I interned (sort of) at Babcock and Wilcox's computing center around 1980. We had several CDC systems, including a 76 ("7600"), which was built in a horseshoe arrangement much like the Cray-1. (The field engineers used its interior as a storage closet.) Me, I was just hauling tapes, card decks and printouts, but I did get to learn a bit about the machines, and a lot more once I got into comp architecture classes in college. It was a great place for a geek.
This is an error from the original article, not from the summary. If the author didn't even bother to look up what "PP" actually stood for, I don't have a lot of confidence in the rest of the article's scholarship. Heck, ONE CLICK TO WIKIPEDIA would have given her the proper definition.
Yep, that was about the boat we were in before Google announced -- we do also have TWC, but that didn't motivate Frontier to offer anything beyond 6/1 DSL (except the FttPR deployment I mention downthread).
I can only hope that Google finds a way to profit on widespread deployment. Their announcement here has really lit a fire under everyone. As a result, AT&T and TWC are moving, and Frontier is probably shriveling to ash.
If it's not AT&T, AT&T will probably want to find out who has been hanging tags on our doorknobs notifying us about the excavation, and using the AT&T GigaPower logo.
Even the mid-range neighborhoods around here harbor a lot of tech workers. We're lucky enough to be a big, tempting target.
Frontier, the ILEC we're saddled with, deployed its own FttPR effort a year or two ago. I think they've hooked up an office complex or two, and one residential development where I don't think anyone's even started building houses. Beyond that, Frontier offers blazing 6/1 DSL (over our old GTE/Verizon physical plant). TWC was offering up to 100Mb, I think, at a hefty price, and was starting to mutter about caps. AT&T served us NOTHING, no physical plant at all, prior to this buildout. So, nobody took Frontier seriously, but apparently everyone takes Google seriously, and the Google Fiber announcement for our area had barely finished repainting before TWC started pushing out MAXX and AT&T rolled the backhoes.
I've seen quite a bit of Fiber To The Press Release, but here in the RTP area of North Carolina, they're digging like crazy. Our decidedly-not-upscale neighborhood has already received the doorknob hang-tabs about excavation, and the Miss Utility painters have been around.
Probably helps that Google Fiber has named us as part of their next round of deployments, although they seem to have put things on hold until the new year.
I'm unimpressed with AT&T's advertising, monitoring and capping policies, but they're already having a positive effect -- last time I threatened to drop TWC, they bumped me to 50/5, which is now 200/20, all at less than $40/month. Competition rocks.
But apparently at least one reader with mod points thinks this is trolling. Whatever.
I do try to make allowances for posters and submitters who don't have strong English skills. But as long as submissions are reviewed and edited, I think those editors ought to take enough pride in their work to make sure accepted submissions are coherent.
So, Microsoft has timeline-editing software to let them insert actions into their own chronological past? Cool!
Perhaps Microsoft promised earlier this year that it will make WLW open-source, and is now doing so? Or perhaps they promised that they would make it open-source earlier this year, but are only now doing so?
That's, um, not really the sort of goal I had in mind when I gravitated toward this hobby. In fact, the hobby provided a respite from trying to deal with people.
I think someone mislead you. The temperature inside your mouth doesn't swing that significantly with outside temperature, unless you're dead.
You'd get a much bigger swing, as someone else said, going from ice cream to coffee -- or from ice cream to anything, since ice cream's temperature can be close to -10C, and your body temperature is close enough to 40C.
And then a comment like this comes along, and makes me wish I had kept my mouth shut or posted anonymously, just for the privilege of modding it up. Interesting, Informative, Insightful, Underrated, take your pick...
I guess hydrogen and oxygen could be considered "fossil fuels", but it's a bit far-fetched, given that one is a "fossil" of the Big Bang itself and the other a "fossil" of stellar nucleosynthesis...
Actually, we need to build more hydrogen bombs, since milking our existing stock of bombs supplies our current world consumption of helium-3.
That, and hydrogen bombs represent our sole existing solution for exceeding break-even yield from fusion (excepting, of course, solar power). They just require a rather large cylinder and piston to harness their output.
Well, golly, as long as we can discount the decades of research, engineering, and implementation that would be required to (a) establish a huge industrial presence on the Moon, (b) extract helium-3 in bulk from the lunar crust, (c) transport that He3 in bulk to Earth's surface, and (d) successfully fuse that He3 on an industrial scale to produce power, why don't we hedge our bets with giant space-constructed solar shades and thorough terraforming of Mars?
I think I remember that from one of my computer-security classes. Sanitize all your inputs, do length checks to avoid buffer overflows, and if those don't work, change your product's name.
Yep. You also wrote much, much, MUCH LESS code, that did fewer things, and did many of them (especially the user-facing parts) in a much more primitive way. And that code used far fewer and far smaller libraries, which meant that you spent a lot more time re-inventing things. Sure, your low-level coding skills were sharp, but you just weren't getting that much done.
When Apple started making PowerBooks, the logo on the top cover was oriented so that it's upside down when the laptop is open. Why did they do something dumb like that? Because user testing showed that people naturally tended to orient the logo so it looked right-side-up to them before trying to open the laptop. In other words, it worked better for the user to orient it that way.
Unfortunately, that meant that someone looking at a PowerBook user saw the logo upside-down. How awkward! How unflattering! How inelegant! This simply won't do! So, the change was decreed: logos must be oriented to look nice to the audience, and users just need to train themselves to deal with it.
Old vs. new. Optimized for use vs. optimized for appearance and impression.
Slashdot Mirror
I interned (sort of) at Babcock and Wilcox's computing center around 1980. We had several CDC systems, including a 76 ("7600"), which was built in a horseshoe arrangement much like the Cray-1. (The field engineers used its interior as a storage closet.) Me, I was just hauling tapes, card decks and printouts, but I did get to learn a bit about the machines, and a lot more once I got into comp architecture classes in college. It was a great place for a geek.
This is an error from the original article, not from the summary. If the author didn't even bother to look up what "PP" actually stood for, I don't have a lot of confidence in the rest of the article's scholarship. Heck, ONE CLICK TO WIKIPEDIA would have given her the proper definition.
I think you stepped in some Poe. You might want to check your shoes.
Yep, that was about the boat we were in before Google announced -- we do also have TWC, but that didn't motivate Frontier to offer anything beyond 6/1 DSL (except the FttPR deployment I mention downthread).
I can only hope that Google finds a way to profit on widespread deployment. Their announcement here has really lit a fire under everyone. As a result, AT&T and TWC are moving, and Frontier is probably shriveling to ash.
If it's not AT&T, AT&T will probably want to find out who has been hanging tags on our doorknobs notifying us about the excavation, and using the AT&T GigaPower logo.
Even the mid-range neighborhoods around here harbor a lot of tech workers. We're lucky enough to be a big, tempting target.
Frontier, the ILEC we're saddled with, deployed its own FttPR effort a year or two ago. I think they've hooked up an office complex or two, and one residential development where I don't think anyone's even started building houses. Beyond that, Frontier offers blazing 6/1 DSL (over our old GTE/Verizon physical plant). TWC was offering up to 100Mb, I think, at a hefty price, and was starting to mutter about caps. AT&T served us NOTHING, no physical plant at all, prior to this buildout. So, nobody took Frontier seriously, but apparently everyone takes Google seriously, and the Google Fiber announcement for our area had barely finished repainting before TWC started pushing out MAXX and AT&T rolled the backhoes.
I've seen quite a bit of Fiber To The Press Release, but here in the RTP area of North Carolina, they're digging like crazy. Our decidedly-not-upscale neighborhood has already received the doorknob hang-tabs about excavation, and the Miss Utility painters have been around.
Probably helps that Google Fiber has named us as part of their next round of deployments, although they seem to have put things on hold until the new year.
I'm unimpressed with AT&T's advertising, monitoring and capping policies, but they're already having a positive effect -- last time I threatened to drop TWC, they bumped me to 50/5, which is now 200/20, all at less than $40/month. Competition rocks.
But apparently at least one reader with mod points thinks this is trolling. Whatever.
I do try to make allowances for posters and submitters who don't have strong English skills. But as long as submissions are reviewed and edited, I think those editors ought to take enough pride in their work to make sure accepted submissions are coherent.
Instead of an easily-described geometry like "spherical" or "toroidal", this has a Lovecraftian "unnameable" geometry.
Nah. Metal bands should have a fission-related name.
So, Microsoft has timeline-editing software to let them insert actions into their own chronological past? Cool!
Perhaps Microsoft promised earlier this year that it will make WLW open-source, and is now doing so? Or perhaps they promised that they would make it open-source earlier this year, but are only now doing so?
That's, um, not really the sort of goal I had in mind when I gravitated toward this hobby. In fact, the hobby provided a respite from trying to deal with people.
I think someone mislead you. The temperature inside your mouth doesn't swing that significantly with outside temperature, unless you're dead.
You'd get a much bigger swing, as someone else said, going from ice cream to coffee -- or from ice cream to anything, since ice cream's temperature can be close to -10C, and your body temperature is close enough to 40C.
And then a comment like this comes along, and makes me wish I had kept my mouth shut or posted anonymously, just for the privilege of modding it up. Interesting, Informative, Insightful, Underrated, take your pick...
I guess hydrogen and oxygen could be considered "fossil fuels", but it's a bit far-fetched, given that one is a "fossil" of the Big Bang itself and the other a "fossil" of stellar nucleosynthesis...
Leave the helium at standard pressure, and it will still fall -- in a vacuum.
Sort of like the joke apparently did.
Two separate hedges. Shades for Earth, mirrors and huge greenhouse-gas generators for Mars.
1. we have a space elevator..
But we have to bring the helium down from the Moon, and helium rises, so it'll take a lot of energy to drag it down to the surface.
Actually, we need to build more hydrogen bombs, since milking our existing stock of bombs supplies our current world consumption of helium-3.
That, and hydrogen bombs represent our sole existing solution for exceeding break-even yield from fusion (excepting, of course, solar power). They just require a rather large cylinder and piston to harness their output.
Well, golly, as long as we can discount the decades of research, engineering, and implementation that would be required to (a) establish a huge industrial presence on the Moon, (b) extract helium-3 in bulk from the lunar crust, (c) transport that He3 in bulk to Earth's surface, and (d) successfully fuse that He3 on an industrial scale to produce power, why don't we hedge our bets with giant space-constructed solar shades and thorough terraforming of Mars?
Lots and lots of room.
I think I remember that from one of my computer-security classes. Sanitize all your inputs, do length checks to avoid buffer overflows, and if those don't work, change your product's name.
I'm sorry that popular culture touched you in your no-no spot, but the seventh-son "meme" is quite a bit older than you apparently think.
I guess neither of these are that, but what if they were? Would the core have... special powers?
Yep. You also wrote much, much, MUCH LESS code, that did fewer things, and did many of them (especially the user-facing parts) in a much more primitive way. And that code used far fewer and far smaller libraries, which meant that you spent a lot more time re-inventing things. Sure, your low-level coding skills were sharp, but you just weren't getting that much done.
When Apple started making PowerBooks, the logo on the top cover was oriented so that it's upside down when the laptop is open. Why did they do something dumb like that? Because user testing showed that people naturally tended to orient the logo so it looked right-side-up to them before trying to open the laptop. In other words, it worked better for the user to orient it that way.
Unfortunately, that meant that someone looking at a PowerBook user saw the logo upside-down. How awkward! How unflattering! How inelegant! This simply won't do! So, the change was decreed: logos must be oriented to look nice to the audience, and users just need to train themselves to deal with it.
Old vs. new. Optimized for use vs. optimized for appearance and impression.