You forgot to mention the fancy box with the plush anti-static bag for the card. What, did you think you were just giving the companies those $5,000? It costs a lot to make something that's both plush AND anti-static, you know!
Part of the problem is that only this one program is being declassified. There's no indication that this is the only project that would meet the 50-year rule. That is going to provide added fuel to the conspiracy nuts, because there is now confirmation about the infrastructure. It's not enough to say "project X took place" when it is near-certain there'd be dozens of projects being worked on in tandem.
Of course, TFA makes it clear that the problems are largely of the Government's own making. Denying a site exists when it's obvious it does simply draws attention to it - they very thing they SHOULD have been avoiding. Describing it in horribly boring terms would have been much more effective.
If you want to hide something that is in plain sight, the LAST thing you want to do is be seen trying to keep it out of sight. Call it a launch-pad for target balloons for night-fighter practice, if you like.
Of course, it's good that things are starting to be declassified. An incomplete history is a boring history and a deceptive history. However, like I said, there will have been parallel projects to this, some of which may have been canceled/completed many years earlier than OXCART. (OXCART started 8 years in. Don't tell me there wasn't a single failed and abandoned project in those first eight years.)
These other projects should be being released alongside this, especially if abandoned in the first eight years. They're no longer of significance to anyone but a historian, and if you think OXCART has few survivors, anything that never progressed as far will have had far fewer members to begin with and may well have no survivors left at all.
Oh, it really does matter. Early computers had to be hard-wired to match the logic of the program. The next generation could only retain one instruction at a time, which meant that loops required tape to feed back and forwards - and, tape being what it is, that's too fragile for any form of non-deterministic loop. Recursion is completely impossible because there is no meaningful program state as the only thing you can store is data. Dynamic code and dynamic linking have no meaning. Neither does self-modifying code, although that tends to be rather rare these days. As code and data are physically distinguished, you couldn't even pass a pointer to a function, so such a machine could never support languages as advanced as C, and certainly couldn't handle object-oriented notions.
The moment you get to true all-electronic stored-program stored-data machines, you enter a world in which procedural and functional logic is possible, where programming techniques we take for granted can actually exist. Sure, you couldn't run Linux on the MMk1, at least as it was left, but it was the first machine to have sufficient underlying hardware that it was intrinsically capable of every task an OS like Linux needs to perform.
If someone were to take the MMk1 design and add the necessary opcodes and memory, you COULD run Linux (with kernel module support) on it. You would not need to re-architecture the machine. No matter how you extended ABC or ENIAC, you could never run an OS like that, simply because the architecture is too primitive. It lacks key capabilities.
True, running Linux on the MMk1 would be horribly slow. I definitely advise against running X, especially on the limited display available to it (8x32 pixels). However, like I said, the architecture would handle it. Turing and Kilburn were absolute geniuses in that they did not over-optimize their machine but built something totally generic and then only implemented as much as they needed.
Or maybe the original program BECAME the ILOVEYOU virus. Evolution takes along time, but there have been many clock cycles since the poetry code was first written.... Be afraid. Be very afraid.
YOU try doing hard real-time coding with no timestamp counter or system clock!:) Seriously, the banner program was more impressive, IMHO. I've provided links in another post to video footage from the 50th anniversary CD.
The title is misleading. The Baby and MMk1 are the first all-electronic (no mechanical elements) fully stored-program (the program was entirely stored in internal RAM, there was no external component to the program) stored-data (there was no external data source either, data was entirely held in RAM) computer. Since this is how people perceive computers in the modern era, for the most part, this is usually shortened to "first modern computer".
The point of TFA is that outright prostitution does NOT exist. Giving meat does not produce results there and then and does not guarantee them in the future. It's not a pay-to-play deal.
What is observed with chimps is something far more interesting, as it shows an awareness of delayed gratification on the part of the males and of long-term strategies by the females.
Basically, meat is nutritionally high-value food compared to anything the females can get otherwise. This means that giving meat to the females improves the health and strength of the females. The female doesn't reward the male for the meat, but rather rewards the male for superior long-term care and support.
In other words, it's not an exchange, nothing is being bartered, and no individual gift by either side is connected in any way to any individual gift by the other. Instead, it looks much closer to long-term strategies by both sides where a move might be planned weeks or months in advance.
To compare chimps with bonobos is like comparing (theoretically intelligent) economists with stock market day-traders. I'd argue the chimps are actually smarter than economists, as chimps have fewer housing bubbles and the meat supply doesn't go bankrupt as often.
For all the primitiveness of the exchange, this indicates an extremely high level of intelligence that is beyond a fairly large percent of the human population. Humans do NOT do well on delayed gratification.
The main problem is with getting receivers sensitive enough. Normally, you'd do this with a dish antenna which is then locked onto the rocket - probably by radar.
There is nothing in principle stopping the North Koreans from having such technology. It IS 1960s-era and most of that is no longer considered verboten under export laws. However, it's still not trivial and possibly beyond their ability to manufacture or maintain.
However, there is another aspect to consider. There were a hell of a lot of nations with SIGINT gear parked in their neighbourhood. Each and every one of them would be compiling every scrap of telemetry transmitted on top of every single photo and radar track they were gathering themselves.
If the rocket transmitted significant telemetry, it would tell the US and other nations a lot about the weaknesses in the rocket design, the limitations of metalwork, the limitations in fuel technology, the sophistication of the guidance systems, etc. All information that North Korea would be very unhappy other nations having.
That sort of technical information, given the US' superior number-crunching technology, would limit the deterrence value of the missile and strengthen the US' hand in talks - the exact opposite of the effect North Korea could possibly want.
The only option that makes sense would be for the rocket to have been nearly silent, transmitting little or nothing, with North Korea relying entirely on reports from observers from countries sort-of sympathetic towards it. Then it could conceal where the problems lay - maybe even for long enough to fix them.
If you loaded a missile up with aluminium foil and detonated it almost anywhere in front of the approaching missile, it would certainly scramble radar and should give any kind of laser guidance a tough time.
Depends on the telemetry they were getting. If they laced sensors throughout the rocket and were transmitting back every last detail, then yes, they will have learned a hell of a lot.
Chances are they didn't, which means they won't know what warning signs were evident, nor will they know precisely what bit failed, nor will they know how it failed or even exactly when it failed.
Yes, failure can tell you a lot. Rolls Royce experimented with deliberately burning out their early aircraft engines to see where the points of failure were. They then re-engineered those parts. Not long after, they had perhaps the world's most powerful, most reliable engine built.
A parallel would be for North Korea to do static test after static test, each time pushing the engine up to (and maybe beyond) design limits to see what fails, then re-design that part. Static tests can only tell you so much, but this would eliminate what are probably very fundamental design flaws.
That is not the direction they are going, however. They are opting for political showmanship. A very dangerous form of showmanship at that.
For that matter, since the really tough part is the guidance system, I'm sure that a lot of countries would be very happy learning if such a system can be jammed or otherwise interfered with remotely. Much easier and much less politically risky than anti-missile missiles, if it can be done.
Olber's Paradox says that the sky should be infinitely bright in all directions. In a black hole, this might actually be the case, as there's nothing to obstruct the view and nowhere else for the photons to go.
The ponies one was doubly cool because geeks got to maraud Cute Overload for a day. Maybe Taco could have matched it by running all posts through the English-to-Lolcat translator this year, but it would not have topped it.
Never mind that lot, it means virtually all St. Trinian's TV shows are now illegal to own or watch, and all BBC General Directors since the 1960s will now have to file as sex offenders.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot to mention the fancy box with the plush anti-static bag for the card. What, did you think you were just giving the companies those $5,000? It costs a lot to make something that's both plush AND anti-static, you know!
Part of the problem is that only this one program is being declassified. There's no indication that this is the only project that would meet the 50-year rule. That is going to provide added fuel to the conspiracy nuts, because there is now confirmation about the infrastructure. It's not enough to say "project X took place" when it is near-certain there'd be dozens of projects being worked on in tandem.
Of course, TFA makes it clear that the problems are largely of the Government's own making. Denying a site exists when it's obvious it does simply draws attention to it - they very thing they SHOULD have been avoiding. Describing it in horribly boring terms would have been much more effective.
If you want to hide something that is in plain sight, the LAST thing you want to do is be seen trying to keep it out of sight. Call it a launch-pad for target balloons for night-fighter practice, if you like.
Of course, it's good that things are starting to be declassified. An incomplete history is a boring history and a deceptive history. However, like I said, there will have been parallel projects to this, some of which may have been canceled/completed many years earlier than OXCART. (OXCART started 8 years in. Don't tell me there wasn't a single failed and abandoned project in those first eight years.)
These other projects should be being released alongside this, especially if abandoned in the first eight years. They're no longer of significance to anyone but a historian, and if you think OXCART has few survivors, anything that never progressed as far will have had far fewer members to begin with and may well have no survivors left at all.
Oh, it really does matter. Early computers had to be hard-wired to match the logic of the program. The next generation could only retain one instruction at a time, which meant that loops required tape to feed back and forwards - and, tape being what it is, that's too fragile for any form of non-deterministic loop. Recursion is completely impossible because there is no meaningful program state as the only thing you can store is data. Dynamic code and dynamic linking have no meaning. Neither does self-modifying code, although that tends to be rather rare these days. As code and data are physically distinguished, you couldn't even pass a pointer to a function, so such a machine could never support languages as advanced as C, and certainly couldn't handle object-oriented notions.
The moment you get to true all-electronic stored-program stored-data machines, you enter a world in which procedural and functional logic is possible, where programming techniques we take for granted can actually exist. Sure, you couldn't run Linux on the MMk1, at least as it was left, but it was the first machine to have sufficient underlying hardware that it was intrinsically capable of every task an OS like Linux needs to perform.
If someone were to take the MMk1 design and add the necessary opcodes and memory, you COULD run Linux (with kernel module support) on it. You would not need to re-architecture the machine. No matter how you extended ABC or ENIAC, you could never run an OS like that, simply because the architecture is too primitive. It lacks key capabilities.
True, running Linux on the MMk1 would be horribly slow. I definitely advise against running X, especially on the limited display available to it (8x32 pixels). However, like I said, the architecture would handle it. Turing and Kilburn were absolute geniuses in that they did not over-optimize their machine but built something totally generic and then only implemented as much as they needed.
Or maybe the original program BECAME the ILOVEYOU virus. Evolution takes along time, but there have been many clock cycles since the poetry code was first written.... Be afraid. Be very afraid.
YOU try doing hard real-time coding with no timestamp counter or system clock! :) Seriously, the banner program was more impressive, IMHO. I've provided links in another post to video footage from the 50th anniversary CD.
The title is misleading. The Baby and MMk1 are the first all-electronic (no mechanical elements) fully stored-program (the program was entirely stored in internal RAM, there was no external component to the program) stored-data (there was no external data source either, data was entirely held in RAM) computer. Since this is how people perceive computers in the modern era, for the most part, this is usually shortened to "first modern computer".
Links that are of interest to fans of the Manchester Mk. 1 and the Manchester Baby:
You're right, and it's not even the first. The Manchester team rebuilt the Manchester Mk. 1 for the 50th anniversary.
It's being discussed on Slashdot. Thus, at the very least, the website is being crucified.
The point of TFA is that outright prostitution does NOT exist. Giving meat does not produce results there and then and does not guarantee them in the future. It's not a pay-to-play deal.
What is observed with chimps is something far more interesting, as it shows an awareness of delayed gratification on the part of the males and of long-term strategies by the females.
Basically, meat is nutritionally high-value food compared to anything the females can get otherwise. This means that giving meat to the females improves the health and strength of the females. The female doesn't reward the male for the meat, but rather rewards the male for superior long-term care and support.
In other words, it's not an exchange, nothing is being bartered, and no individual gift by either side is connected in any way to any individual gift by the other. Instead, it looks much closer to long-term strategies by both sides where a move might be planned weeks or months in advance.
To compare chimps with bonobos is like comparing (theoretically intelligent) economists with stock market day-traders. I'd argue the chimps are actually smarter than economists, as chimps have fewer housing bubbles and the meat supply doesn't go bankrupt as often.
For all the primitiveness of the exchange, this indicates an extremely high level of intelligence that is beyond a fairly large percent of the human population. Humans do NOT do well on delayed gratification.
The main problem is with getting receivers sensitive enough. Normally, you'd do this with a dish antenna which is then locked onto the rocket - probably by radar.
There is nothing in principle stopping the North Koreans from having such technology. It IS 1960s-era and most of that is no longer considered verboten under export laws. However, it's still not trivial and possibly beyond their ability to manufacture or maintain.
However, there is another aspect to consider. There were a hell of a lot of nations with SIGINT gear parked in their neighbourhood. Each and every one of them would be compiling every scrap of telemetry transmitted on top of every single photo and radar track they were gathering themselves.
If the rocket transmitted significant telemetry, it would tell the US and other nations a lot about the weaknesses in the rocket design, the limitations of metalwork, the limitations in fuel technology, the sophistication of the guidance systems, etc. All information that North Korea would be very unhappy other nations having.
That sort of technical information, given the US' superior number-crunching technology, would limit the deterrence value of the missile and strengthen the US' hand in talks - the exact opposite of the effect North Korea could possibly want.
The only option that makes sense would be for the rocket to have been nearly silent, transmitting little or nothing, with North Korea relying entirely on reports from observers from countries sort-of sympathetic towards it. Then it could conceal where the problems lay - maybe even for long enough to fix them.
If you loaded a missile up with aluminium foil and detonated it almost anywhere in front of the approaching missile, it would certainly scramble radar and should give any kind of laser guidance a tough time.
This game was released with so many bugs that they ended up shipping a patch disk - before pulling it from the shelves.
Depends on the telemetry they were getting. If they laced sensors throughout the rocket and were transmitting back every last detail, then yes, they will have learned a hell of a lot.
Chances are they didn't, which means they won't know what warning signs were evident, nor will they know precisely what bit failed, nor will they know how it failed or even exactly when it failed.
Yes, failure can tell you a lot. Rolls Royce experimented with deliberately burning out their early aircraft engines to see where the points of failure were. They then re-engineered those parts. Not long after, they had perhaps the world's most powerful, most reliable engine built.
A parallel would be for North Korea to do static test after static test, each time pushing the engine up to (and maybe beyond) design limits to see what fails, then re-design that part. Static tests can only tell you so much, but this would eliminate what are probably very fundamental design flaws.
That is not the direction they are going, however. They are opting for political showmanship. A very dangerous form of showmanship at that.
For that matter, since the really tough part is the guidance system, I'm sure that a lot of countries would be very happy learning if such a system can be jammed or otherwise interfered with remotely. Much easier and much less politically risky than anti-missile missiles, if it can be done.
Hulk wanna go. Hulk wanna be big and strong. Hulk angry cannot go get more gamma.
Olber's Paradox says that the sky should be infinitely bright in all directions. In a black hole, this might actually be the case, as there's nothing to obstruct the view and nowhere else for the photons to go.
Besides which, APNGs cannot escape a black hole. They degrade into animated GIFs when converted to Hawking Radiation.
The ponies one was doubly cool because geeks got to maraud Cute Overload for a day. Maybe Taco could have matched it by running all posts through the English-to-Lolcat translator this year, but it would not have topped it.
Look no further than this for proof of the severe damage alcohol has done to the brains of Chris Tarrent.
There are now English-to-Lolcat automatic translators. I am considering producing a Lolcat 'translation' for Ubuntu, but teh goggie keeps eeting it.
You DO realize that this is just a cunning ploy to hide their typos, don't you? Nobody will be able to distinguish them from a new form of 'Leetspeek.
And to get back to my point, that is WHY the St Trinian's method of politician control is so important.
Only if you go to school at St. Trinian's, apparently, where you can not only sexualize under-18s but be totally disrespectful of the armed forces, avocate the illegal destruction of Government property and violate international law.
Never mind that lot, it means virtually all St. Trinian's TV shows are now illegal to own or watch, and all BBC General Directors since the 1960s will now have to file as sex offenders.
(Well, that last part isn't too bad, I suppose.)