Up to 1960s or so. Military and some businesses would hire rooms of "computers", people working with mechanical calculators and graph paper. The autobiography "Surely you are joking Mr Feynman" has a segment about this. Some of these same women carried over to early vacuum-tube computers. Grace Hopper, inventor of the first widely used compiler, was of this generation.
At one of my early summer jobs in a large corporation there was a gender split between "scientists and engineers" and "programmers". The guys did write code on large "coding sheets" of paper. But the females programmed keypunched the coding sheets, submitted the job decks and collected the printouts, and the guys would analyze the printouts. You were lucky to get one or two turn-arounds a day. The new people had did their own programming on teletypes of terminals (inverted 1974) in school, so declined programming assistants. Some theold guys NEVER touched a keyboard in their careers. They were either promoted into management or laid off during the late 20th century corporate restructurings.
So early programming acquired the "taint" of effeminity and being "trade" taught in vocation school. That taint delayed computer science from becoming as degree offereing at places like MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, some untilt he 1980s. I attended all three of those schools and remember the faculty debates about this. Computer scientists hid out in other departments, typically math and electrical engineering. I guess it was when you started seeing coding superstars like Don Bricklin and Bill Gates (yes Bill wrote a legendary BASIC compiler OFF-LINE that worked within a day of finally getting the hardware) that commercial computer science became more acceptable.
I'm seeing claims of 100 mpg cars implemented by plugging the car into wall socket every night. The car would store extra energy in extra batteries compared to "ordinary" hybrids.
Last time I looked the 34 kilowatt hour-equivalent energy to a gallon of gasoline costs nearly six dollars form my electric company. Not to mention much of it was from messier coal.
So we'll have more recipients of the Darwin award.
Just because people steal from rhe InterNet all the time doesnt mean the world willbe so benign when one tresspasses.
The hard-core singularists deny death. Either the biotechnological problems of aging will be solved or here will be some Borg-like hybrid of human machine immortality. Kuzweil suggest this will happen in the 2040s, so his taking 200 anti-aging pills a day to be around.
I suggest there is an chance chance of a third(*) dark age reversing much of the industrial revolution and returning much of the world to framing villages as there is reaching the Singularity in the next millennium. There's all kinds of potential boogeymen out there- overpopulation, running out of cheap stored energy, climate change, AIDs-like/SARs/Bird-flu super-pandemic, end of Moore's law and cheap technology, fundamentalist religions conquering most of worlds governments, another world war, volcano or meteor disaster, etc. Any single one of these may be insufficient, but what if three or more occur together?
(*) The first dark age is around 1000 BCE - 500 BCE when there is a lot less written history than the centuries before or after in areas of Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Some historians posutlate the rise of iron & horse & boat warfare, or a large volanic eruption, etc.
The second dark age is around 500 - 1000 CE, sometimes called the low Middle Ages between the collapse of Rome and the rise of high medieval culture. Relatity few inventions and writings then compared to surrounding centuries.
NASA has let non-astronauts into space. Rather than selling these positions, NASA has sought citizens with a special slant. One was a Senator. Two were teachers( one didnt quite make it, and one converted into a full-fledge astronaut). And there was a slot for a journalist/author/poet that I dont think was ever realized after the accidents.
The recent science fiction movie Sunshine described taking a special spacecraft close to the Sun. The premise of the movie and final resolution were bogus to me. However the issues of near solar travel and the special effects were interesting.
Up to the turn of the century about as many people summited Everest and went into space with a similar fatality rate. With pampered guided tours recently, the Everest summits are about triple.
Distinguished astrophysicist Fred Hoyle invented the term "big bang" to deride the idea of a universe with a compact origin. But the term caught on as standard.
I attend SIGGRAPH now and then and see some of these futuristic displays. We still have a bit to go. My criteria for a "perfect display" is that it should be indistingushable from looking out of a window at the same scene. Some of the devices at SIGGRAPH are a lot better than current technology. And all I can say that its almost like looking at magic, to paraphrase Arthur Clarke.
The biggest defect is contrast or dyanmic range of intensity. When you view the banks of TVs at Best But etc, its the ones that have contrasts over 100,000 "brighter whites and darker blacks" that appear supperior. But then you run into the limitations of the camera and intermediate analog/digital signal. The ultra-high dynamic range displays at SIGGRAPH are the most stunning improvements.
Pixel resolution matters, but not as much as it used to. There are several commercial displays over 200 dpi and 5 megapixels. These are about as good as my middle-age vision.
Color resolution can be improved. I've seen six-gun displays at SIGGRAPH with the red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, and magneta. They are more vibrant for nature scenes, but not as much for city life.
3D matters too. Depth of view, auto-stereo without glasses, things changing whern you move your head. Lots of schemes at SIGGRAPH, but niot that great resolution.
All of these require simultaneous improvements in the display, camera, and carrier signal conencting the two. Its exciting to see there are substantially better displays than regularly used out there, but its unclear about the commercialization timescale. Like it took nearly a half-century to commercially implement higher-definition television.
Why do you think he put GPS in the new phones? So he could more quickly find dissenters like you. (I have visions of police from Minority Report descending from copters...)
There were geologic ages where either the oxygen, carbon dioxide, or both were higher than they are now. And the whole planet was literally a jungle full of lush life.
Its not whether life life can survive in such conditions, but what happens when this changes occur in a century or two instead of hundreds of thousands of years. Some species may have a lot of trouble adapting to quick change, including coastal-dwelling humans.
I find writing a few moderate length pieces in discussion keeps my writing sharper. Otherwise I would not practice wrting as much.
In a discussion group you have to make your point clear int he first screenful. People arent likely t read further unless you caught their attention. Its a lot like journalism.
I had forgotten how tedious it was to do research before there was google and other library databases until I saw the 25th anniversary showing of WarGames on AMC last week. The kid is tryign to break into an account and researches the account-holder's in the library life for clues. I spent many of a college evening in the library during my college years doing that.
I think its much more important with what you do with your raw material afterwards than how painful it was to obtain the materials. I'd prefer a studing to write a novel critical review of 2 or 3 major conflicting sources rather than some weak regurgitation (or direct copy) of a large number of sources.
I usually see some papers on automated-computer architecture at the annual SIGGRAPH meeting. I didnt see such in the just-announced primarly ppaers section, but there might be stuff in the secondary sessions. www.siggraph.com
I'd buy lots of ebooks if the price was attractive, say $5 to own it, or $1 a day to read-rent a book. At $20 a book, or even some of Kindle's $10 books, thats too high.
And I dont care so much about technology. I wasnt agravated by reading the free 500-page "Secret History of Star Wars" (mentioned in Slashdot recently) on the FSF PDF-viewer.
Even Intel early on recognized the limitations of its very early architecture and introduced replacements. But all were commmercial failures. Customers were too attached to legacy binary software. And this left openings for companies like AMD who "did Intel better than Intel".
So what happened then is that Intel emulates itself using more modern architectures. The underlying engine changesd to RISC around 486(?), wide-words, and more recently cells. All emulate the ancient x86 instruction set. Each generation needs proportionately less real estate to do this. Last time I looked it was 5%, but might be under 1% now.
I saw War Games on AMC Tuesday night and hadnt seen it for years. The ancient computers brought back nightmares of the limitations of that time. However, many of the tricks then-very-skinny Matthew Broedrick used to hack computers are still relevant. He systematically scanned ports, looked up personal info on people for password clues, used social engineering to fleece information. The strangest thing was him physically going to the library to do research. People use online search now.
Slashdot Mirror
They've already taken over the governorship of California and have many more ambitions.
Up to 1960s or so. Military and some businesses would hire rooms of "computers", people working with mechanical calculators and graph paper. The autobiography "Surely you are joking Mr Feynman" has a segment about this. Some of these same women carried over to early vacuum-tube computers. Grace Hopper, inventor of the first widely used compiler, was of this generation.
At one of my early summer jobs in a large corporation there was a gender split between "scientists and engineers" and "programmers". The guys did write code on large "coding sheets" of paper. But the females programmed keypunched the coding sheets, submitted the job decks and collected the printouts, and the guys would analyze the printouts. You were lucky to get one or two turn-arounds a day. The new people had did their own programming on teletypes of terminals (inverted 1974) in school, so declined programming assistants. Some theold guys NEVER touched a keyboard in their careers. They were either promoted into management or laid off during the late 20th century corporate restructurings.
So early programming acquired the "taint" of effeminity and being "trade" taught in vocation school. That taint delayed computer science from becoming as degree offereing at places like MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, some untilt he 1980s. I attended all three of those schools and remember the faculty debates about this. Computer scientists hid out in other departments, typically math and electrical engineering. I guess it was when you started seeing coding superstars like Don Bricklin and Bill Gates (yes Bill wrote a legendary BASIC compiler OFF-LINE that worked within a day of finally getting the hardware) that commercial computer science became more acceptable.
I'm seeing claims of 100 mpg cars implemented by plugging the car into wall socket every night. The car would store extra energy in extra batteries compared to "ordinary" hybrids.
Last time I looked the 34 kilowatt hour-equivalent energy to a gallon of gasoline costs nearly six dollars form my electric company. Not to mention much of it was from messier coal.
So we'll have more recipients of the Darwin award.
Just because people steal from rhe InterNet all the time doesnt mean the world willbe so benign when one tresspasses.
The hard-core singularists deny death. Either the biotechnological problems of aging will be solved or here will be some Borg-like hybrid of human machine immortality. Kuzweil suggest this will happen in the 2040s, so his taking 200 anti-aging pills a day to be around.
I suggest there is an chance chance of a third(*) dark age reversing much of the industrial revolution and returning much of the world to framing villages as there is reaching the Singularity in the next millennium. There's all kinds of potential boogeymen out there- overpopulation, running out of cheap stored energy, climate change, AIDs-like/SARs/Bird-flu super-pandemic, end of Moore's law and cheap technology, fundamentalist religions conquering most of worlds governments, another world war, volcano or meteor disaster, etc. Any single one of these may be insufficient, but what if three or more occur together?
(*) The first dark age is around 1000 BCE - 500 BCE when there is a lot less written history than the centuries before or after in areas of Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Some historians posutlate the rise of iron & horse & boat warfare, or a large volanic eruption, etc.
The second dark age is around 500 - 1000 CE, sometimes called the low Middle Ages between the collapse of Rome and the rise of high medieval culture. Relatity few inventions and writings then compared to surrounding centuries.
They have to do some cooking and measuring. How long does that all take?
NASA has let non-astronauts into space. Rather than selling these positions, NASA has sought citizens with a special slant. One was a Senator. Two were teachers( one didnt quite make it, and one converted into a full-fledge astronaut). And there was a slot for a journalist/author/poet that I dont think was ever realized after the accidents.
The recent science fiction movie Sunshine described taking a special spacecraft close to the Sun. The premise of the movie and final resolution were bogus to me. However the issues of near solar travel and the special effects were interesting.
Up to the turn of the century about as many people summited Everest and went into space with a similar fatality rate. With pampered guided tours recently, the Everest summits are about triple.
Distinguished astrophysicist Fred Hoyle invented the term "big bang" to deride the idea of a universe with a compact origin. But the term caught on as standard.
Lets now call pre-big bang time "foreplay".
I attend SIGGRAPH now and then and see some of these futuristic displays. We still have a bit to go. My criteria for a "perfect display" is that it should be indistingushable from looking out of a window at the same scene. Some of the devices at SIGGRAPH are a lot better than current technology. And all I can say that its almost like looking at magic, to paraphrase Arthur Clarke.
The biggest defect is contrast or dyanmic range of intensity. When you view the banks of TVs at Best But etc, its the ones that have contrasts over 100,000 "brighter whites and darker blacks" that appear supperior. But then you run into the limitations of the camera and intermediate analog/digital signal. The ultra-high dynamic range displays at SIGGRAPH are the most stunning improvements.
Pixel resolution matters, but not as much as it used to. There are several commercial displays over 200 dpi and 5 megapixels. These are about as good as my middle-age vision.
Color resolution can be improved. I've seen six-gun displays at SIGGRAPH with the red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, and magneta. They are more vibrant for nature scenes, but not as much for city life.
3D matters too. Depth of view, auto-stereo without glasses, things changing whern you move your head. Lots of schemes at SIGGRAPH, but niot that great resolution.
All of these require simultaneous improvements in the display, camera, and carrier signal conencting the two. Its exciting to see there are substantially better displays than regularly used out there, but its unclear about the commercialization timescale. Like it took nearly a half-century to commercially implement higher-definition television.
Why do you think he put GPS in the new phones? So he could more quickly find dissenters like you. (I have visions of police from Minority Report descending from copters...)
They could show off to their girlfriends they were cool like Steve and had money to throw away.
There were geologic ages where either the oxygen, carbon dioxide, or both were higher than they are now. And the whole planet was literally a jungle full of lush life.
Its not whether life life can survive in such conditions, but what happens when this changes occur in a century or two instead of hundreds of thousands of years. Some species may have a lot of trouble adapting to quick change, including coastal-dwelling humans.
I find writing a few moderate length pieces in discussion keeps my writing sharper. Otherwise I would not practice wrting as much.
In a discussion group you have to make your point clear int he first screenful. People arent likely t read further unless you caught their attention. Its a lot like journalism.
I had forgotten how tedious it was to do research before there was google and other library databases until I saw the 25th anniversary showing of WarGames on AMC last week. The kid is tryign to break into an account and researches the account-holder's in the library life for clues. I spent many of a college evening in the library during my college years doing that.
I think its much more important with what you do with your raw material afterwards than how painful it was to obtain the materials. I'd prefer a studing to write a novel critical review of 2 or 3 major conflicting sources rather than some weak regurgitation (or direct copy) of a large number of sources.
I usually see some papers on automated-computer architecture at the annual SIGGRAPH meeting. I didnt see such in the just-announced primarly ppaers section, but there might be stuff in the secondary sessions. www.siggraph.com
I'd buy lots of ebooks if the price was attractive, say $5 to own it, or $1 a day to read-rent a book. At $20 a book, or even some of Kindle's $10 books, thats too high. And I dont care so much about technology. I wasnt agravated by reading the free 500-page "Secret History of Star Wars" (mentioned in Slashdot recently) on the FSF PDF-viewer.
Stanford 1952. That was when Silicon Valley was mostly orange groves.
Souch negativism. Sounds like wanting to end the project.
Considering 70-90% of world uses the MicroSoft Windows interface, this article suggest lawyer-vermin whould start class action suits against MS.
Even Intel early on recognized the limitations of its very early architecture and introduced replacements. But all were commmercial failures. Customers were too attached to legacy binary software. And this left openings for companies like AMD who "did Intel better than Intel".
So what happened then is that Intel emulates itself using more modern architectures. The underlying engine changesd to RISC around 486(?), wide-words, and more recently cells. All emulate the ancient x86 instruction set. Each generation needs proportionately less real estate to do this. Last time I looked it was 5%, but might be under 1% now.
I saw War Games on AMC Tuesday night and hadnt seen it for years. The ancient computers brought back nightmares of the limitations of that time. However, many of the tricks then-very-skinny Matthew Broedrick used to hack computers are still relevant. He systematically scanned ports, looked up personal info on people for password clues, used social engineering to fleece information. The strangest thing was him physically going to the library to do research. People use online search now.
Not as dumb as boomers