The CHM is very definitely a "real" museum. It takes as its purpose, the collection and preservation of artifacts and documents. Also as with most real museums, the part on display to the public is a tiny fraction of the whole collection, which comprises some 30,000 cataloged artifacts and even more documents. 99% of those are in a rather amazing warehouse in Milpitas, CA.
Far from being a junkpile, every artifact from single vacuum tubes or circuit boards up to the massive cabinets of the Zuse, is photographed, cataloged and stored on shelving in a climate-controlled space.
Most of the collection is pieces of computers because that's what people and companies donate, often discards and salvage.
Like that 360/91 console that features in the photographs? There is only the console panel; you go around back of it, and see thick bundles of yellow wires that were hacked off with a bolt-cutter when the machine was scrapped. Those lights will never blink again. So, should it be thrown out, or is there some value in preserving and displaying the hacked-off panel?
There are several working restorations at CHM. (1) That 1620 definitely works, I've seen it run. They interfaced a PC to replace the console typewriter, but otherwise it ran. (2) there is a complete, working PDP-1 that is demo'd every month, you can play the orignal spacewar game on its vector CRT, and last Christmas they had a carol sing with PDP-1 synthesizer accompaniment. (3) There is a complete 1950s-era machine room with raised floor containing two complete 1401 systems, along with working 026 keypunches, 085 sorter, and tape drives. These are demo'd monthly also. (4) The restoration of the IBM RAMAC, the original hard disk drive, is nearing completion and should be on display later this year.
All the above proceed slowly because they are 100% volunteer-run. They get minimal funding from CHM and only minimal help from the small paid staff. It takes tens of thousands of donated hours to get one of those old machines running and debugged. There are a myriad of age-induced problems, for example dried-up electrolytic caps, corroded contacts, hardened bearing grease and cracked or flattened rubber rollers, which introduce hard-to-trace problems.
If you live anywhere near Mountain View and know something about one of these machines, your help (or money) would be welcome.
I've spent a lot of hours classifying galaxies at GalaxyZoo. The abstract sense of making a tiny contribution to research gets thin real fast. What keeps me coming back is the surprise factor. You'll click away sorting boring balls and streaks and then up pops a perfect barred-spiral, or a swooshy collision or an oddity that doesn't fit any of the categories, and wakes you up. There are millions of galaxies in the deep-field surveys that are the source, most of them never looked at individually, and you never know what the software will toss up next.
The site has an active and supportive forum community, and it was in the forums that the users -- not the astronomy post-docs who run the site -- first commented on the little green balls, suggested they might represent a unique class, and started collecting them as posts on a thread. There are user-run threads going on for other odd types of galaxy some of which might ultimately turn into research topics as well.
Dude, I watched the same episode of "Make" on PBS off my TiVO just last night. Switch on the baseball bat, and the dude who makes musical instruments out of found objects, AND the trebuchet.
You might site your sources instead of just saying "I saw..."
Apparently quite a few people have clicked that link because as of 3pm PST, the site is borked, returning only "We're sorry..." followed by a voluminous page of "Fuse" errors. Anyone who wants to see the guts of Feinstein's site can look now, it's all there in the error dump.
...opening a sealed original package. Cut its value on the collectibles market by 50%, easy.
The Computer History Museum has one of these but it is not in original packaging. Original packaging, even when opened, greatly adds to the historic, research (and sale) value.
Less useful than it might be -- it isn't well formatted (author names run into the titles and what do the asterisks mean?) but mainly because it is just authors and titles, no indication of SF or fantasy, no indication of series/trilogy connections, no clue as to contents other than the title.
It uses a proprietary battery good for at most 180 shots -- as opposed to several Canon A-series models that use AA batteries available worldwide to take as many or more shots.
Also the NV-10 requires its proprietary base dock to charge the battery or upload -- which means you have to carry that extra brick in your bag -- and then have to carry AC plug adapters and transformers in many countries -- and if you lose it, the camera is useless.
So for the specific questioner, the NV-10 tho pretty is not useful.
Before everyone completely disappears in a cloud of disputation, here is where you can actually read the actual book: www.nap.edu -- as opposed to reading the NYT's linkless description, or worse, reading reactions to the NYT by a lot of people who have read neither that nor the book...
I am disappointed in the Academy: they do not offer a free downloadable copy. You can read it for free but only online on their site, page by page, in a format that does not permit increasing the text size or searching.
As noted in passing above, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA has an IBM 305 RAMAC on display. This RAMAC is in process of being restored to working condition as noted here. The restoration process, as documented on the magnetic disk heritage club club web page, seems to have been rather lengthy and meandering -- not surprising for a volunteer-run project that has moved multiple times and had changing personnel. Some interesting photos, schematics, and wave-forms are in the PDF progress reports at the sjmdhc site.
I think it was b/c it was "childhood reading" for a lot of people...
Precisely. Sometime in the late 40s (early 50s?) Heinlein signed a contract with Doubleday to deliver a series of "juvenile" novels -- a contract that he later regretted.
Under that contract he produced books that stamped themselves on the impressionable mind of every young person with a library card in the 1950s or 1960s -- Farmer in the Sky, Space Cadet, The Rolling Stones, Between Planets, Tunnel in the Sky, Red Planet... These were superb examples of exactly what he had contracted to produce: mind-grabbing page-turners for the young-adult reader.
They remain superb examples of how to tell a story ("spin a yarn" as someone was criticized for saying above). They are still models for any author of the basics of fiction: how to open a story with action, how to use dialog to reveal character, how to use inference and image to convey expository detail without slowing the narrative for explanation.
In respect to the last, Chip Delany in a critical essay goes on for paragraphs about one Heinlein sentence: "The door dilated." How in that phrase he smoothly yanked the reader's mind into the future, and achieved more than pages of exposition could do.
When Heinlein was finally free of the Doubleday contract, he wrote Glory Road to celebrate his "freedom" from the constraints of juvenile fiction -- but I personally think the writing and narrative construction of those early books are better than anything he did later.
Provided you are content to drive a displacement hull (a normal, rounded-vee shape) at no more than its "hull speed" you can go VERY long distances on VERY little horsepower and hence fuel. I am basing this on The Troller Yacht Book by marine designer George Buehler, in which for example, he claims that his 48-foot "Diesel Duck" can go 11,410 miles (Tahiti, anyone?) on a fuel load of 900 gallons i.e. over 12 m.p.g., which makes the snazzy catamaran look pretty bad.
The hitch is, you cover that distance at a speed of 6.77 knots, and it takes you a couple of months. Suddenly the catamaran looks a little better...
When I was getting ready to have my aortic valve replaced, the surgeon showed me a porcine valve; in appearance it is nothing like leather, but rather an incredibly thin and flexible structure. The aortic valve is not like a flap valve, but more like three little plastic grocery bags hung from the sides of a pipe. When blood flows one way, the leaflets collapse against the wall; when it flows the other way, whap, they fill up and block the tube.
There is no rejection problem with porcine or bovine heart valves because everything except the collagen has been chemically leached out of them; there's no distinctly cow/pig cell material left for the human immune system to react to. Same for a human-tissue replacement valve (harvested from a cadaver). Nevertheless, I think a lot of people opt for the mechanical valve (and a lifetime of coumadin) because of the "ick" factor.
The reliability figures I got from researching medical journals was that my porcine valve should last 15 years (not 5). At the time (2002) I told the doctor, "Great, by the time I need another, they'll be able to grow it from my own cells." I am just delighted this is proving to be true!
p. s. I also predicted that by 2017 they would be installing new valves using minimally-invasive, arthroscopic surgery -- not opening the chest like a book. There has been progress on that front, too...
I suppose it's pointless adding to the as-of-now 1200 comments, the content of which whirled off into unrelated rantery with more than the usual rapidity, but just the same, to return to the original question:
Why I, at least, hate Microsoft is first, because they lie. They lie consistently, and they lie as a matter of policy. They tell untruths which cause people outside of Microsoft to waste hours, days, years of their productive time and of course money.
This is going way, way back I know -- and I have tried to let go of this and forgive and forget -- but I cannot forget hearing Bill Gates in person telling a crowd of techies, and this is an exact quote, "OS/2 is our platform for the next decade." And a few weeks later, at an OS/2 developer's conference in Manhattan, I heard Steve Ballmer say essentially the same thing. How many companies and individuals wasted years of time on the strength of that assurance? Those who did haven't forgotten the lie or forgiven the waste.
The utter lack of respect for standards, best exemplified by their multi-year refusal to repair the many, clearly-documented, and egregious errors in IE6's CSS support... how many thousands of web-developer years have been pointlessly wasted programming around Microsoft's ignorance and intransigence in that matter?
In these and many other ways, Microsoft has deliberately made life harder and less productive for millions of people who care about productivity. They are hated for that, and quite deservedly so.
Back in 1963 (!) the great documentary writer John McPhee published The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, telling how, to quote from the editorial review on the Amazon book page,
...in the 1960s, an unusual band of inventors, engineers and investors... created the Aereon, a strange, wingless hybrid airplane/dirigible. The Aereon--the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed-- promised to be a safe workhorse of the skies, capable of carrying the payload of entire freight trains with minimal cost.... McPhee... makes us wonder why this promising technology hasn't been perfected.
From the pix of this thing, it is a long way from the elegance of the "Aereon".
In future, maybe. What (little) I know of Roger Angel's existing, completed work involves spin-casting glass, see for example Stewart Observatory,
These mirrors are a radical departure from the conventional solid-glass mirrors used in the past. They are honeycomb on the inside; made out of Ohara E6-type borosilicate glass that is melted, molded and spun cast into the shape of a paraboloid in a custom-designed rotating oven.
The P.I. for the "Deep Field Infrared Observatory Near the Lunar Pole" is... Roger Angel. No, not the baseball writer, the two-ell angel, but the astronomer and telescope designer from the U of A who pioneered using spun-molten-glass as a means of making huge, thin mirrors.
...and I don't see how on-chip threading helps. Instead of memory serving a single thread's stream of instructions and one set of registers being loaded/stored, you now have multiple threads demanding multiple streams of instructions and loading/storing from multiple register sets.
Do the CMT chips assume greatly expanded L1 and L2 caches? The more threads, the broader and more scattered the working set. Without parallelism in memory service, multiple threads in multiple cores will just mean even more hardware sitting idle while waiting for a cache line to be loaded. Doing nothing in parallel? Not a win.
Kenneth Iverson, undoubtedly one of the brainiest people to have lived in the 20th Century, devised APL and its follow-on, J, and inspired several generations of programmers.
Sadly, he died just two months ago, and I guess that disqualifies him for this list. If it didn't, I can see several names on the list that are less worthy of commemoration than Iverson's.
Kildall wrote PL/M -- a system-programming subset of PL/I -- as part of his academic work, and he did indeed use that tool to write some or all of CP/M.
After CP/M and Digital Research had been well-launched and had a wide customer base, when another kind of person would have been growing and diversifying the company, then Kildall went into his office and spent a lengthy period implementing the full PL/I language for CP/M. See examples and manuals at the Tim Olmstead Memorial CP/M Library
Digital Research sold the PL/I product -- but not much of it.
...I first read about it in this CACM article (v33#12, Dec 90). The authors generated random text strings and fed it into UNIX utilities, producing a variety of entertaining crashes and lockups.
"A good portion of the paper discusses common mistakes made by programmers that caused the utilities to fail..." want to bet they mention buffer overruns? (sadly, full text requires ACM membership)
Slashdot Mirror
actually, only two.
The CHM is very definitely a "real" museum. It takes as its purpose, the collection and preservation of artifacts and documents. Also as with most real museums, the part on display to the public is a tiny fraction of the whole collection, which comprises some 30,000 cataloged artifacts and even more documents. 99% of those are in a rather amazing warehouse in Milpitas, CA.
Far from being a junkpile, every artifact from single vacuum tubes or circuit boards up to the massive cabinets of the Zuse, is photographed, cataloged and stored on shelving in a climate-controlled space.
Most of the collection is pieces of computers because that's what people and companies donate, often discards and salvage.
Like that 360/91 console that features in the photographs? There is only the console panel; you go around back of it, and see thick bundles of yellow wires that were hacked off with a bolt-cutter when the machine was scrapped. Those lights will never blink again. So, should it be thrown out, or is there some value in preserving and displaying the hacked-off panel?
There are several working restorations at CHM. (1) That 1620 definitely works, I've seen it run. They interfaced a PC to replace the console typewriter, but otherwise it ran. (2) there is a complete, working PDP-1 that is demo'd every month, you can play the orignal spacewar game on its vector CRT, and last Christmas they had a carol sing with PDP-1 synthesizer accompaniment. (3) There is a complete 1950s-era machine room with raised floor containing two complete 1401 systems, along with working 026 keypunches, 085 sorter, and tape drives. These are demo'd monthly also. (4) The restoration of the IBM RAMAC, the original hard disk drive, is nearing completion and should be on display later this year.
All the above proceed slowly because they are 100% volunteer-run. They get minimal funding from CHM and only minimal help from the small paid staff. It takes tens of thousands of donated hours to get one of those old machines running and debugged. There are a myriad of age-induced problems, for example dried-up electrolytic caps, corroded contacts, hardened bearing grease and cracked or flattened rubber rollers, which introduce hard-to-trace problems.
If you live anywhere near Mountain View and know something about one of these machines, your help (or money) would be welcome.
what he said. The Geek Atlas has exactly the info you are looking for.
I've spent a lot of hours classifying galaxies at GalaxyZoo. The abstract sense of making a tiny contribution to research gets thin real fast. What keeps me coming back is the surprise factor. You'll click away sorting boring balls and streaks and then up pops a perfect barred-spiral, or a swooshy collision or an oddity that doesn't fit any of the categories, and wakes you up. There are millions of galaxies in the deep-field surveys that are the source, most of them never looked at individually, and you never know what the software will toss up next.
The site has an active and supportive forum community, and it was in the forums that the users -- not the astronomy post-docs who run the site -- first commented on the little green balls, suggested they might represent a unique class, and started collecting them as posts on a thread. There are user-run threads going on for other odd types of galaxy some of which might ultimately turn into research topics as well.
Dude, I watched the same episode of "Make" on PBS off my TiVO just last night. Switch on the baseball bat, and the dude who makes musical instruments out of found objects, AND the trebuchet.
You might site your sources instead of just saying "I saw..."
Apparently quite a few people have clicked that link because as of 3pm PST, the site is borked, returning only "We're sorry..." followed by a voluminous page of "Fuse" errors. Anyone who wants to see the guts of Feinstein's site can look now, it's all there in the error dump.
...opening a sealed original package. Cut its value on the collectibles market by 50%, easy.
The Computer History Museum has one of these but it is not in original packaging. Original packaging, even when opened, greatly adds to the historic, research (and sale) value.
Less useful than it might be -- it isn't well formatted (author names run into the titles and what do the asterisks mean?) but mainly because it is just authors and titles, no indication of SF or fantasy, no indication of series/trilogy connections, no clue as to contents other than the title.
It uses a proprietary battery good for at most 180 shots -- as opposed to several Canon A-series models that use AA batteries available worldwide to take as many or more shots.
Also the NV-10 requires its proprietary base dock to charge the battery or upload -- which means you have to carry that extra brick in your bag -- and then have to carry AC plug adapters and transformers in many countries -- and if you lose it, the camera is useless.
So for the specific questioner, the NV-10 tho pretty is not useful.
Before everyone completely disappears in a cloud of disputation, here is where you can actually read the actual book: www.nap.edu -- as opposed to reading the NYT's linkless description, or worse, reading reactions to the NYT by a lot of people who have read neither that nor the book... I am disappointed in the Academy: they do not offer a free downloadable copy. You can read it for free but only online on their site, page by page, in a format that does not permit increasing the text size or searching.
As noted in passing above, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA has an IBM 305 RAMAC on display. This RAMAC is in process of being restored to working condition as noted here. The restoration process, as documented on the magnetic disk heritage club club web page, seems to have been rather lengthy and meandering -- not surprising for a volunteer-run project that has moved multiple times and had changing personnel. Some interesting photos, schematics, and wave-forms are in the PDF progress reports at the sjmdhc site.
Following the links given earlier, I downloaded PowerPointViewer into XP (running in Parallels on a Mac) and launched it.
It immediately presents a license agreement which I actually looked at (for a change) and find these points:
The combination of these would seem to absolutely rule out my doing any of:
Since these are all and only what I would have used them for, I declined to accept the terms and deleted the download. Feh.
Precisely. Sometime in the late 40s (early 50s?) Heinlein signed a contract with Doubleday to deliver a series of "juvenile" novels -- a contract that he later regretted.
Under that contract he produced books that stamped themselves on the impressionable mind of every young person with a library card in the 1950s or 1960s -- Farmer in the Sky, Space Cadet, The Rolling Stones, Between Planets, Tunnel in the Sky, Red Planet... These were superb examples of exactly what he had contracted to produce: mind-grabbing page-turners for the young-adult reader.
They remain superb examples of how to tell a story ("spin a yarn" as someone was criticized for saying above). They are still models for any author of the basics of fiction: how to open a story with action, how to use dialog to reveal character, how to use inference and image to convey expository detail without slowing the narrative for explanation.
In respect to the last, Chip Delany in a critical essay goes on for paragraphs about one Heinlein sentence: "The door dilated." How in that phrase he smoothly yanked the reader's mind into the future, and achieved more than pages of exposition could do.
When Heinlein was finally free of the Doubleday contract, he wrote Glory Road to celebrate his "freedom" from the constraints of juvenile fiction -- but I personally think the writing and narrative construction of those early books are better than anything he did later.
Provided you are content to drive a displacement hull (a normal, rounded-vee shape) at no more than its "hull speed" you can go VERY long distances on VERY little horsepower and hence fuel. I am basing this on The Troller Yacht Book by marine designer George Buehler, in which for example, he claims that his 48-foot "Diesel Duck" can go 11,410 miles (Tahiti, anyone?) on a fuel load of 900 gallons i.e. over 12 m.p.g., which makes the snazzy catamaran look pretty bad.
The hitch is, you cover that distance at a speed of 6.77 knots, and it takes you a couple of months. Suddenly the catamaran looks a little better...
When I was getting ready to have my aortic valve replaced, the surgeon showed me a porcine valve; in appearance it is nothing like leather, but rather an incredibly thin and flexible structure. The aortic valve is not like a flap valve, but more like three little plastic grocery bags hung from the sides of a pipe. When blood flows one way, the leaflets collapse against the wall; when it flows the other way, whap, they fill up and block the tube.
There is no rejection problem with porcine or bovine heart valves because everything except the collagen has been chemically leached out of them; there's no distinctly cow/pig cell material left for the human immune system to react to. Same for a human-tissue replacement valve (harvested from a cadaver). Nevertheless, I think a lot of people opt for the mechanical valve (and a lifetime of coumadin) because of the "ick" factor.
The reliability figures I got from researching medical journals was that my porcine valve should last 15 years (not 5). At the time (2002) I told the doctor, "Great, by the time I need another, they'll be able to grow it from my own cells." I am just delighted this is proving to be true!
p. s. I also predicted that by 2017 they would be installing new valves using minimally-invasive, arthroscopic surgery -- not opening the chest like a book. There has been progress on that front, too...
I suppose it's pointless adding to the as-of-now 1200 comments, the content of which whirled off into unrelated rantery with more than the usual rapidity, but just the same, to return to the original question:
Why I, at least, hate Microsoft is first, because they lie. They lie consistently, and they lie as a matter of policy. They tell untruths which cause people outside of Microsoft to waste hours, days, years of their productive time and of course money.
This is going way, way back I know -- and I have tried to let go of this and forgive and forget -- but I cannot forget hearing Bill Gates in person telling a crowd of techies, and this is an exact quote, "OS/2 is our platform for the next decade." And a few weeks later, at an OS/2 developer's conference in Manhattan, I heard Steve Ballmer say essentially the same thing. How many companies and individuals wasted years of time on the strength of that assurance? Those who did haven't forgotten the lie or forgiven the waste.
The utter lack of respect for standards, best exemplified by their multi-year refusal to repair the many, clearly-documented, and egregious errors in IE6's CSS support... how many thousands of web-developer years have been pointlessly wasted programming around Microsoft's ignorance and intransigence in that matter?
In these and many other ways, Microsoft has deliberately made life harder and less productive for millions of people who care about productivity. They are hated for that, and quite deservedly so.
$9K? How about the Air-X Wind Turbine for $575? Even with a mast, wiring, batteries, current-flow regulator, you should be comfortably under $2K.
Stewart Observatory,(emphasis added)
The P.I. for the "Deep Field Infrared Observatory Near the Lunar Pole" is... Roger Angel. No, not the baseball writer, the two-ell angel, but the astronomer and telescope designer from the U of A who pioneered using spun-molten-glass as a means of making huge, thin mirrors.
Here's a story from Universe Today and one from space.com.
...and I don't see how on-chip threading helps. Instead of memory serving a single thread's stream of instructions and one set of registers being loaded/stored, you now have multiple threads demanding multiple streams of instructions and loading/storing from multiple register sets.
Do the CMT chips assume greatly expanded L1 and L2 caches? The more threads, the broader and more scattered the working set. Without parallelism in memory service, multiple threads in multiple cores will just mean even more hardware sitting idle while waiting for a cache line to be loaded. Doing nothing in parallel? Not a win.
Kenneth Iverson, undoubtedly one of the brainiest people to have lived in the 20th Century, devised APL and its follow-on, J, and inspired several generations of programmers.
Sadly, he died just two months ago, and I guess that disqualifies him for this list. If it didn't, I can see several names on the list that are less worthy of commemoration than Iverson's.
Kildall wrote PL/M -- a system-programming subset of PL/I -- as part of his academic work, and he did indeed use that tool to write some or all of CP/M.
After CP/M and Digital Research had been well-launched and had a wide customer base, when another kind of person would have been growing and diversifying the company, then Kildall went into his office and spent a lengthy period implementing the full PL/I language for CP/M. See examples and manuals at the Tim Olmstead Memorial CP/M Library
Digital Research sold the PL/I product -- but not much of it.
...I first read about it in this CACM article (v33#12, Dec 90). The authors generated random text strings and fed it into UNIX utilities, producing a variety of entertaining crashes and lockups.
"A good portion of the paper discusses common mistakes made by programmers that caused the utilities to fail..." want to bet they mention buffer overruns? (sadly, full text requires ACM membership)