Yeah, they kinda did give Rejewski the shaft. In The Code Book by Simon Singh they tell his side of the story -- certainly Turing deserves all the credit he got, but the British shuffled him off into a minor codebreaking job nowhere near Bletchley.
Highly recommended book, that. Lots of stuff, not just on Enigma and World War II, but a long way before and after, even including some interesting stuff on Champollion and Ventris (Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mycenaean Greek writing)... did you know RSA was invented independently in the UK but the discoverer couldn't talk about it until long after it had been reinvented in the US?
Except that it has one teeny tiny problem of being a major factor in the man's life. It's why he committed suicide -- it's like trying to talk about Frederick Douglass without mentioning that he was multiracial.
Point being that digital IMAX is probably the only reasonable application for UHDV. I can't imagine there being any practical use for this at all otherwise -- I certainly don't need absolute photorealism for my TV, and I've been underwhelmed by what I've seen on HD, or digital video in general.
Let's see... compression artifacts, awkward color palettes, and on HD sports shot composition that looks like the camerapeople taped off the edges of the viewfinder rather than actually learn how to shoot in widescreen. One tends to wonder whether the tradeoffs to digital video were worth it sometimes. Upconversion from SDTV is even worse, especially when it's being shown on a non-letterboxed widescreen monitor and you can see artifacts from the stretching process all over the picture. Even now it's very obvious when a TV production was done in digital.
Re:Here's the official way of remapping keys:
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Is Caps Lock Dead?
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It's incredibly easy to do on MacOS Classic -- a ResEdit hack on whatever KCHR resource you're using at the time. There's even a nice graphical editor mode. Unfortunately, ResEdit is no longer supported, and ResEdit 3 (for Copland) was never completed. And I actually don't know how to do it on OS X, though it can't be that hard -- probably an XML file somewhere, or maybe they're still using KCHRs.
Get a used iMac or eMac. You can get them for $500-$700 with Firewire, and you should be able to run all versions of OS X (though you'll have trouble with some of the iApps on G3 hardware, especially Garage Band, I'm thinking that's probably not a concern in your case.)
The original "English" capacity system was base-2, actually... nobody uses drams or gills anymore, but there are other units apart from the ounce, pint, quart, and gallon. We just don't use the names anymore.
I don't know that there's an advantage per se, except for the fact that you don't have to deal with operator precedence. It makes things easier for computers to deal with -- take a course in programming language design some time. RPN conversion is usually one of the first lessons, if you didn't do it already in CS2.
As for using the notation itself, well, it's sort of like using Lisp. It looks funny, but there's a certain rhythm to it that just seems cleaner when coding. There's a very good reason why Forth and HP users are so militant about their respective platforms -- RPN just has a flow to it, kind of pouring data into data, that most styles of programming don't. It's the same elegance that functional language proponents get all up ons about, but RPN users can rely on their notation to do some of the work for them. It's a matter of personal taste, but there's a good reason for it.
ObPaperCommentary: when I was in college I always wanted to get my hands on a stack of A4 and hand in a paper or two on it, just to see what the professor said...
Yeah, definitely. It only gets to be a tricorder if you add the sensor package.
What I want to know is why I can't buy a tricorder if I want one... the technology is there for a basic model. Take a standard PDA -- doesn't matter if it's PocketPC or Palm. Make sure it's got a camera (preferably with IR capabilities) and a very large stick of flash attached, then create some sensor modules. Temperature, pressure, and maybe magnetic field sensing could be built in, along with hookups for probes of various sorts -- presto, a 21st century tricorder. I garon-damn-tee they'd sell like crazy to schools and colleges for science lab use, not to mention the custom sensor packages you could create for industry.
Rambus has nothing to do with Dual Channel. The operating principle behind Rambus seems to be the same basic principle as USB or Firewire vs. SCSI or IEEE 1284 -- a narrow connection is more flexible than a wide one, so you can get much more efficient gains for less trouble if you simply speed up a serial connection (FireWire) rather than trying to enhance a paralell connection (UltraSCSI).
Rambus memory channels are 16 bits wide vs. DDR and SDRAM 64 bit channels. The plan behind RDRAM was to use that 16-bit connection at a far higher speed than SDRAM for the same or better performance. The i820 chipset used single-channel RDRAM; the i850 used dual-channel, essentially dividing the memory into two banks because the Pentium 4 had the speed to access both at once. So you see, it is a chipset thing.
The paired installation is Intel's doing, not Rambus -- the 850 chipset uses dual-channel memory access, so the system actually needs two memory banks instead of one. (There's dual-channel DDR as well -- Apple uses it on the G5.) Those of us still running 820-based Pentium IIIs have single-channel memory controllers and can upgrade their RDRAM by single sticks instead of dual.
That said, Rambus is still a shady operator, and there are other technical issues involved in RDRAM (crosstalk between memory traces and latency issues) that killed it. Narrow-channel memory busses are an interesting idea, but from what I heard not even the Intel engineers liked dealing with RDRAM.
Strictly speaking they aren't -- they're Herald Corp. However, Pat Purcell, the publisher, is a good buddy of Rupert Murdoch, so it's not that far off.
actually droit du seigneur is an urban legend -- I forget exactly where I saw it debunked, but there's no evidence of it ever actually being practiced.
Somewhat, but if you're defending Velikovsky let me remind you that he had a habit of making stuff up as he went along (the conflation of Athena with Aphrodite, for example) and distorting data points he relied upon.
It is true that Carl Sagan botched his critique of Velikovsky. But that doesn't mean Velikovsky was right.
Let's see... five languages (six if you count the two variations of Norwegian as separate languages), all derived from Old Norse, three (or four) of which are mutually more or less comprehensible... I think you could debate Scandinavian vs. Danish/Swedish/Norwegian for quite a while on a linguistic basis without ever really reaching an answer satisfactory to everybody. One could argue that the only reason they're considered separate languages at all is for political reasons. (I mean, it's only recently that Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian are considered separate languages -- there's very little difference between those three at all apart from the choice of alphabet.)
I would suspect that GNU Octave is too tightly tied to a console, but I've never used it. I suspect it could be ported to PalmOS 5, but I wouldn't try it on the older models.
And I'm just saying that it could be done. EasyCalc already does seem to be the most feature-filled calculator program for the Palm as it is.
The Silver Edition exists, IMHO, primarily so TI can stop being forced to support the 85/86 platform. It's more or less compatible with the 83+, more powerful than the 86, and looks cooler (yeah! yeah!). You'll notice the USB link cable only supports the 86 on the Mac platform, not on Windows...
Now that's an idea... great one for the students, beyond frightening for the teachers, and we'd probably get FireWire calculators on top of it.
What bothers me is the price gouging, even at Staples... you're going to tell me a vanilla 83+ should cost as much as a Palm Zire21? Hell, an old-school DragonBall Palm is slightly more powerful than an 89/92/V200, runs rings around an 83/84, and you can get either an original Zire or a reconditioned m500 for about $80. If someone put a symbolics math package on a par with the 89/92 operating system on the Palm platform, we'd have an issue...
Try EasyCalc... very close to the real thing. The only thing it's missing is scriptability, and since it's GPL someone could add that.
Truth be told, some teachers like the freedom to nuke their students' calculators before tests so they can't, you know, stash answers in there. Frankly, if PDAs were allowed and teachers followed that protocol, nastiness would ensue from parents, and rightly so. Truth be told, an ARM-based PDA such as a Palm Tungsten or WinCE unit would so utterly blow away a graphing calculator that, properly implemented, it'd be not unlike sending your kid to school with a copy of Matlab. Most teachers of anything up to college-level calculus II would not appreciate that.
I do agree with your logic -- makes sense, right tool for the right job, and graphing calcs and PDAs have both evolved far enough away from their early-80s pocket computer roots that they occupy distinctly different domains. But the reason PDAs aren't allowed is strictly a functional issue.
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Yeah, they kinda did give Rejewski the shaft. In The Code Book by Simon Singh they tell his side of the story -- certainly Turing deserves all the credit he got, but the British shuffled him off into a minor codebreaking job nowhere near Bletchley.
Highly recommended book, that. Lots of stuff, not just on Enigma and World War II, but a long way before and after, even including some interesting stuff on Champollion and Ventris (Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mycenaean Greek writing)... did you know RSA was invented independently in the UK but the discoverer couldn't talk about it until long after it had been reinvented in the US?
Except that it has one teeny tiny problem of being a major factor in the man's life. It's why he committed suicide -- it's like trying to talk about Frederick Douglass without mentioning that he was multiracial.
Point being that digital IMAX is probably the only reasonable application for UHDV. I can't imagine there being any practical use for this at all otherwise -- I certainly don't need absolute photorealism for my TV, and I've been underwhelmed by what I've seen on HD, or digital video in general.
Let's see... compression artifacts, awkward color palettes, and on HD sports shot composition that looks like the camerapeople taped off the edges of the viewfinder rather than actually learn how to shoot in widescreen. One tends to wonder whether the tradeoffs to digital video were worth it sometimes. Upconversion from SDTV is even worse, especially when it's being shown on a non-letterboxed widescreen monitor and you can see artifacts from the stretching process all over the picture. Even now it's very obvious when a TV production was done in digital.
It's incredibly easy to do on MacOS Classic -- a ResEdit hack on whatever KCHR resource you're using at the time. There's even a nice graphical editor mode. Unfortunately, ResEdit is no longer supported, and ResEdit 3 (for Copland) was never completed. And I actually don't know how to do it on OS X, though it can't be that hard -- probably an XML file somewhere, or maybe they're still using KCHRs.
Get a used iMac or eMac. You can get them for $500-$700 with Firewire, and you should be able to run all versions of OS X (though you'll have trouble with some of the iApps on G3 hardware, especially Garage Band, I'm thinking that's probably not a concern in your case.)
The original "English" capacity system was base-2, actually... nobody uses drams or gills anymore, but there are other units apart from the ounce, pint, quart, and gallon. We just don't use the names anymore.
Good book to read: The Measure of All Things (don't have the ISBN -- my copy's a preprint). Tells the whole story, including an error in measurement.
I don't know that there's an advantage per se, except for the fact that you don't have to deal with operator precedence. It makes things easier for computers to deal with -- take a course in programming language design some time. RPN conversion is usually one of the first lessons, if you didn't do it already in CS2.
As for using the notation itself, well, it's sort of like using Lisp. It looks funny, but there's a certain rhythm to it that just seems cleaner when coding. There's a very good reason why Forth and HP users are so militant about their respective platforms -- RPN just has a flow to it, kind of pouring data into data, that most styles of programming don't. It's the same elegance that functional language proponents get all up ons about, but RPN users can rely on their notation to do some of the work for them. It's a matter of personal taste, but there's a good reason for it.
ObPaperCommentary: when I was in college I always wanted to get my hands on a stack of A4 and hand in a paper or two on it, just to see what the professor said...
Yeah, definitely. It only gets to be a tricorder if you add the sensor package.
What I want to know is why I can't buy a tricorder if I want one... the technology is there for a basic model. Take a standard PDA -- doesn't matter if it's PocketPC or Palm. Make sure it's got a camera (preferably with IR capabilities) and a very large stick of flash attached, then create some sensor modules. Temperature, pressure, and maybe magnetic field sensing could be built in, along with hookups for probes of various sorts -- presto, a 21st century tricorder. I garon-damn-tee they'd sell like crazy to schools and colleges for science lab use, not to mention the custom sensor packages you could create for industry.
Rambus has nothing to do with Dual Channel. The operating principle behind Rambus seems to be the same basic principle as USB or Firewire vs. SCSI or IEEE 1284 -- a narrow connection is more flexible than a wide one, so you can get much more efficient gains for less trouble if you simply speed up a serial connection (FireWire) rather than trying to enhance a paralell connection (UltraSCSI).
Rambus memory channels are 16 bits wide vs. DDR and SDRAM 64 bit channels. The plan behind RDRAM was to use that 16-bit connection at a far higher speed than SDRAM for the same or better performance. The i820 chipset used single-channel RDRAM; the i850 used dual-channel, essentially dividing the memory into two banks because the Pentium 4 had the speed to access both at once. So you see, it is a chipset thing.
Heh... mod this up... first time I've ever seen a Soviet Russia joke that was actually funny, or at least relevant...
The paired installation is Intel's doing, not Rambus -- the 850 chipset uses dual-channel memory access, so the system actually needs two memory banks instead of one. (There's dual-channel DDR as well -- Apple uses it on the G5.) Those of us still running 820-based Pentium IIIs have single-channel memory controllers and can upgrade their RDRAM by single sticks instead of dual.
That said, Rambus is still a shady operator, and there are other technical issues involved in RDRAM (crosstalk between memory traces and latency issues) that killed it. Narrow-channel memory busses are an interesting idea, but from what I heard not even the Intel engineers liked dealing with RDRAM.
Strictly speaking they aren't -- they're Herald Corp. However, Pat Purcell, the publisher, is a good buddy of Rupert Murdoch, so it's not that far off.
actually droit du seigneur is an urban legend -- I forget exactly where I saw it debunked, but there's no evidence of it ever actually being practiced.
Randi would agree with you, I would think...
Somewhat, but if you're defending Velikovsky let me remind you that he had a habit of making stuff up as he went along (the conflation of Athena with Aphrodite, for example) and distorting data points he relied upon.
It is true that Carl Sagan botched his critique of Velikovsky. But that doesn't mean Velikovsky was right.
You are correct. The marine foodchain wasn't completely destroyed, but it was in bad shape -- that's why we don't have plesiosaurs anymore.
Anheuser-Busch: the Wal-Mart of beer. They can't stand the competition either...
Let's see... five languages (six if you count the two variations of Norwegian as separate languages), all derived from Old Norse, three (or four) of which are mutually more or less comprehensible... I think you could debate Scandinavian vs. Danish/Swedish/Norwegian for quite a while on a linguistic basis without ever really reaching an answer satisfactory to everybody. One could argue that the only reason they're considered separate languages at all is for political reasons. (I mean, it's only recently that Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian are considered separate languages -- there's very little difference between those three at all apart from the choice of alphabet.)
I would suspect that GNU Octave is too tightly tied to a console, but I've never used it. I suspect it could be ported to PalmOS 5, but I wouldn't try it on the older models.
And I'm just saying that it could be done. EasyCalc already does seem to be the most feature-filled calculator program for the Palm as it is.
Point being, it's open source... it can be fixed. Why it hasn't yet is an interesting question...
The Silver Edition exists, IMHO, primarily so TI can stop being forced to support the 85/86 platform. It's more or less compatible with the 83+, more powerful than the 86, and looks cooler (yeah! yeah!). You'll notice the USB link cable only supports the 86 on the Mac platform, not on Windows...
Now that's an idea... great one for the students, beyond frightening for the teachers, and we'd probably get FireWire calculators on top of it.
What bothers me is the price gouging, even at Staples... you're going to tell me a vanilla 83+ should cost as much as a Palm Zire21? Hell, an old-school DragonBall Palm is slightly more powerful than an 89/92/V200, runs rings around an 83/84, and you can get either an original Zire or a reconditioned m500 for about $80. If someone put a symbolics math package on a par with the 89/92 operating system on the Palm platform, we'd have an issue...
sounds like not a bad plan...
Try EasyCalc... very close to the real thing. The only thing it's missing is scriptability, and since it's GPL someone could add that.
Truth be told, some teachers like the freedom to nuke their students' calculators before tests so they can't, you know, stash answers in there. Frankly, if PDAs were allowed and teachers followed that protocol, nastiness would ensue from parents, and rightly so. Truth be told, an ARM-based PDA such as a Palm Tungsten or WinCE unit would so utterly blow away a graphing calculator that, properly implemented, it'd be not unlike sending your kid to school with a copy of Matlab. Most teachers of anything up to college-level calculus II would not appreciate that.
I do agree with your logic -- makes sense, right tool for the right job, and graphing calcs and PDAs have both evolved far enough away from their early-80s pocket computer roots that they occupy distinctly different domains. But the reason PDAs aren't allowed is strictly a functional issue.