The mainstays of the "PC" platform in the 70's included the commodore PET, Apple IIe and TRS-80. What we think of as the "PC" today (i.e. the IBM PC and compatibiles) was not even invented till '82.
A favourite game on the original PET was a pretty accurate clone of Space Invaders (8K of 6502 machine code, no bit mapped graphics in those days of course, only 40x25 lines of a fixed character set. You could get blocky graphics @80x75 by doing strange things with the character set).
On the Apple II, I remember a version of the original Colossal Cave adventure. (purely text based, mazes of twisty passages all alike, etc). Obviously a clone of the mainframe version. That game needed some serious hardware to run it. (48K, and gasp! a floppy disk drive)
I subscribed to almost all of the issues of the Perl Journal. While it is true that up to date news about Perl can be found on Perl.com, this is not necessarily the market that TPJ was addressing.
The value of TPJ was that you could read it offline (even with other people in a room with no computers present!) There were many interesting and detailed articles about Perl, and many serendipitous discoveries to be made. My reaction to many of these was included:-
- That's a cool thing to do in Perl - That makes me feel better about pushing it to my employer.
- That's an interesting way to write something in Perl, maybe I'll try that.
- That's an interesting sounding new module, I could use that in my job for....
- Is that really a Perl program? (for the terminally obfuscated).
I like having a dead tree-thing around to read in the bath and put on my bookhelves. YMMV.
You can have a Multi-GHz CPU, a laptop that runs cool, serveral hours of battery life, pick any two options...
Seriously, CPU speeds have reached the point where I don't see the value in paying to stay on the bleeding edge of CPU speed.
I've been using a 600MHz laptop with win2K the last couple of years for development, mail, wordprocessing etc, and I don't feel in any need to upgrade. I'd much rather just wait till the machine dies of it's own accord over the next year or two, rather than go out and buy a 2.5Ghz laptop that will be no faster, have no more battery life and be equally obselete in 6 months.
By the time I get to that stage, I'm guessing that the marketeers driving M$ product development these days will have the Windows ship locked up so tightly with Palladium and DCMA compliance that a Mac with OSX will be the only option. (And the 2Ghz Ti powerbook available by then will still be 3 times faster than what I have now!)
Didn't America have a lengthy argument about DC vs AC mains supplies, which revolved around the fact that AC was used in the electric chair, and therefore *must* be more dangerous than DC.
DC mains supplies were not uncommon until the 1950's. I think at that point most electrical engineers had realised that AC was far easier to deal with from a transmission POV.
The American Choice of 120V might have been due to this "Electric Chair issue", but it does seem to have quite a noticable impact on the design of electical systems there:-
- The power cords on everything seem to be thicker (to carry more current). I guess this must apply to the household wiring as well. How many megatonnes of copper are "wasted" in this way in US wiring circuits? - You need far more transformers in the last mile than Europeans do. America seems often to need transformers in situations where Europeans would use a simple distribution panel or 3-phase supply. When I worked in America I was amazed that the equipment hall where we were working (which had quite a few computers in it) had its own large transformer sitting on the floor for electrical distribution. (I guess that 120V would not have made it all of the way around the factory, or would have made the Aircon work too hard!) - You don't see too many electric kettles or Toasters in the US (Do you even know what they are?)
About the only good things about american/European plugs is is a very marginal cost difference and that you can pull them out by thier cord. UK plugs were specifically designed to make this as hard as possible (on the grounds that you really shouldn't be pulling a plug out by the cable anyway) UK plugs may look big and clunky, but they do have a number of useful, "user friendly" features:- - Almost impossible to touch live metal - They only go in one way round. - You can guarantee which wire contains live current within a device (you do want to put the power switch to your device on the live wire don't you? You mean you don't know the difference between live and neutral?) - All UK plugs contain a fuse. The rating of the fuse should be appropriate to the device. This means that appliances in the UK do not generally catch fire. On the other hand you do have to work out whether it's the circuit breaker in the distribution panel, or the fuse in the plug that has died. (or even the light bulb in the lamp, or the fuse in the device itself, if it has one.) - You can't easily pull them out by the cord, either accidentally, or on purpose.
- Having a switch on the wall socket is very useful. One thing I really miss when I'm abroad. It allows you to isolate a device without unplugging it (which given that UK plugs are so hard to get out, is probably a good thing.) I don't unplug my computer at the end of the day, I just switch it off at the wall to give all those power supplies I have plugged into the multiblock adapter a chance to have a rest.
I'm generally quite surprised at how primitive the electical systems are in other countries are(i.e. not UK). While the UK system is not without faults, I think it is better than all the alternatives that I've seen so far.
Anyone who's desperate enough to download an (unfinished?) copy off the Net is probably going to see it half a dozen times anyway in the movide theatre, and *then* buy the DVD (not to mention the director's cut DVD)
What is the point of victimizing your best customers?
I think someone really should beat the music industry around the head and tell them to get a grip on reality. We are after all only talking about copying music here, not drug-running, murder and international terrorism.
I am in no way opposed to the general idea that music companies should own copyright in music and be allowed to copy from it.
BUT the music industry should try really really hard to keep a sense of perspective in this matter (somthing IMHO which they have completely failed to to do far through the whole Napster/DMCA debacle.)
The danger that someone might copy a CD, and deprive an already very rich music company of a small amount of revenue does not justify in any way the crippling of millions of PC's, operating systems, hard drives, sound cards, etc. The music industry has completely lost its sense of proportion in this matter, and it should not be imposing huge costs and inconveniene on a huge number of people, most of whom will never copy a CD any way.
The latest device, of creating CD's that will not play on PC's is again a completely disproportionate repsonse. Many of the record companies customer may only listen to CD's on their PC's. Are they going to go out any buy a CD player because they can't listen to record X on their PC? Or are they going to take the CD back to the shop and "borrow" a ripped MP3 from one of their more technically able friends who has managed to copy the CD?
At least there was an argument that Napsters and the whole MP3 thing would encourage people to buy more CD's. I can't see that making life harder for their customers will increase the record companies' profits (this doesn't seem to work for other companies, unless you are called Microsoft!)
I live inthe UK, so it was interesting to read the article about "big brother" and CCTV in the UK.
The subject is not really as controversial here as it might seem. I know that my local town council (Wokingham) has been pressing to get funding to install CCTV in the twon centre for some time. The argument for CCTV is made every time there is a ram-raiding incident, or some other such crime where someone drives a 4x4 (SUV to Americans;-) into the front of a shop.
I personally think that the sheer amount of data collected from CCTV cameras is so great that any general surveillance and control of the population at large would be very difficult. I would assume that most CCTV cameras do not have a pair of human eye-balls watching them. It's only really worth digging through mountains of material when a serious crime has been committed, ususally murder (which is pretty uncommon in this country).
Personally I feel more reassured than threatened by CCTV, I'm do nothing that I want to hide (but then I'm not an anti-globalisation eco-nutter!), but there is a reasonable chance that CCTV might catch anyone committing a crime against me - which works for me!
As I recall the ultimate ancestor of C was a language called CPL (Computer Programming Language), developed by Martin Richards et al at Cambridge (England) in the 60's. This was thought to be too hard to implement at the time, so a subset (Basic CPL or BCPL) had some popularity for a time into the 70's
There was a short lived lanuage called "B", which ultimately gave rise to "C" (B*C*P*L) as developed by Kernighan and Ritchie in the 70's at Bell labs.
So should we whould be calling any successor to "C" by the name "P"?
I can recall years ago (5/10?) hearing about Ferro-Electic RAM, and how it was going to revolutionise the industry in a couple of years. This is exactly what MRAM sounds like. In principle it sounds like a great idea (non-volatile, low power RAM).
But however good MRAM is it is always going to suffer from the fact that it will receive less investment than other more mainstream technologies such as SDRAM or Flash. The effect of this is that the capacity and storage density of MRAM is going to lag behind the competitors, not because it is inherently a worse technology, but just because it receives less investment.
The only way MRAM is going to get anywhere is if it gets adopted by a major chip company that can afford the $billions initial investment and then pushed hard (e.g. Intel and RDRAM). Even then it has do deliver the goods or it will become a white elephant (e.g. Intel and RDRAM;-)
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The mainstays of the "PC" platform in the 70's included the commodore PET, Apple IIe and TRS-80. What we think of as the "PC" today (i.e. the IBM PC and compatibiles) was not even invented till '82.
A favourite game on the original PET was a pretty accurate clone of Space Invaders (8K of 6502 machine code, no bit mapped graphics in those days of course, only 40x25 lines of a fixed character set. You could get blocky graphics @80x75 by doing strange things with the character set).
On the Apple II, I remember a version of the original Colossal Cave adventure. (purely text based, mazes of twisty passages all alike, etc). Obviously a clone of the mainframe version. That game needed some serious hardware to run it. (48K, and gasp! a floppy disk drive)
I subscribed to almost all of the issues of the Perl Journal. While it is true that up to date news about Perl can be found on Perl.com, this is not necessarily the market that TPJ was addressing.
The value of TPJ was that you could read it offline (even with other people in a room with no computers present!) There were many interesting and detailed articles about Perl, and many serendipitous discoveries to be made. My reaction to many of these was included:-
- That's a cool thing to do in Perl - That makes me feel better about pushing it to my employer.
- That's an interesting way to write something in Perl, maybe I'll try that.
- That's an interesting sounding new module, I could use that in my job for....
- Is that really a Perl program? (for the terminally obfuscated).
I like having a dead tree-thing around to read in the bath and put on my bookhelves. YMMV.
You can have a Multi-GHz CPU, a laptop that runs cool, serveral hours of battery life, pick any two options...
Seriously, CPU speeds have reached the point where I don't see the value in paying to stay on the bleeding edge of CPU speed.
I've been using a 600MHz laptop with win2K the last couple of years for development, mail, wordprocessing etc, and I don't feel in any need to upgrade. I'd much rather just wait till the machine dies of it's own accord over the next year or two, rather than go out and buy a 2.5Ghz laptop that will be no faster, have no more battery life and be equally obselete in 6 months.
By the time I get to that stage, I'm guessing that the marketeers driving M$ product development these days will have the Windows ship locked up so tightly with Palladium and DCMA compliance that a Mac with OSX will be the only option. (And the 2Ghz Ti powerbook available by then will still be 3 times faster than what I have now!)
Didn't America have a lengthy argument about DC vs AC mains supplies, which revolved around the fact that AC was used in the electric chair, and therefore *must* be more dangerous than DC.
DC mains supplies were not uncommon until the 1950's. I think at that point most electrical engineers had realised that AC was far easier to deal with from a transmission POV.
The American Choice of 120V might have been due to this "Electric Chair issue", but it does seem to have quite a noticable impact on the design of electical systems there:-
- The power cords on everything seem to be thicker (to carry more current). I guess this must apply to the household wiring as well. How many megatonnes of copper are "wasted" in this way in US wiring circuits?
- You need far more transformers in the last mile than Europeans do. America seems often to need transformers in situations where Europeans would use a simple distribution panel or 3-phase supply. When I worked in America I was amazed that the equipment hall where we were working (which had quite a few computers in it) had its own large transformer sitting on the floor for electrical distribution. (I guess that 120V would not have made it all of the way around the factory, or would have made the Aircon work too hard!)
- You don't see too many electric kettles or Toasters in the US (Do you even know what they are?)
About the only good things about american/European plugs is is a very marginal cost difference and that you can pull them out by thier cord. UK plugs were specifically designed to make this as hard as possible (on the grounds that you really shouldn't be pulling a plug out by the cable anyway)
UK plugs may look big and clunky, but they do have a number of useful, "user friendly" features:-
- Almost impossible to touch live metal
- They only go in one way round.
- You can guarantee which wire contains live current within a device (you do want to put the power switch to your device on the live wire don't you? You mean you don't know the difference between live and neutral?)
- All UK plugs contain a fuse. The rating of the fuse should be appropriate to the device. This means that appliances in the UK do not generally catch fire. On the other hand you do have to work out whether it's the circuit breaker in the distribution panel, or the fuse in the plug that has died. (or even the light bulb in the lamp, or the fuse in the device itself, if it has one.)
- You can't easily pull them out by the cord, either accidentally, or on purpose.
- Having a switch on the wall socket is very useful. One thing I really miss when I'm abroad. It allows you to isolate a device without unplugging it (which given that UK plugs are so hard to get out, is probably a good thing.) I don't unplug my computer at the end of the day, I just switch it off at the wall to give all those power supplies I have plugged into the multiblock adapter a chance to have a rest.
I'm generally quite surprised at how primitive the electical systems are in other countries are(i.e. not UK). While the UK system is not without faults, I think it is better than all the alternatives that I've seen so far.
Anyone who's desperate enough to download an (unfinished?) copy off the Net is probably going to see it half a dozen times anyway in the movide theatre, and *then* buy the DVD (not to mention the director's cut DVD)
What is the point of victimizing your best customers?
If you have a hot tub in the right place, that's a great place to be when observing!
It seems to me that Palladium is essentially trying to create an illegal monopoly in something.
There must be enormous scope for an enterprising lawyer to tie this up in the courts in an anti-trust suit for years.
I think someone really should beat the music industry around the head and tell them to get a grip on reality. We are after all only talking about copying music here, not drug-running, murder and international terrorism.
I am in no way opposed to the general idea that music companies should own copyright in music and be allowed to copy from it.
BUT the music industry should try really really hard to keep a sense of perspective in this matter (somthing IMHO which they have completely failed to to do far through the whole Napster/DMCA debacle.)
The danger that someone might copy a CD, and deprive an already very rich music company of a small amount of revenue does not justify in any way the crippling of millions of PC's, operating systems, hard drives, sound cards, etc. The music industry has completely lost its sense of proportion in this matter, and it should not be imposing huge costs and inconveniene on a huge number of people, most of whom will never copy a CD any way.
The latest device, of creating CD's that will not play on PC's is again a completely disproportionate repsonse. Many of the record companies customer may only listen to CD's on their PC's. Are they going to go out any buy a CD player because they can't listen to record X on their PC? Or are they going to take the CD back to the shop and "borrow" a ripped MP3 from one of their more technically able friends who has managed to copy the CD?
At least there was an argument that Napsters and the whole MP3 thing would encourage people to buy more CD's. I can't see that making life harder for their customers will increase the record companies' profits (this doesn't seem to work for other companies, unless you are called Microsoft!)
I live inthe UK, so it was interesting to read the article about "big brother" and CCTV in the UK.
;-) into the front of a shop.
The subject is not really as controversial here as it might seem. I know that my local town council (Wokingham) has been pressing to get funding to install CCTV in the twon centre for some time. The argument for CCTV is made every time there is a ram-raiding incident, or some other such crime where someone drives a 4x4 (SUV to Americans
I personally think that the sheer amount of data collected from CCTV cameras is so great that any general surveillance and control of the population at large would be very difficult. I would assume that most CCTV cameras do not have a pair of human eye-balls watching them. It's only really worth digging through mountains of material when a serious crime has been committed, ususally murder (which is pretty uncommon in this country).
Personally I feel more reassured than threatened by CCTV, I'm do nothing that I want to hide (but then I'm not an anti-globalisation eco-nutter!), but there is a reasonable chance that CCTV might catch anyone committing a crime against me - which works for me!
As I recall the ultimate ancestor of C was a language called CPL (Computer Programming Language), developed by Martin Richards et al at Cambridge (England) in the 60's. This was thought to be too hard to implement at the time, so a subset (Basic CPL or BCPL) had some popularity for a time into the 70's
There was a short lived lanuage called "B", which ultimately gave rise to "C" (B*C*P*L) as developed by Kernighan and Ritchie in the 70's at Bell labs.
So should we whould be calling any successor to "C" by the name "P"?
But however good MRAM is it is always going to suffer from the fact that it will receive less investment than other more mainstream technologies such as SDRAM or Flash. The effect of this is that the capacity and storage density of MRAM is going to lag behind the competitors, not because it is inherently a worse technology, but just because it receives less investment.
The only way MRAM is going to get anywhere is if it gets adopted by a major chip company that can afford the $billions initial investment and then pushed hard (e.g. Intel and RDRAM). Even then it has do deliver the goods or it will become a white elephant (e.g. Intel and RDRAM ;-)