mineral water flowing through fractures deep in rock) into ore bodies.
They have interesting life chemistry; some are killed by oxygen; some gain energy from the sulphide - sulphate conversion process leaving behind the heavy metal as their waste product but in a more chemically stable state.
The novelty with the original posting is that a new type of microorganism has been created with characteristics of BOTH rad-hard AND heavy metal stabilizing features.
However, I suspect that such organisms may be found naturally in the sub-soil of uranium mine areas such as the ones in Kakadu National Park in tropical north
-JR
Probably not much appreciated outside of Australia, but I'd nominate the Blue Sky Industries version of e, grep, roff, sort which ran on CP/M on a Z-80. The programs behaved like their namesakes because we missed *nix after we left Uni, and couldn't afford the real thing. That was around 1979.