In the olden times, the IBM 3278 keyboard had the F (PF) keys over on the left, IIRC, rather than across the top. Top F keys are too far to reach, so hardly ever used. Things like windows Alt-F4 are move-the-hand actions, painful.
Precis on dimming: Global warming effects may have been masked by particulate pollution which appears to have reduced the amount of sunlight getting to the Earth by a massive 30% in some cases).
The sunlight is getting to Earth. It's being absorbed in the atmosphere. And guess what the absorption of sunlight causes? heat -- warming, in other words. That's not good news.
In my mainframe experience, we had trouble at least every year, at the end of daylight savings time. Our procedural "fix" was to leave the @#$% down so it never saw the same timestamp twice. But we had 24 hour operations support.
The AC is right that temporal logic is hard, calendars are nastily irregular, and there are inevitable errors. As late as 1999 I bought new books with incorrect leap-years examples. Really silly, as unless you need to process birthdates or the like, the % 4 is the correct answer from 1804 to 2096 - more than adequate if you're dealing with the current timestamp.
The vast majority of real-world control systems are embedded systems, not running either mainframe or server or consumer OS -- both good and bad. Various tests of Y2K effects did trigger a few glitches, but the predictions of aircrashes, etc., were always overblown, and mocked at the time.
But! around 1 March 1992 I started to try to get people interested in starting to fix the problems during routine maintainance - too early, no one listened until at least 1998. Similarly, 2038 isn't the only epoch date around - 2036 for those same mainframes is another. In 2009, a number of Y2K "repairs" will need re-patched. Know your epoch!
Name: Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit
Birth Date: May 14, 1686 Death Date: September 16, 1736 Place of Birth: Danzig, Germany Place of Death: Netherlands
From the first Google hit on "Fahrenheit biography".
Re:An error in one of his essays
on
Joel On Software
·
· Score: 1
Of course, the point of the essay - Hard-assed Bug Fixin' - is that not every bug is worth finding and fixing. If this dubious C++ locution (and it is dubious) occurs, and works 99.9% of the time, how much is fixing it worth in time and resources? Of course, that depends on what happens the other 0.1% of the time. That's why there's a level 5 of the Capability Maturity Model -- and why most of us don't need to do that level.
...while the software is successful, Netscape as a company is not.
<sarcasm>He wants us to demean our art with commerce! Shock, horror. That would be untrue to our Xerox PARC ancestors.</sarcasm>
"Currency is the sincerest of flattery" said someone, and to some extent it's true. That people are willing to pay for the product (whether in classic license or shareware license or GPL support license) is important. For one thing, it keeps me supplied with hardware:-)
Precisely - Mach 1 is the local speed of sound. Specifically, it's the velocity at which shockwaves propagate. If you are flying at Mach 1 (plus delta) you are encountering a medium which is uninfluenced by your motion until you encounter it - it doesn't have time to get out of the way. That makes a huge difference to the behavior, a little like the difference between swimming in water and swimming in concrete!
There is, of course, a FAQ on this Frequently Asked Question.
There was a early HP one-piece machine that vented the exhaust air up through the keyboard. A lovely machine for a cold morning.
(It was a BASIC machine, with some funky built-in tape system, a five digit number, and GPIB/HPIB peripherals. I used it around 1973-75 in a machine shop, where it ran CNC software to make punched paper tape for a "wire EDM" machine.)
... symptoms usually disappear in a day or two, and a symptom-free, latent period follows, varying in length depending upon the size of the radiation dose. A period of overt illness follows, and can be characterized by infection, electrolyte imbalance, diarrhea, bleeding, cardiovascular collapse, and sometimes short periods of unconsciousness. Death or a period of recovery follows the period of overt illness.
and
The latent phase - lasts a few days to as long as 2 to 3 weeks at the lower dose levels. The patient is asymptomatic but CBCs will show characteristic changes in the blood elements, with lymphocyte depression and gradual decrease in neutrophil and platelet counts.
It's that "few days" in the 320 rem and up exposure (320 rad or 3.2 seivert is considered the LD-50 according to this table) where you could lose the war.
Dude, what are you doing to those machines? That's a lot of hardware failures. You running in a machine shop full of metal particles or something?
We're still running our Mac LC II, with all original parts except the display. And that was more an upgrade than a failure - went from 12" b&w to 15" colour. It's still running MacOS 7.0, as it has since 1992. Even if it is a Road Apple!
the intention was to use them against invading Warsaw Pact troop concentrations...
Until someone pointed out that in a concentration of say 100,000 troops, you kill 10% on the spot, and 100% in 14 days - and no one wanted to stand in front of 90,000 troops who know that they're already dead - and are still capable of getting revenge. Think about it. The tactics that you use in shoot-em-up video games would have happened in the real world!
Seriously hard to crack license code is above trivial -- but not that far. A few parameters, a good salt, a timestamp, and a decent two-way hash algorithm that generates 25-character alphanumeric codes are what you need. My current employer used to use simple serial numbers, and they were cracked. For the current generation of product, we invested maybe two programmer days in beefing it up. We've seen requests for keygens and cracks, but we don't think that there are any out there.
The crypto function is the hard part - but you don't write your own, you look up a good one.
Is this really a perfect technical book? or is the reviewer a close friend of the author? Nothing is dated, nothing is misunderstood?
I've never read a technical book I'd rate 10/10... 9/10 is reserved for the greats like Tannenbaum on networking, K&R on C - and books only get that rating in retrospect. (Usually when I buy the second copy, either because I wore one out or to have one at home and one at work.)
I had one of those freeze up in a Canadian winter. What does it do when the water loop freezes? Why, it overheats, of course.
One of the operators had to crawl into the chiller with a blowtorch - and his feet at about -40. That year he moved to North Carolina, and claimed that the frozen mainframe had nothing to do with it. None of us believed him.
Anyone see the manure story?
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
Dr. Yanhui Zhang... at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Ill.,... has perfected a continuous thermochemical conversion process to produce fuel oil from livestock manure.
At the moment the process is only 200% efficient (i.e. burning the product returns twice the energy of transforming it from manure to oil.)
There are some obvious remarks I won't make.
Slashdot Mirror
In the olden times, the IBM 3278 keyboard had the F (PF) keys over on the left, IIRC, rather than across the top. Top F keys are too far to reach, so hardly ever used. Things like windows Alt-F4 are move-the-hand actions, painful.
The sunlight is getting to Earth. It's being absorbed in the atmosphere. And guess what the absorption of sunlight causes? heat -- warming, in other words. That's not good news.
Leverage once meant "buy with borrowed money" and was a specific financial strategy. Now, it's a meaningless piece of management-speak.
The AC is right that temporal logic is hard, calendars are nastily irregular, and there are inevitable errors. As late as 1999 I bought new books with incorrect leap-years examples. Really silly, as unless you need to process birthdates or the like, the % 4 is the correct answer from 1804 to 2096 - more than adequate if you're dealing with the current timestamp.
The vast majority of real-world control systems are embedded systems, not running either mainframe or server or consumer OS -- both good and bad. Various tests of Y2K effects did trigger a few glitches, but the predictions of aircrashes, etc., were always overblown, and mocked at the time.
But! around 1 March 1992 I started to try to get people interested in starting to fix the problems during routine maintainance - too early, no one listened until at least 1998. Similarly, 2038 isn't the only epoch date around - 2036 for those same mainframes is another. In 2009, a number of Y2K "repairs" will need re-patched. Know your epoch!
>...the British
A clue for you:
From the first Google hit on "Fahrenheit biography".
Of course, the point of the essay - Hard-assed Bug Fixin' - is that not every bug is worth finding and fixing. If this dubious C++ locution (and it is dubious) occurs, and works 99.9% of the time, how much is fixing it worth in time and resources? Of course, that depends on what happens the other 0.1% of the time. That's why there's a level 5 of the Capability Maturity Model -- and why most of us don't need to do that level.
<sarcasm>He wants us to demean our art with commerce! Shock, horror. That would be untrue to our Xerox PARC ancestors.</sarcasm>
"Currency is the sincerest of flattery" said someone, and to some extent it's true. That people are willing to pay for the product (whether in classic license or shareware license or GPL support license) is important. For one thing, it keeps me supplied with hardware:-)
At what altitude?
Precisely - Mach 1 is the local speed of sound. Specifically, it's the velocity at which shockwaves propagate. If you are flying at Mach 1 (plus delta) you are encountering a medium which is uninfluenced by your motion until you encounter it - it doesn't have time to get out of the way. That makes a huge difference to the behavior, a little like the difference between swimming in water and swimming in concrete!
There is, of course, a FAQ on this Frequently Asked Question.
There was a early HP one-piece machine that vented the exhaust air up through the keyboard. A lovely machine for a cold morning. (It was a BASIC machine, with some funky built-in tape system, a five digit number, and GPIB/HPIB peripherals. I used it around 1973-75 in a machine shop, where it ran CNC software to make punched paper tape for a "wire EDM" machine.)
Poor man, Micro$oft stole his initials!
Maybe they mean protected against RMS?
Such as the celebrated South Sea Bubble of 1711-1720, referred to in the article.
What kind of jargon is RTFA?
and
It's that "few days" in the 320 rem and up exposure (320 rad or 3.2 seivert is considered the LD-50 according to this table) where you could lose the war.
Don't learn about radiation from Hollywood.
We're still running our Mac LC II, with all original parts except the display. And that was more an upgrade than a failure - went from 12" b&w to 15" colour. It's still running MacOS 7.0, as it has since 1992. Even if it is a Road Apple!
Until someone pointed out that in a concentration of say 100,000 troops, you kill 10% on the spot, and 100% in 14 days - and no one wanted to stand in front of 90,000 troops who know that they're already dead - and are still capable of getting revenge. Think about it. The tactics that you use in shoot-em-up video games would have happened in the real world!
Seriously hard to crack license code is above trivial -- but not that far. A few parameters, a good salt, a timestamp, and a decent two-way hash algorithm that generates 25-character alphanumeric codes are what you need. My current employer used to use simple serial numbers, and they were cracked. For the current generation of product, we invested maybe two programmer days in beefing it up. We've seen requests for keygens and cracks, but we don't think that there are any out there. The crypto function is the hard part - but you don't write your own, you look up a good one.
for sure -- no. But lots of things can be done with standard ports that are likely open, such as http, telnet, and smtp.
Is this really a perfect technical book? or is the reviewer a close friend of the author? Nothing is dated, nothing is misunderstood?
I've never read a technical book I'd rate 10/10 ... 9/10 is reserved for the greats like Tannenbaum on networking, K&R on C - and books only get that rating in retrospect. (Usually when I buy the second copy, either because I wore one out or to have one at home and one at work.)
It's not legislation. It's a court ruling in an anti-trust suit. RTFA, please.
First done in the 1950's - my memory says Ford Aerospace, but several Google searches turned up no details.
One of the X-Prize contenders from Canada uses this model - The Da Vinci Project
Fred's account of the 360 project still has lessons to teach, despite the intervening years. If you haven't read it, go read it.
about 1GHz. My primary home machine is still a Pentium 180. It isn't any slower than it ever was.
I had one of those freeze up in a Canadian winter. What does it do when the water loop freezes? Why, it overheats, of course.
One of the operators had to crawl into the chiller with a blowtorch - and his feet at about -40. That year he moved to North Carolina, and claimed that the frozen mainframe had nothing to do with it. None of us believed him.